Impeachment shadow

The impeachment of US President Donald Trump for the second time, making him the first American president to be impeached twice, is an event which is certain to hang over the assumption of office by President-Elect Joe Biden on January 20, just a week from now. Biden has already rolled out an ambitious plan, which includes delivering one lakh Covid-19 vaccines in the first 100 days of his presidency and taking measures that can ensure people are able to get coverage for the vaccine and increasing taxes on wealthy people in order to help fund programmes which offer assistance to those who have lost employment as a result of the pandemic. But rolling out this programme will be overshadowed by the drama surrounding the exit of President Trump.

In most cases, the transition of power is a formal but orderly affair involving discussions between the incoming and outgoing president and a photoshoot at the White House as the new president takes over. This is not likely to happen this time with President Donald Trump, who his aides say is in somewhat of a bad mood, indicating he will not be attending the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20. There is also a threat of protests across the country on that date and high security has been placed in many parts of the country, especially Washington. Few had thought they would see this in the US, the country which calls itself the most developed and most committed democracy in the world.

The events we have seen in the recent past and which Biden will need to make his way through as he negotiates a complex situation in which the Senate will need to spend some of its time on the trial regarding Trump's impeachment, and then vote on the issue, also highlights how far populism and the politics of mass appeal can cause harm. As Trump lost the democratic vote, he opted to galvanize people and adopt a populist line insisting that the election had been 'stolen' and that there were conspiracy groups who had been involved in this, including China, North Korea and surprisingly, even Russia, which till now Trump appeared to have regarded as a kind of distant ally. The whole scenario in the US is of course, now rather bizarre. We can only hope that President Biden who is expected to deliver a full outline of his ambitious programme immediately after taking over power on January 20th, will be able to succeed on the path he has laid out without being impeded by the chaos that we have witnessed in the final days of the Trump era. He must achieve this. President Trump has set a terrible example for the US. There is a need for the country to recover from this. And no matter how much Joe Biden tries, as he has said he will, it will take time to heal wounds, and win over American people, a significant number of whom still say they back Trump and believe him when he says conspiracies led to him being deprived of a win at the 2020 election.