Trump and Ruto: Two Presidents, One Dangerous Playbook

When Catholic historian and liberal thinker Lord Acton of Groppoli in an 1887 letter coined the phrase “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” he could hardly have guessed how pertinent his warning would be nearly 150 years later in two very different countries on opposite sides of the world.

Acton said that holding any kind of authority erodes a person’s moral sense, and that unchecked power, with no oversight and no checks and balances or accountability, destroys that person’s ethical standards completely, leading to tyranny and self-serving abuse.

We today have a perfect example of this in the horrifying antics of US president Donald Trump. But we don’t need to cast our eyes that far. We have our own original model here at home. In fact, with Trump and William Ruto’s defining characteristics so similar, these two destructive narcissists could be twins.

From the lies about their own education, to the boasts, to the everyday violation of truth, to the cold-blooded cruelty, to the incitement to violence, to the U-turns, to the love of shiny things and extravagance with public funds, to the corruption, to the insider trading, to the contempt for the courts, the Constitution and the political system, to the assault on education, to the tribalism and xenophobia, to the absence of self-awareness and the total lack of empathy for any kind of suffering, they are mirror images.

Trump repeatedly says he is very smart, and claims to know more than anyone else about every topic. Ruto dismisses everyone else as ‘average thinkers’ and boasts that he combines the political traits of all our former presidents. Both make daily claims about their imagined successes that are demonstrably untrue.

It is when claims about their personal academic credentials are examined, however, that it all comes unstuck. Trump’s claim that he graduated first in his class from a top finance school was debunked when it transpired that he was right near the bottom.

One of his former lawyers testified before the US Congress that Trump had told him to threaten his old high school and colleges with legal action and jail time if they revealed his SAT scores. One professor said Trump was his dumbest student but thought he knew everything.

Ruto also thinks he knows everything, interfering in every tier of government. He has publicly scolded his Cabinet secretaries for not knowing their jobs as well as he does, and boasted that he is the most “learned” among Kenya’s presidents because he has a PhD.

Ruto might hold a piece of paper that says PhD on it but it is bogus. A PhD in plant ecology – Ruto’s reported field – consists of full-time study for three to four years in a research-focused programme requiring rigorous outdoor work in all weathers and years in the laboratory looking through a microscope to examine, quantify and analyse empirical evidence.

It requires original research, analysis of complex ecological datasets, journal articles for peer review, mentoring undergraduates, and a hundred other facets, finally combining the outdoor field experiments, greenhouse studies and laboratory modelling into a dissertation that proves the thesis.

Ruto claims to have graduated with this degree in 2018. At that point, he had been deputy president for the previous five years.

When, during that period or, indeed, any other, did Ruto take three years’ leave of absence to pursue this academic journey? Who saw him labouring in the field month after month, collecting plant and soil samples and observing and measuring plant behaviour? Who saw him in a white coat in a laboratory, extracting and studying plant DNA under a microscope and collating and analysing evolving data?

Outsourced essay and dissertation writing is a profitable business, and Ruto’s PhD is on a par with that previously ‘won’ by then Zimbabwean first lady Grace Mugabe. The whole thing took her just a few months, in a case lecturers at the University of Zimbabwe called “academic corruption”. After her husband’s ouster, the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission arrested the university vice-chancellor and charged him with criminal abuse of office.

David Ndii, once Ruto’s implacable foe but later somewhat implausibly his economic adviser, tweeted at the time of Ruto’s reported ‘graduation’: “Congratulations, conman. When you sleep at night, you will know you have not earned a PhD, just like the rest of your loot.” The facts concerning Ruto’s PhD are common knowledge, but it’s also a case of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’.

I was listening recently to Jeffrey Sachs, a US economist and current director of the US Centre for Sustainable Development, warning of the dangers of unchecked presidential power. He described the US as “a show. It’s PR. Anything can get said. There’s no planning, there’s no systematic review, there are no checks and balances, there’s nothing.”

