The Donald vs. Uncle Joe
by Ayman Hakki
The debate of whether or not past President Donald Trump was mistreated by the FBI and the Justice Department rages on. At the core of this debate is a simple fact; President Trump feels he was robbed of the Presidency and is the victim of a plot to discredit him by the White House. President Biden, through his spokesperson, has assured the nation that the White House had no knowledge of the raid.
Who to believe seems to have become the national, and international, equivalent of a Rorschach test, blotches on a white sheet of paper subject to personal interpretation. Trump’s supporters are crying bloody murder, while President Biden’s supporters seem content with the fact that a search warrant signed off by the Justice Department after a Judge ordered it was executed. Truth is in the eye of the beholder is a common saying, and nothing could be more telling than that statement.
People outside the United States must wonder how the same set of facts can be seen in such a different way! Here is the answer: In the US any X-President loses all the privileges of the post. A telling story is that of x-President Richard Nixon, who left the White House in Air Force One, and landed in California on a flight re-designated as SAM 27000 (special air mission,) according to Matt Bai in a Washington Post op-ed piece Monday, August 15, 2022. Page A17.
To explain more to the reader of the WHIA, one must delve into the psychological makeup of Presidents Biden and Trump. President Biden’s nickname is Uncle Joe, the down-to-earth Amtrak-taking X-Congressman who served at the will of his constituents and under President Obama with humility and an astonishing lack of hubris. On the other hand, President Trump’s nickname was The Donald, a charismatic bombastic millionaire’s kid who had never served an elected office and was most famous for saying: “You Are Fired,” on his reality TV show.
One can imagine, one day soon, our Uncle Joe leaving office after handing over all classified and non-classified documents in his position to his successor, while it would be unlikely for Donald to do so. And that’s exactly what happened. The treasure trove of documents seized in the raid is probably never going to be made public, but the legal battle over what they contain will become the basic materials used in a soon-to-come court battle.
In the same op-ed piece, Charles Stimson of the Heritage Foundation (a conservative Think Tank) says to NBC News; “there’s a rich debate about whether or not a document is declassified if a president has decided but not communicated it outside of his own head.” This would make an Arab reader’s head swim. Some of us would say; are you kidding of course a president can do so, but other saner Arabs would disagree. It’s all about perception. Here too, both arguments will be made, but here disputes are settled in courts, not cafés. But to help my café brethren let me make a prediction, at some point, there will be a deal struck: You don’t run, we won’t prosecute.
Uncle Joe will leave office having served us, while The Donald will stay true to himself and for himself.
