There is a disturbing degree of disruptive energy in Donald Trump. Now that he has lost the election to Joe Biden and yet is in little mood to acknowledge his defeat, he is seriously thinking of imposing martial law in the United States in order to hang on to power. We will not belabour the point that the outgoing president is seriously trying to turn America into a banana republic. That is something he has been doing for the past four years. We will not go into that.
But let us imagine a scenario where Trump and his rabid advisors -- and among them are those Republican congressmen who, ostrich-like, have buried their heads in the sand and have refused to accept that the battle has been lost -- actually decide that the time has come for America to have martial law clamped on it.
The first move in that direction will be for Trump to declare himself not only president but also chief martial law administrator. He would be well-advised to take some tips, before taking that decisive step, from the many tin-pot dictators who have been part of the Third World, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Trump’s advisors could procure for him a copy of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s Friends Not Masters for him to get into the nitty-gritty of how a coup can be organized and put into effect. He could even consult the Thai military ruler Prayut Chan-o-cha. And then, of course, there is the extremely rich work by Hebditch and Connor, rich because it can come in handy for men who have no time to respect democratic norms.
The book should be after Trump’s heart. It is called How to Stage a Military Coup: From Planning to Execution. There is too a pretty revealing work of fiction from Ben Coes called Coup d’Etat. But, of course, since Trump does not read anything, it will be up to the cabal around him to let him know how these books can help him realize his ambition of undermining American democracy.
So with the imposition of martial law, Donald Trump will be president-cum-CMLA. His next step will be to have the likes of General Michael Flynn, the recently pardoned former national security advisor, as deputy chief martial law administrator. The conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell might be appointed the regime’s information czarina in a newly created department of information, on the patterns set in place by authoritarian regimes around the world. Trump could dismiss his cabinet, all of whom have anyway come to the end of their roles in government with the election of November.
He could, like General Yahya Khan of Pakistan, set up a council of advisors that will buttress his claims that the November election was unfair, that indeed the White House was stolen from him.
In his martial law administration, of course, the White House remains in his vice-like grip. He could then take another leaf out of Yahya Khan’s book: Place President-elect Joe Biden under arrest, have him flown to a secret location, and kept in solitary confinement. The next move, once Dictator Trump has settled into his martial law establishment, will be for a special military tribunal to be constituted for Biden to be tried on charges of waging war against America.
All of this will go on alongside frantic operations by Trump, Flynn, Powell, and company to round up Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and the men and women named by Biden to serve in his administration come January. They will all be carted off to prisons around the country.
Trump will certainly be informed by his sycophants that a number of moves need to be made to consolidate his martial law regime. Again, the Third World textbook will be of huge help for him. He will, in the new situation, disband Congress, both houses of it, and send America’s elected representatives packing. All 50 state governors will be summarily sacked. But that should be complemented by that more necessary step: Donald Trump will, under martial law regulations, have to abrogate the constitution. It does not matter that America’s founding fathers brought their wisdom, experience, and expertise to bear in formulating the constitution more than 200 years ago. That was the past. Trump is now.
In Trump’s America or the America he imagines is out there, constitutionalism is of little consequence. He will produce his own constitution or a red book (red for Republican), in line with Gaddafi’s green book. But till that happens, martial law regulations will flow, one after another.
On the streets, where people once used to be, will be tanks and armoured cars and battalions of soldiers ready to confront any movement for a restoration of democracy in the country with firepower. Floggings could become a daily occurrence before a silent, abandoned Capitol. The Black Lives Matter movement would be a particular target of America’s first martial law regime. QAnon and Proud Boys would, in style reminiscent of Nazi Brown Shirts, march triumphantly on the streets.
Bananas all over the globe
The Trump regime will gleefully go after CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, the New York Times and the Washington Post. He will ban them all and oversee a filing of sedition charges against all those journalists who have been vocal in their criticisms of him over the years. Fox News will remain as a crusader in defense of the undermining of democracy. It will be the regime’s voice. On Mount Rushmore, decreed by martial law, sculptors will be busy carving Trump’s image beside those of the four great Americans of history. Trump’s image will be bigger, enough to overshadow those outdated votaries of liberal pluralism.
All of this is an unlikely scenario. And yet with Trump still in the White House and mulling the ways in which he can hang on to power that is not his, circumstances could turn bizarre. That dark possibility of the United States of America dwindling into a banana republic hangs over the world.
And, yes, bananas all over the globe will begin to tower over every other fruit in significance -- until a time comes when it is only the skins that are left to putrefy. The meaty part is gone. The republic shrivels, but soon the strongman makes his escape in the face of a gathering popular upsurge.
Democracy is regularly left bruised and bloodied by unscrupulous power-hungry individuals, but it lives nevertheless to push the forces of malignant ambition into the woods. That has been the lesson of history.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
