Biden & Trump Sage 7.

 

Trump is not going silently into the night. 

I flipped the papers this morning and this caption surfaced: “Trump opens office to carry on agenda of his administration.”

Yes, the ex-president is not letting it go. He wants to be heard. But that is all fine until the goal of such a set up is to “advance the interests of the United States and to carry on the agenda” of his administration. 

I believe his particular agenda-advancing office is the first of any former presidents. And we can tell what he is up to, knowing how he resented bitterly for not being re-elected for the second term. Losing to sleepy Joe was a painful defeat he cannot take lying down. 

According to a statement, the “office will be responsible for managing president Trump’s correspondence, public statements, appearances and official acitivites to advance the interests of the United States and to carry on the agenda of the Trump administration through advocacy, organising and public activism.”

And whether he endorses the new set up or not, I suspect Trump is not going to do anything about it. He has sown enough discord by spreading conspiracy theories before he became president and it is not going to surprise anyone if he had allowed this para-presidential office to exist (even directed it by sheer will) just to continue his sinister legacy to supplement Qanon, if not supersede it. 

Anyway, we all had expected it somehow. Trump will be trump. And this kind of reminds you of the tale of the scorpion and the frog. This is the Google extract of the tale.

“A scorpion asks a frog to carry him over a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, both would sink and the scorpion would drown. The frog then agrees, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When asked why, the scorpion points out that this is its nature.”

Yes, that is Trump’s nature. We must not forget that he once wielded great power. He had the trust of the people. They wanted change, real change. And it was never about making America great again, as it is about making sense again. It is about returning the people’s clamour for dignity and humanity back to the center of politics. Unfortunately, he squandered that golden opportunity. 

Trump could not confront the one person that matters most in his term of presidency - that is, himself. He had innumerable chances to turn things around, make amends, admit to his failings as a human leader, embrace real changes to advance the interest of those who trusted his leadership. But he could not capitalise on any of them because he cannot accept the fact that he can be wrong or mistaken. 

The reality is, never once has he publicly apologised for what he had done in the short 4 years, or at least acknowledge that he could have done better next time round. Like I said, Trump will be trump.

 

Incidentally, this news of Trump’s office set up came at the heeds of another, that is, today is UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day. German ambassador Norbert Riedel wrote the article entitled: “The Holocaust - never again must mankind stumble this way.”

He wrote: “The Holocaust refers to the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of about six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. And this also must be said: The perpetrators were human beings. They were Germans. The worst crime in the history of humanity - it was committed by my countrymen.”

In the article, ambassador Riedel wrote about the famous “stumbling stones” or Stolpersteine, in the streets of Berlin. 

“The inscription on each stone begins “Here lived”, followed by the victim’s name, date of birth, and fate: internment, suicide. exile or, in the vast majority of cases, deportation and murder.”” 

There are more than 70,000 Stolpersteine commemorating these lives who just happened to stand in the way of the tyrannical steam-rulers, or were just marked out because of their race, heritage and blood. 

The stumbling stones was designed by German artist, Gunter Demnig about two decades ago. It is the “world’s largest decentralised monument to the Holocaust.”

I brought up the stumbling stones in this post because you will note that, to read the inscription on these stones in the walkway, one has to bow before the victims. This is deliberate, and it was one of the project initiators’ design. 

As you’d have guessed it, it is about humility. It is about what Jesus once said, “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” And as it is also said, humility is not about thinking less of yourself, it is about thinking of yourself less. 

Come to think of it, this is the simple elegance of the teachings at Sermon on the mount. And this is a much-neglected counterculture (Jesus had taught about) as against the current state of world affairs led by leaders like Trump. He no doubt stands out because he is someone who milks every opportunity to exalt himself. 

Even after going through so much, Trump is not someone who will ever think of himself less. We would in fact be lucky if he even spare the time to think of others a little more (or not sting those who carry his orders on their backs).

And in the same way that the office of presidency can exalt the leader who humbles himself before all, the same office can also abase a leader who exalts himself above all.