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24. Donald Trump
The 2016 US Presidential election is like no other in living memory. Some of the early ones were, perhaps, more problematic but surely not more bizarre. In 2000 George W. Bush slipped into the White House on the back of a bevy of disputed votes and dubious legal wrangling in Florida that led all the way to the Supreme Court. Exactly two hundred years earlier Thomas Jefferson did something similar by importuning the swinging vote that got him elected. Jefferson’s subsequent losing opponent, Aaron Burr, who became Vice President in consequence, later killed another of Jefferson’s political opponents, Alexander Hamilton in a dual. No slouch when it came to political character assassination, the sainted Thomas supposedly accused another opponent, the President preceding him, John Adams, of dressing up as a woman.
However, the 2016 election uniquely pitted the first woman to head the ticket of a major political party against a self-professed maverick with no previous political – or at least government – experience. Hilary was and is a professional politician, wife of a past President and past Secretary of State in the Administration of America’s first African American President. The Donald is a revelation – sublime to his supporters, devilish to his detractors. The wealthy son of a wealthy father, he claims to speak for the struggling sons of America’s forgotten heartland. Trump is an angry man who appeals to angry men. He’s mad as hell – and he’s not going to take it anymore.
Populism has a long and successful career in US politics. All the successful Presidents, especially the wealthy ones like FDR and JFK, connected with ordinary Americans, especially those who felt excluded and put upon. Trump is following their lead from the other side of the political spectrum, trading on decades of neoconservative groundwork leavened by a native libertarianism that pits the ordinary citizen against the establishment and – in particular –the government, any government. The fact that Trump is himself a product of East Coast wealth and influence is of no consequence. Trump has easily assumed the persona of the self-made man, in the sense that he is wealthier than his forebears – he’s pulled himself up by his trust fund. He has also assumed the rugged, weather-beaten visage of an outdoorsman, red-faced and energetic. Tailored suits there may be but no svelte, gym-sculptured body glides across the public stage. Only the amazing coif, the elaborate comb-over – that great gift to the world’s cartoonists and late night television hosts – hints at a less than manly vanity. To the world at large and his rusted-on supporters, Donald Trump is the man.
To most of the world he is a worry. Many questions were framed during the long and frankly bizarre presidential campaign. What would a Trump Presidency mean? What would it do? More to the point, what wouldn’t it do? How would that arbitrator of world destiny – the bond markets – react? Would the world end with a bang or a big bang, the unintended result of a gigantic series of foreign policy mistakes or a collapse of the global economy, barely averted last time? Or is this mere alarmism, the fevered speculations of observers unnerved by a radical departure from the normal run of American politics. After all, Democracy in America, to use de Tocqueville’s book title, has weathered some very stormy seas. The British even burnt down the White House once.
As soon as Trump’s inauguration occurred he has begun to issue executive orders. A few weeks into his presidency Trump attempted to ram through executive order after executive order. This is fairly normal in the early days of a new President’s incumbency. What is not normal is the degree of instant and widespread alarm and opposition that Trump’s flashing pen unleashed. From the parallel public demonstrations of the women’s march to the chaos created at America’s airports, it quickly became clear that Trump’s administration had changed the temperature of democratic politics in America. The millions of Americans who didn’t vote for Trump – and millions more who didn’t vote at all – are beginning to realize that their world has changed, precisely the aim and fervent wish of those who did vote for him.
An even more important question is not why him but why now? Populist candidates tend to arise in democracies during times of crisis. If Trump didn’t exist, he would have had to be invented. Wars and other major social and economic dislocations are fertile ground for demagogues peddling simplistic programs to thrive. Representative democracy is an ideal political basis for their rise and rule. Most citizens have effectively delegated government to a professional political class – elected politicians and civil servants. The mass media keeps a loose link between the people and their political representatives. Participation in government is ritualized, reduced to infrequent trips to the ballot box and informal but rarely informed discussions around the bar-b-que, club or pub. At least, this is the case when things are going well for most people. Occasionally, issues arise that create major cleavages across society. Unpopular wars, economic crises and disagreements over social issues like abortion, religion in schools or gay marriage can resonate the deeply held moral sentiments of citizens and bring them out onto the street. In America, some reach for their guns. In recent times, concern in Western societies over home-grown Islamic extremism, triggered by lone wolf terror attacks reminiscent of fin de siècle anarchist politics a century ago has added a layer of fear and loathing to the normal workings of electoral politics.
