On January 20, 2021, I will declare a self-justified relief after four years of living with a dedicated, proud and Trumpian apostle who has turned my bedroom into a heated war room from where she fights a war of supremacy with the majority anti-Trump in her household. I never knew that a passing fad in 2016 could quickly develop into a full blown passion and cause for an apolitical wife of over three decades until… That is, until Mr. Donald John Trump was sworn in as the president of the US in January 2016.
For the past four years, I have been cursing Steve Bannon, arguably the architect and the most significant force behind the Donald Trump victory. Bannon grasped that in the digital age, political ideas must be draped over distinctive personalities to cut through the babel of electronic noises.
He believed that the 21st century populist leader does not have to be drawn from any particular social background, have any specific competence or the credentials that were once expected as a qualification for office. He must only have a voice, uniqueness, a capacity to persuade voters that they were being duped by an ill-defined elite and that apparently complex problems are terribly simple. Does that description of the millennial leader ring true of Nigerian leaders?
I would not understand why madam would brazenly indulge in mindless escape and endanger her marriage to a lovely man like me and fall head over heel for Trump. For the past four years, I have come to understand a painfully obvious reality: you could not predict women. How can my madam find a man the whole world see as ungracious, ill-mannered, boorish, ignorant, bigoted, bullying and a danger as her hero? How my madam can find Trump derangement syndrome appealing is more than an amazement.
How can my wife ever settle for a man described thus: “His mountainous orange hairpiece askew, purse strings tightening round his tiny puckered mouth, the sad friendless, cretinous, semi-literate, misogynistic, homophobic, islamophobic, xenophobic, closet racist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi and flat out serial-lying flabby ignoramus who cannot laugh and can hardly smile, applauds himself as he appears on stage, a waddling catalogue of psychotic disorders, a paranoid, delusional, self-obsessed, egotistical schizophrenic, narcissistic, sociopathic con man whose miniature mouth really does resemble an ass hole.” Such polemical hatred for Trump from such unflattering writer would not encourage my madam into reexamining his besotted hero.
For the past four years, I have been praying for a freer space where the shadow of Trump would not be stalking us all at home. But no. Anywhere you turn in my home, the effigy of Trump looms large and with that, sanity has gone beyond reclaiming. Madam has been waging an epic Orwellian war on truth and gaslighting and calling out Democrats as liars, dangerous, anti-Christ and wicked. This process of political re-education from a woman with two degrees in sociology is breathtaking. Her stentorian judgment on Obama and all democrats is a haunting worry.
We have endured, in the past four years of Trump, an intellectual atmosphere lacking in nuance and the simple appreciation that it is healthy for us all to agree and disagree and engage in the conflict of ideas. Rather, my wife has been shoving back all our desire for a liberal atmosphere by falling back upon siege mentality and the received paranoid that we are all sustained critics of Trump. Such accusation has been unnerving for the last four years. Her desire to take control of our thoughts, ideas and world view about Trump had been her obsession since Trump orbited onto the White House.
To achieve her aim of controlling information flow, she has permanently rejected all the main stream media, calling them disinformation mouthpiece and blaming the enablers shaping those channels as traitors and anti-Trump. She has deleted her Google for Bing, Yandex and OneSearch. She has blackened out BBC, ITV, CNN, Sky News, Aljazeera, Russia Today, Reuters, AP and most European news outlets for social media right wing talking heads. For hours, she gets her Trump indoctrination from Newsmax (One American News Network), Right Side Broadcasting Network, Black Conservative Patriots (Open Source), Crossroads (Joshua Philipp), Declassified (Gina Shakespeare), Dr. Steve Turley, Eric Greitens, Eye Opener (Michael Lewis), Gateway Pundit, Monkey Werx US, Officialaclj, The Werff Report and Zooming in with Simone Gao.
As a trump foot soldier, I noticed a massive change in the language of my wife immediately after the bruising US election last year November. She now speaks with radical, pro-Trump and predictable militaristic neo Nazi syntax. As a patriot and Trump defender, she couches her rhetoric with Armageddonian sentiments praying that, Trump, as the cheated winner, should call out the National Guard and arrest all democrats vote riggers and send them all to the hell hole of Gitmo – the Guantanamo prison meant for terrorists.
With such radical remodeling I knew that my wife’s love for Trump, the sociopath, is not ordinary. She keeps reminding me on a daily basis that something spectacular is on the way. She drew up many conspiracy theories that will upturn the election in favour of Trump instead of Biden, the adjudged winner. I thought the world would cave in on the 6th of January, 2021, a day most Trumpist watched out for celestial intervention that refused to come. It was the day my wife thought that the Capitol Hill invaders would drain the swamp of all democrats from the surface of the earth. Rather, it became a calamitous day for Trump and Trumpism as they were battered by a series of disasters that hit them simultaneously.
In a short space of time, the Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence turned publicly against Trump in formally accepting Joe Biden as the next president. As they did so the Democrats won two Senate seats in Georgia, giving them a majority in the chamber, a defeat blamed by many Republicans on Trump.
For four long years, I guess that Trump has been enjoying the bosom of Melania and the joy of family fun and laughter. I lost my wife to Trump-addiction that put us on romantic famine. She once boasted that Trump watching is better than watching my naked body beside her. When I reminded her of her marital obligation, she reminded me that we live in a Trumpian universe of self-control, abstinence and fight for justice. Until the fight is over on Jan 20th, 2021, and Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th President of the US, my wife still holds on to a strange last card: the accelerationists – that is, the deconstructionist term for fomenting dissatisfaction with the existing order to hasten its creative destruction by exacerbating social conflicts.
Trumpism has created social distance between my wife and me. It has drained our love life. I have been living in a toxic bubble of Trump captivity reinforced for the past four years by Republican lies, racism, fascism and narcissism right in my own home. The mounting evidences of Trump’s madness would not convince my wife to ship out of delusion and embrace reality. Hers is a radical loyalty to a man who brought shame to US democracy. Until Wednesday January 20th, 2021, I will hold my breath. Until we all get rid of Trump and my wife gets over her delusional Dear Leader, our married life is still under suspended animation. Help! I want my wife back from fantasy Trumpland!!!