He could have been talking about Kenya, especially considering the unconstitutional level of Ruto’s borrow-and-spend regime, not to mention his random and pernicious roadside decrees, including the one recently directed at the Indian multinational Tata Chemicals. Tata has operated a soda ash facility at Lake Magadi since 1939, but Ruto told them out of the blue to pack up their belongings and go, saying there was an investor ready to take over (possibly Ruto himself, aiming to expand the list of companies he has already captured).

The U-turns came thick and fast. First, he changed course and said that there would be a competitive bidding process (the other ‘investor’ apparently raising no objections), then came U-turn number two, promising further negotiations with Tata. Total chaos. That’s what desperate populism does for you.

Criticising Tata for doing nothing in the area (it fully funds a 55-bed hospital serving about 30,000 people, fully finances four schools, and supports water infrastructure for more than 20 schools and for dozens of surrounding community points), Ruto omitted to mention that his government has done nothing whatsoever to bring any kind of infrastructural development or relief to the people of the Kajiado region, whose next nearest hospital is nearly 100 kilometres away.

Not content with this undignified and downright crude and unpresidential tantrum, Ruto went on to include all small-business foreign nationals in his xenophobic rant, with no care for what this might mean for thousands of refugees in Kenya, many with families and young children, now living in fear like their counterparts in the US. As Sachs said, “Everything is propaganda, morning till night ... So the situation is very strange, very dangerous.”

Continuing his blistering critique, Sachs said, “[Trump] is, from a personality point of view, a malignant narcissist ... or if you want a more classical diagnosis, ‘dark triad’ personality, which means that he is personally narcissistic, he is Machiavellian ... manipulative, untrustworthy, deceitful. And he is psychopathic .... no empathy for how many people he kills or how much damage is done. The ability of a man like this to have the power that he does to order a war is a profoundly broken political order.”

In a similar profoundly broken political order, Ruto has ordered war on his own people. Kenya National Commission on Human Rights’ numbers show that his attempts to silence dissent with a state policy of intimidation have led to more than 700 cases of forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

Before Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in 2021, he told them “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.” Likewise, to people shouting ‘Ruto must go’, Ruto said “Tell me how you want me to go. ... If there is no country for William Ruto, there is no country for you.” Both comments are menacing.

Trump has spent a lifetime mired in criminality and corruption. He has been convicted of dozens of felonies, especially for fraud, as well as of sexual assault. Currently there are more than 300 pending cases against him. Multiple federal judges, lawmakers and legal experts have also concluded that several of his executive actions and policies violate the US Constitution. As Sachs said, “A man like this should not be president.”

Quite so. Ruto’s legal history is similarly colourful, spanning international criminal law, multi-million-dollar domestic fraud allegations, private land disputes, and constitutional challenges. He is ranked at number 11 among the world’s richest leaders, while Kenya is ranked at 66 for wealth in the world. That is evidence of unmitigated corruption and theft.

In 2004, Ruto was charged with defrauding Kenya Pipeline of sh96 million by falsely claiming he was in a position to sell pieces of land in Ngong Forest. He was acquitted due to the prosecution’s ‘failure to provide sufficient evidence’ linking him to the fraudulent money trail.

Later, he was sued by a farmer who had fled his 100-acre land in Uasin Gishu during the 2007-8 post-election violence. The land’s ownership was transferred, and Ruto acquired it. He claimed he was an innocent buyer but the High Court ruled in favour of the farmer, ordering Ruto to pay him sh5 million in compensation and vacate the land.

Ruto has also faced a plethora of constitutional petitions challenging his executive orders, appointments and tax policies.

His housing levy was ruled unconstitutional, forcing restructuring of the legislation through Parliament. His attempt to appoint 50 CASs was quashed and his appointment of more than 20 personal state advisers ruled illegal and unconstitutional. His plan to unilaterally privatise key state-owned corporations, including KICC, without parliamentary and public approval, was blocked. Like Trump, he has amply demonstrated that the Constitution is simply something he can attempt to manipulate or even ignore to achieve his objectives.