This has come on top of a dawning realization among the middle and working classes of the West that their living standards are under attack too. Economic inequality has intensified over the past thirty years. For the first time since World War II most people in America will not enjoy progressively rising real incomes; indeed, many will and are already losing ground. The children of the baby boomers are likely to be the first generation since the industrial revolution developed a head of steam up not to be better off than their parents. Economic insecurity has replaced the complacent comfort of life enjoyed during the long post-War boom. Hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their homes following the global credit crunch and Great Recession of 2008. Many more still dread the same fate, while real underlying unemployment remains high a decade after the onset of the crisis. More to the point, the wages and conditions of those who do have jobs are eroding. Income insecurity as well as inequality is biting hard. Americans and those in Italy, Greece, Ireland, Spain and much of Eastern Europe are living through what one ex Deputy-Secretary of the US Treasury has called ‘the age of stagnation’. The hollowing out of the middle classes is a widespread result of decades of neoliberal economic policies imposed in those countries, while the fruits of continuing productivity growth are appropriated by a self-perpetuating ruling plutocracy, the 1% of the world’s wealthiest who have plundered the economy, debauched the political system and turned the faces of the confused and angry multitude against each other.
Who is to blame? Who is to save us? Enter Sir Donald, stage right. You are to blame he suggests. You have allowed the effete political class, that selfish, evil collection of Washington insiders and bleeding heart liberals to organize affairs to suit themselves and stick you with the bill. They steal your hard-earned income in taxes and throw it away on lazy, welfare sponging, delinquent-producing deadbeats. Not content to waste your money, they invite terrorists, murderers and rapists to infiltrate our great country to threaten your very existence. The ‘dangerous other’ that once included African Americans and immigrants from certain despised destinations in Eastern and Southern Europe now makes room for Mexicans, other Latino populations and above all, Muslims. They are the enemy within, sapping the vitality of America’s greatness, her (our) true destiny as the land of the free, the home of the brave.
American exceptionalism and its association with an isolationist foreign policy have long established roots. Stemming from the fact that the fledgling federation of British colonies grew into the first stable republican democracy, albeit punctuated by a fratricidal civil war and ruthlessly dispossessing the indigenous inhabitants, the claim to being a special case has something going for it. However, since the turn of the twentieth century, the increasingly contested reach of the American empire and the global significance of US capitalism has created a fault line in American politics and among America’s political leaders and would-be leaders. Since World War II, a strong consensus developed around the imperial project, the bipartisan support for the USA as world policeman, imposing – by military force where necessary, overt diplomacy and the murky intelligence underworld – order in ways that furthered the national interests of America and the dominant economic and political position of its elites. This state of affairs was supercharged following the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s and the resurgent triumphalism of the neoconservative putsch. America, humiliated in Vietnam and constrained by Soviet power, would now call the shots and ‘bring democracy’ to the downtrodden of the world. They would be, in the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, forced to be free.
After the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Northern Africa, the ‘necon’ adventure looks less attractive to Americans and the old forces of isolationism and xenophobia are peeking out of the cracks of a political system stalled by ferocious partisanship in the Congress and the political drift characteristic of the American constitutional separation of powers. China’s rapid economic growth and increasingly belligerent military stance caused ‘a pivot to Asia’ by the Obama Administration. To the insecurities caused by global economic stagnation, domestic civil strife and increasing inequality of opportunity and outcomes, China’s rise has intensified the old isolationist, America First reaction in the body politic. It’s all so complicated. Won’t someone deal with it and make it go away? Yes, Donald will. Trust him. It’s easy. Build a wall, do a deal, bully people. He does it every week on television. That’s real – isn’t it?
Donald Trump is the very modern model of a modern major leader. He isn’t a very naughty boy; he’s the Savior. He can’t say exactly how he will stop the flow of illegal migrants or lone wolf terror attacks or shirt-front Putin or keep the South China Sea open for business or any one of a hundred key problems he will need to deal with as President. It will be alright on the night. Trust him. He might look and sound like he doesn’t know what he’s doing but it’s worked out for him to date in his life. What could go wrong?
