I Am Scared, Very Scared!
I Am Scared, Very Scared! is a brief, heartfelt political tract that advocates against a second Donald Trump presidency.
John Ayoola Akinyemi’s political manifesto I Am Scared, Very Scared! makes an impassioned case against electing Donald Trump as the forty-seventh president of the United States.
Gathering a Nigerian immigrant and senior American citizen’s personal reflections and opinions on the 2024 presidential election campaign, the book airs fears and dire warnings about the possibility of a second Trump presidency. Responding to campaign events in real time, its prose is candid. It covers the experience of watching the presidential debates, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the election, and Donald Trump’s ambivalence to the January 6th raid on the Capitol. The dangers of a Donald Trump presidency are compared to the plight of Nigerian citizens who were captured against their will and taken as slaves to North and South America, and these and other scathing images are tied to scriptural quotes and invocations of past American leaders.
But mistakes arise throughout, as with the opening misattribution of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inaugural statement “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” to Ronald Reagan and with the misspelling of President Barack Obama’s name. Further, identical sentences and fragments of sentences appear side by side, and apocryphal quotes are attributed to political leaders. Quotation marks and capitalization are also used to highlight words in an inconsistent manner, and quotes and parentheses are often left unclosed.
Further, the absence of fleshed-out policy arguments and explanations for the book’s political opinions inhibits its ultimate coherence. Vice President Kamala Harris is described as a candidate who understands stress and who would help calm the nation, while Donald Trump is pegged as the cause of stress in American consumers. These pronouncements are never broken down or explained, however, limiting the book’s persuasiveness. Other hyperbolic statements, such as that there is a Nigerian in every single city and town on earth, are made without support—or discernible connection to the book’s political focus. Observations of the difficulties caused by rising prices, the dangers of antidemocratic beliefs, and the emotional turmoil that Americans feel are voiced, but their power is obscured by mistakes, as with the assertion that Tim Walz and JD Vance were running for the senate. Body language is claimed to reveal unspoken authoritarian intentions without support as well, causing the book’s call to action to fall flat.
An heartfelt plea against a second Donald Trump presidency, I Am Scared, Very Scared! warns of the former president’s authoritarian impulses and advocates for electing Kamala Harris.
Reviewed by
Willem Marx
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
