Trump is clearly not the change required, says John Wight, but he understands far better the America that for Washington has become enemy territory.
Trump at a re-election campaign rally in Rochester, New Hampshire, on Jan. 21. (Liam Enea, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By John Wight
Special to Consortium News
Despite Jan. 6, 2021. Despite all of his legal travails. Despite the endorsements of Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey et al. Notwithstanding it all, Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won the keys to an increasingly ill-begotten kingdom.
If the result of the U.S. presidential election of 2024 has proved anything it is that the corporate Democratic Party establishment, to paraphrase the famed French statesman Talleyrand, has “learned nothing and forgotten everything.”
Kamala Harris was Hillary Clinton 2.0. She was the change-nothing candidate in an age in which change has never been more necessary.
Trump is not the change required, clearly, but with all his abundant flaws he understands far better the America from which Washington has become so detached, it has long since become enemy territory.
No shortage of money when it comes to subsidising wars and conflicts in far flung corners of the globe, while millions at home struggle to keep food on the table and a roof over their benighted heads.
Huge amounts of political bandwidth expended in the name of propping up Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, in his failing and disastrous war against Russia — a war being waged in the name of U.S. and Western hegemony — while failing to mount a serious intervention to save the lives of Palestinian babies as they were and still are slaughtered by the thousand on the altar of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionist, ethno-supremacist chopping block.
All of that and yet, still, we have overpaid and under-qualified Democratic Party ideologues scratching their heads as to the reasons why Trump prevailed in this election.
Trump’s brand of vulgar realism speaks to the mounting late stage capitalist chaos that is blighting the lives of the many in the name of the few in this land of the unfree. A rogue billionaire snake-oil salesman par excellance, Trump has perfected the art of playing to the fabricated fears of America’s forgotten and ignored.
Where once Robert De Niro was a poster-boy for Americana, this now stumbling, bumbling wreck of a man with his regular tirades against the now two-time president is a lightning rod for a Hollywood and movie celebrity culture despised by millions in an age in which social media and the podcast is king.
“Trump’s brand of vulgar realism speaks to the mounting late stage capitalist chaos that is blighting the lives of the many in the name of the few in this land of the unfree.”
Here it must be said and said again that the two Joes — Biden and Rogan — had a huge part to play in Trump’s victory. President Biden, with the hubris of a man who placed his own personal interests above those of country, remained steadfast in his determination to stand for a second term way past the point where it was obvious to all that he could hardly stand on his own two feet.
If Trump is America’s Nero, then Biden was its Emperor Claudius — the accidental leader of a country mired in imperial decline.
The cultural phenomenon that is Joe Rogan is a man whose microphone wields more power than a thousand bayonets. His three-hour-long Trump interview in the run-up to Nov. 5 was a game-changer in this election.
In it, Trump came across as the relatable alternative to a Harris campaign that excelled itself in excelling in nothing. Her VP pick, Tim Waltz, was cast as her folksy and down to Earth all-American foil. In truth, and in fact, he came over as a ham actor in an episode of The Waltons.
Taking a step back, the gnashing of teeth in Kiev, London, Brussels — in every part of the world in which Western liberal values still reign to the detriment of progress — in response to Trump’s election victory has been wonderful to witness. But here any sense of triumphalism must give way to the hard fact that Donald J. Trump ain’t no Henry Wallace.
“If Trump is America’s Nero, then Biden was its Emperor Claudius — the accidental leader of a country mired in imperial decline.”
Where Wallace believed in the cause of the common man as an end worth fighting for, Trump has used the common man as his own personal footstool. Netanyahu will have celebrated Trump’s victory on Nov. 5.
In him he sees a kindred white supremacist, Islamophobic spirit. In him he sees a man he can utilize in his malign desire to reshape the Middle East with blood and bullets.
Yes, we can — and we should — despise everything that Harris and Biden represents. But we should do so without celebrating the nativism of Trump and the beast of Trumpism it has unleashed.
On the contrary, impervious to truth, decency, humility or limitation, his is the warped character of the megalomaniac, driven by the ineluctable belief in his own wisdom and strength, underpinned by off-the-scale narcissism.
The shifting tectonic plates of American politics today emits chilling parallels to the prelude of the “first” U.S. Civil War of 1861–65. In the lead-up to this event of world-historical-importance, partisan politics reached such a pitch of intensity that the breach between the two Americas forged became irreconcilable.
Political opponents morphed into political enemies to the point where the ballot became the precursor to the gun.
This said, the depiction of Trump as the fascist threat to American democracy is as overblown as it is misses the point. When your precious democratic system normalizes the genocidal slaughter of an indigenous people in the third decade of the 21st-century, it is hardly worth saving or salvaging.
When it upholds Third World levels of poverty amid islands of obscene wealth and ostentation, it has ceased to be the answer and has become the problem.
America as a country is circling the drain. When a clown enters the palace, the palace becomes a circus. Trump is a clown who knows how to weaponize fear for political ends.
When the people become ‘sheepified’ they yearn for a shepherd. In him, millions believe they have found one. The point at which he fails them in this role — as he will and as he must — this is the point at which serious politics will begin.
False consciousness is a helluva thing.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.