Well, quite a lot really. The President of the United States of America is still the most powerful individual on the planet. He is Commander-in-chief of the greatest military force in history, more than capable of destroying all of us. In the past populist leaders have promised the world but not destroyed it, in large part because once in charge they have used their power to raid the country’s treasury and resources to enrich themselves, their families and their cronies. But what can you give the man who has everything? Beware the populist leader who believes what he says and who must deliver the things he so rashly promises in order not to lose face with his rabid acolytes. President Trump will build that wall, stop foreign Muslims from coming to America and make the lives of American Muslims hell. He will engage in risky military adventures. He will be totally unpredictable, inconsistent, incoherent and uncontrollable. Leaders in the Republican Party, the military and big business, believe that they can control the beast, bend him to their wills. They are kidding themselves. The dangers that the Federalists saw in the creation of a Republican monarch have lurked within US democracy since Jefferson and Madison took on Hamilton and Adams. The beast has slumbered in its cave for more than two hundred years but is now stretching and flexing.
Overblown comparisons of Trump and the rise of Adolph Hitler are fanciful. Trump is an opportunist, a narcissist rather than a delusional sociopath. He comes with no fixed ideology, just an overweening desire to win – anything and everything. His enemies and scapegoats are whoever he thinks will help him win. Like Peter Cook in the film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, he expects to slip into power by subterfuge, dirty tricks, a compliant media and the art of the breathtaking bluff.
The rise of populist politicians in Western democracies is also afflicting countries like Austria, The Ukraine, Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain and even the United Kingdom. The same trend is evident in parts of South America and Asia, while long established in post-colonial Africa. Interestingly, ‘Trumpism’ is not confined to the right of the political spectrum. In America, Bernie Sanders, a self-professed ‘socialist’ and in the UK, the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, an old Labour socialist, are shaking their respective centre-right (British Labour and the Democratic Party leadership have long since renounced their leftish histories) parties to the core. Both Sanders and Corbyn are tapping into the same seam of discontent and confusion that Trump is mining. All three, in their various ways, are trying to reconnect with and fire up a dormant memory of when things were better, that is, before the rise of neoliberal and third way policies and politicians. Wasn’t life so much better when banks lent money to hard working businesses and households and not each other?; when bosses negotiated labour contracts with unions, rather than having them unilaterally forced on workers?; when most people could look forward with confidence to a gradual but secure improvement in living standards, and a retirement with dignity?
The populist counter attack in America and Britain has created increasingly sharp social cleavages and an inward looking focus. Corbyn, although personally in favour of Britain leaving the European Union, was bound by his party to oppose ‘Brexit’. He no longer is so constrained. The fact that the British people decided by referendum to leave the European Union is a stunning demonstration of the populist upsurge in reaction to all the forces of the political and financial establishment. The level of shock and outrage expressed by political leaders, government officials, business titans, the mainstream media, economists and virtually every other member of the ruling elites throughout the western democracies perfectly indicates how out of touch they were with ordinary people. How dare they show us the finger. How ungrateful. How stupid. Don’t they know that we know best?
Brexit split the United Kingdom like no other event in recent history. Not even the battles between the appeasers and the anti-appeasers in the 1930s pitted citizen against citizen, city against country, North against South, old against young, and the well off against the struggling in the same way as the referendum. Thatcher’s war with the miners pales into the misty past by comparison. The effects of Britain’s exit from the EU are uncertain but bound to be large. The immediate rhetoric is overblown – seismic, catastrophic, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it – an exercise in what has been termed ‘adjectival inflation’. Ordinary descriptors like uncertainty, confusion, recession, upheaval and unintended consequences suffice to indicate the likely upshot of where life is headed but not where we will end up. ‘Contagion’ is a well-worn metaphor thanks to the global financial meltdown of 2008 and its aftermath. Will the babble of nationalist, xenophobic and opportunistic voices lead to the secession of Scotland from the Union, in search of independent EU membership? It’s certainly likely that right wing nationalist forces in France, Italy and elsewhere will be emboldened to push their national governments to follow Britain’s lead and call for a referendum or plebiscite on continued membership. If these forces undermine the French resolve to stay, breaking the twin pillars of European integration it will be a case of ‘game over’. The great experiment designed to curb the age-old war of the European tribes will have failed. We will be back to the picture that Winston Churchill painted at the end of World War II; it is simply too dangerous to have strong, independent European nation states. The shock of Brexit made a Trump Presidency seem less impossible but no less shocking when it eventuated. America’s middle and working classes are even more marginalized and distrustful of and disgusted with their governing class and experts of all kinds. Gesture politics may be shortsighted and leave a massive dose of buyer remorse but that didn’t prevent a surge of popular support for Trump on election day, in part because those who opposed him stayed home in despair, while those in despair came out in support.