When it comes to violence, Trump’s unprovoked, pointless war on Iran has killed thousands and wounded tens of thousands more. In the US itself in 2024-5, more than 2,600 people were killed by the police and the dreaded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With a madly xenophobic president, immigrants in the US face arrest, physical abuse, excessive force, separation of families and systemic violence, particularly during enforcement operations and inside detention facilities.

Just as sinister, violence has always been Ruto’s stock in trade. As a young man he was an enthusiastic member of YK’92, an aggressive Kanu outfit backed by state resources and funds tied to the Goldenberg scandal, and whose aim was to prevent people supporting the then nascent opposition.

The group distributed large sums of money to voters and politicians and paid for mass rallies, branded clothing, campaign cars, music and posters. People who resisted came under pressure and intimidation.

At the time, this was all shockingly new. There had never been anything like this before, Kenya having been a one-party state. YK’92, with Cyrus Jirongo in a key executive role, was awash with money, much of it printed specially for the purpose. Inflation hit 100 per cent in 1993 and the Central Bank was forced to mop up the excess money floating around with aggressive sales of Treasury bills and government securities. Who needs to wonder why Ruto has reportedly bought De La Rue, the money-printing company? He’s been there before.

As a YK’92 operative, Ruto helped birth the situation we have today, with coercion, violence, vote-buying and questionable funds all part of the money politics that has perverted our democratic process. And now, after a lifetime abusing the law, he doesn’t know any different.

And then, of course, there was the big one – his indictment by the International Criminal Court relating to the post-election violence of 2007-8. Ruto was accused of helping mobilise attacks on groups supporting Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity, with charges including murder, forcible displacement and persecution. At least 1,100 people were killed, 660,000 displaced, and thousands beaten, attacked with machetes, raped, and shot by police.

In the most egregious incident, a church in Kiambaa was set on fire. When women and children tried to escape, they were pushed back inside and the exits were blocked. The remains of husbands and fathers who had tried to save their families were found in nearby fields, hacked to pieces, people identifying their relatives’ body parts by the clothing fabric on the severed limbs.

The ICC eventually ruled that there was ‘insufficient evidence to sustain a conviction’ (there we go again), citing witness tampering and political interference. It emphasised that this was not an acquittal, leaving open the possibility of future prosecution.

Ruto’s total lack of empathy continued when he allowed the teargassing of children protesting his theft in 2015 of their school playground for his Weston Hotel car park, and again in July last year when he advised police to shoot protestors’ legs to break them “so they can go to hospital on their way to court”. This was two days after his forces had killed more than 30 people in anti-government demonstrations.

The Kenyan system is deeply corrupted and Ruto is clearly happy to allow unchecked the dangerous spread of goon culture – even if he doesn’t always look it. He has lost a tremendous amount of weight, appears gaunt and stressed, and often sounds panicky and desperate. Trump, for his part, looks sick, old, bloated and increasingly vacant.

Neither of them can retain his presidency by legal means. Trump is not going to win his mid-terms and Ruto cannot win the 2027 election, something he surely knows. My esteemed colleague Barrack Muluka said in a recent tv interview that if he were in the unfortunate position of advising Ruto, he would be counselling him not to be offering himself for a second term.

Indeed, it might be in Ruto’s best interests to negotiate a soft landing and avoid having to spend the rest of his life either living in Dubai or building a close acquaintanceship with prison walls. Or, God forbid, facing a fate similar to Gaddafi’s.

I say this advisedly. Violence instigated by the state against its own citizens at the level we are seeing breeds terrible anger and the bitterest of merciless revenge. It is profoundly dangerous. If such violence – and we still have 11 months of this before elections – were followed by an attempt to prolong power illegally, Kenya would be a bloodbath. As Sachs said, “We’re in really a crazy land right now, where anything goes, as if this is a spectator sport, not your life and not my life.”

And as Lord Acton continued in his letter, it is the “greatest names” that are “coupled with the greatest crimes”. He told his correspondent: “You would spare those criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman [a biblical leader who schemed to kill all Jews], for reasons of quite obvious justice, still more, still higher for the sake of historical science.”

As a ‘scientist’, Ruto will surely appreciate the import of this.