Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
According to Henry Kissinger’s account of the last days before Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States, he felt a sudden fascination with the mystical and the magical as a desperate refuge from his political and personal tragedy. Kissinger explains how Nixon asked him to accompany him in small and futile rituals to find some solace in the face of his despair.
It is possible to postulate the idea that the loss of power, when accompanied by a sense of the reality of failure, is one of the most unhinged tragedies a political person can suffer. King Lear and Macbeth are descriptions of the fall and loss of power and how the powerful become insane in the face of their circumstance.
So, it is happening to President López Obrador. And he, like Nixon, King Lear, and Macbeth, ends his career wrapped up in the fantasy of maintaining power and sanity when both conditions are rapidly and irreparably slipping away.
López Obrador’s great fantasy was expressed with all the desperation and chutzpah of Nixon: “The moral authority of the President is above the Law”. Riding the plane of hallucination from the heights of power, AMLO expressed a phrase that reveals cracks in his sanity and glimpses of madness, as it happened to King Lear.
Constitutionally, no one is above the law—least of all those sworn to respect it. The President is digging his grave politically and legally by encouraging a contrary thesis.
By making such an announcement about his supposed immunity before reality, the President not only reveals his own misplaced position as to the office of President (he is not above the law) but also expresses his feeling of helplessness before a reality that corners him and, apparently, threatens him.
A President with no “tail to be trodden on” would not have to worry about false and malicious accusations against him. The President’s severe confusion in the face of such accusations is shocking and calls our attention. Over the course of several days, the strident defense he has made concluding with a surprise (to say the least) lightning and discreet visit to Sinaloa has been, at best, a sign of excessive presidential discomfort and concern in the face of such accusations.
And much less would he pull a fallacious and out-of-constitutional-order argumentation out of his hat. “I am above the law.” That is also what Trump says about himself: “I can commit a crime, and they can’t do anything to me”.
The similarity between AMLO’s positioning and Trump’s argument is striking. Both argue for “immunity” from reality. The thesis of both is striking because of the delirious nature of the allegation: they voluntarily declare themselves outside reality. In normal times, both would be subject to psychiatric analysis and possible temporary internment. But these are not normal times, and psychiatric patients walk the corridors of power, not the corridors of hospitals.
What is clear is that AMLO’s line of argument is as desperate as it is a fantasy. And it is his last line of defense in the face of a reality that is beginning to lock him in a death trap. The underlying message is that there will be no escape from his serious faults and mistakes as a ruler.
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