Sanders and Corbyn both oppose America’s long projected imperial foreign policy. So does Trump but it is not clear what he would do differently. Popular protests in both countries have ratcheted up the political rhetoric and seen random acts of violence, including the first political assassination of a woman politician in Britain and homophobic mass murder in an Orlando Florida nightclub. Home grown French and Belgian terrorists have perpetrated similar outrages in France. Austria nearly elected a far right populist to the Presidency. The Ukraine has elected a right wing President to lock horns with an equally authoritarian Russian President over the disputed sovereignty of Eastern Ukraine or Western Russia, depending on your view.
Finally, the extreme insecurity of life in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Egypt has driven millions of desperate people across national borders to seek refuge in Western Europe, particularly Germany, France, Italy and the UK. The long established human movement chains from Central to Northern America have continued to agitate citizens in inaptly named ‘host’ countries. Refugees are not welcome. Go back to where you came from. In Australia, a large island surrounded by water, conservative governments of both major parties have won national election after election on the promise to ‘stop the boats’. This has entailed the recreation of what can only be described as ‘soft’ concentration camps in nearby territories and countries. Populist politicians in Europe are hailing Australia’s approach as world’s best practice.
Trumpism ushers in and entrenches the post-Truth era. In the post-inaugural words of a Trump apologist, we face a flood of ‘alternative facts’. In this Wonderland words will mean precisely what Trump says they mean. His press office will function as the Ministry of Truth, much as the Ministry of Love will implement his welfare program. What the Ministry of Peace will deliver is unclear but the very incoherence and uncertainty of his statements on foreign policy, coupled with his total inexperience in the arts of diplomacy and war, make the future a very scary country to live in. Nowhere is this future more starkly evident than in Trump’s unpredictable and contradictory attempt to force North Korea’s equally mercurial leader to scrap his regime’s nuclear program.
The media and professional commentators in academia bear some of the responsibility for this outcome. Their easy dismissal of Trump’s candidature and chances played neatly into Trump’s rhetoric of arrogant and out-of-touch elites rigging the system and ignoring the plight of ordinary Americans. The ideology of rugged individualism, the frontier mythology of self sufficiency and the national narrative of individual triumph against nature and government all contribute to the sense of betrayal felt by the marginalized masses. Never before have so many Americans come to believe that contemporary politics has departed from the glorious promise of the American Revolution. Trump’s promise to ‘take our country back’, ‘to make America great again’, although empty rhetorical flourishes, resonated wildly with people desperate enough to try anything. The abiding liberal belief that by putting the facts before the people they will support sensible governments has been exploded. Those who, however reluctantly, rallied to Trump are deaf to facts – they want action. The more the media and others point out the absurdity of Trump’s ‘facts’, the more his supporters cling onto the dream. After all, there is nowhere else to go. The challenge for progressive political forces to regroup and win back the initiative is immense. In a populist environment, it may take another populist leader to take on Trump and this is unlikely at least until the latter’s ramshackle administration has brought his country and the world to the precipice.
Ironically, the immediate threat to Trump comes not from the battered ruins of the Democratic Party establishment or the progressive wing of American politics – but from the far right. It is from this direction that past assassinations have emanated. Trump is in danger of some of his hardline supporters believing him. If he doesn’t deliver on those ambiguous half-promises they hold dear then, if he can’t overcome the constitutional checks inserted by the Founding fathers, removal and replacement with his Vice-President may appeal as a logical step. Alternatively, his inexperience in the military field could provoke the unthinkable – America’s first military coup. Such events, of course, are not uncommon in other republics. The new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff may not look like Burt Lancaster and we might not be facing ‘Seven Days in May’ any time soon but the possibility of a coup is not much more fanciful than a reality television star holding the nuclear codes at arm’s length. In a further irony, Trump’s personal safety will be in the hands of the intelligence community that he has done much to antagonize.
The tentacles of the security state are gradually encroaching on the turf of the democratic polity and threatening the liberties of citizens in the interests of saving them. Increasingly people are being faced with a choice between security and freedom. Beware the leader who promises both. In such a world, the rise of Donald Trump seems not so surprising. In some ways he perfectly personifies the spirit of our age – fearful, aggressive, intolerant and dangerous. He might have been defeated for the US Presidency, the victim, as he and his supporters would have claimed, of the rigged system and machinations of crooked Hilary. However, he won and spent the interregnum fending off allegations that his victory was due to a rigged system and the machinations of Vladimir Putin. The American people, in the spirit of Lincoln, have made their decision – Donald, you’re hired! As years of wheeling and dealing taught both Lincoln and Trump, you can fool all of the people some of the time. For the good of humankind and the planet, hopefully Lincoln’s last line will eventually come true.