Conduct Unbecoming

The late British-Czech anthropologist Ernest Gellner once wrote admiringly about America that it “was born modern; it did not have to achieve modernity, nor did it have modernity thrust upon it."

Perhaps due to this unique heritage, paid for by the intellectual and physical sweat of founding fathers and bondsmen, many Americans, born with the epistemological equivalent of a silver spoon, have never fully grasped why immigrants are deeply fascinated by the idea of America, and why they will defy all odds to enter the country. Clue: it isn’t the opportunity to make money; it is what makes the opportunity possible.

Coming from societies that, until now, have failed to make that fateful leap across Popper’s philosophical Big Ditch, immigrants appreciate the rarity and preciousness of the American achievement, and it stands to reason that they are often overzealous in defending it.

For these immigrants, therefore, and particularly for scholars and émigrés who have long trumpeted the American Idea, the spectacle of an American president exhibiting and flaunting traits normally associated with tyrants in the closed systems they have escaped from must be the equivalent of a living nightmare.

Yet, this is precisely what President Trump is doing with his repeated false claim that the American constitution allows him to stand for a third term of office. Section One of The Twenty-Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is unambiguous: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” This is Trump’s second term.

The president first flew the third-term kite back in March when he told NBC News on Sunday that “a lot of people want me to do it,” meaning, run for office again in clear circumvention of the constitution. Yesterday, on the second day of his Asia trip, President Trump, seventy-nine, told journalists again that he “would love to do it.” Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been telling whoever is willing to listen that “Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that.”

If it is bad enough that a sitting American president would entertain a notion so disreputable; it is even worse that he would double down on it. It does not seem to have occurred to President Trump that as the leader of the free world and occupier of the world’s most consequential political office, certain things are beyond the pale. For, whether or not he actually decides to pursue this harebrained scheme, by merely “putting it out there,” he has done enough damage by appearing to normalize the abnormal.

From an African perspective, it is jarring that President Trump’s tacit encouragement to tyrants of the world comes in the same week that Paul Biya, ninety-two, and Alassane Ouattara, eighty-three, have strengthened their hold on power in Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire respectively following national elections that the opposition has condemned as unfair and fraudulent.

To be sure, Biya and Ouattara’s desperation to rule for life is fully indigenous, and the American president is not to be blamed for the moral stagnation of African leaders. Nevertheless, President Trump’s heedless flirtation with the idea of a third term undermines local advocacy for political transparency and threatens to undo decades-long progress in corners of the region where, until recently, Washington has made substantial material and moral investment.

Rather than give current and aspirant despots something to think about, Trump is giving them succor by signaling that they have an ally in the White House. Taken together with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s July directive that State Department officials refrain from commenting on the integrity of elections, this creates an atmosphere of political license that many are bound to exploit. Ultimately, it lends credence to adversaries’ portrayal of the president as a cultural vandal intent on rubbishing the country’s most hallowed institutions and liberal heritage.

One must imagine Gellner unhappy.