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 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.
A. This isn’t a democracy. B. All the people who voted for Trump will be thrown under the bus just like all of the people who didn’t vote for him. It will just be more rapid. poorly educated reality show addicted country responding to a Carnival Barker with lots of sexism racism to satisfy them. Trump will just make the rich, Richer and the working class and everyone else a lot worse off. And the people who voted for him will blame someone else. Yes the Democrats have done little and become more and more like the Republicans. That’s not news. That anyone thinks that Trump will do better by them well as I said a country that is filled with delusional folks. There’s one party in America. The property party it has two right wings. Yes the Democrats do little the least they can do. But it’s substantially more than what the Republicans do or will do and it makes a big difference in people’s lives. Far less than what they want but they should have. None of this would be happening if the Democrats had not sabotaged Bernie in 2016. In my humble opinion. But I always made the case that ultimately the ruling class preferred Trump to Bernie. And they will profit mightily
A very interesting article. clearly analyzing the responsibility of the Dem party in this disaster.
One remark the Talleyrand quote is wrong it was ” they forgot nothing, they learned naothing” ( Ils n’ont rien oublié, ni rien appris) and it applied to French aristocrats.
It’s amazing how quickly the ‘defenders of democracy’ are to appeal to the Praetorian guard when democracy chooses the wrong guy. You either believe in democracy, warts and all, or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways.
We were told about this political trajectory long ago by Plato in The Republic. When the oligarchy becomes intolerably corrupt people turn to demagogues.
I’m the freak who watched “I, Claudius” instead of “The Waltons”. It was a very good show, and worth a watch if you can find it still.
Claudius was a historian in the court, and a member of the ‘right’ family to be chosen. But the disrespected relation to the Caesars, due to deformity, which is why he was a geek who read and wrote history instead. What happened was that after the disasters of Emperor Caligula and then Emperor Nero, the Praetorian Guard, the armed force that guarded the Emperors, said enough with this BS and picked the next Emperor themselves, and one that they could control. In more modern terms, the Deep State picked a safer choice for the Empire than the nutcakes that had been chosen before.
The charts of the poll numbers, either national or for a battleground state, show that Killer ‘no change, no hope’ Kamala had a lead after the pr show of the candidate swap and through the 1st debate. She of course ended up losing all the battleground states and quite possibly the popular vote. But when was the high point, and when did the big decline to the finish line begin?
I suspect that if you put the date when KK said “I change nothing” about the Biden had done, that this would be the high point of her poll numbers. It was all downhill for last weeks of the campaign. I just haven’t connected the high point of the graph (and the actual dates the polls were conducted) to the news headline dates, to know if she peaked when she said that.
“False consciousness is a helluva thing.” What I’m seeing in the aftermath is a lot of well, Trump is unpredictable and maybe just maybe he . . . won’t choose the same types while he’s praising Pompeo the other day–in short, I’m seeing a desperation that Trump will this time be different, not the ignoramus playing to his hero-obsessions etc. Good luck with that. This would seem to me to be one explanation for “false consciousness is a helluva thing.” We need a People’s Party, one that excludes the oligarchs and the plutocrats, a genuine ordinary people’s party, and we are clueless on how to get it.
He has since said neither Pompeo nor Haley will be in his cabinet.
One marvelously accurate sentence in this essay is, “America as a country is circling the drain.”
The type of conclusions that must be drawn from this election shouldn’t be at the level of critiquing the 2 monstrously awful candidates. They should be far broader — namely, at the level of recognizing that the 2-party system is a disastrous failure that’s incompatible with social justice & democracy.
In particular, the doctrine of ‘Lesser Evilism’ is absurd & ridiculous. It has led, as many had long predicted it would, to a situation where the supposed ‘Lesser Evil’ party is every bit as bad as the Republicans. After US culture had been characterized ever since WW2 by the idea that genocide was unacceptable & that the Nazis were unbelievably cruel, we have both US parties fully supporting a genocide in which Israel is as cruel & murderous as the Nazis ever were; and the ‘mainstream media’ is so corrupted & bought-off that it refuses to point this out! In fact, it largely supports today’s Nazis — our darling little ‘ally,’ the “only democracy in the Middle East.”
This alone, IMHO, richly justifies describing our political system as “circling the drain.” When you only allow there to be 2 parties, and both support mass murder, and the media not only fails to criticize it but fully sides with the murderers, yes, you are circling the drain.
Mark my words, Donald Trump and all of his minions will rape and pillage the earth until there is nothing left.
Exactly! He will be the shepherd who leads his hapless sheep to the gate of the slaughterhouse and then closes the gate when they are inside
One problem with that statement is that it assumes there is no resistance. I don’t expect any resistance from Americans. We know that from the last few decades. Oh, there will be the same fake, Dem-led movements like against Bush and Trump, but like before, they won’t be real and the Dems don’t want a real organized populace.
But, the part about doing this to ‘the Earth’ ignores the big resistance that has been mobilizing and building for the last decade or more. They are of course the regular targets of the Two Minute Hates on American TV …. Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, etc.
But, the rest of the world is noticing that Russia has stood up to the big bully Sam, and is doing rather well with it. So, BRICS is growing, and the rest of the world is more interested in what Russia and China are doing than what big bully Sam is saying. The world also sees Gaza and Lebanon grinding down the vaunted Israeli Army. Of course, the one thing American TV hates to tell you about is resistance to the American government, especially effective resistance. But you can tell its there from all the hate.
There was no raping and pillaging in Donald Trump’s first term (beyond the established norms of prior presidents). I see no reason to hyperventilate over his second term.
The bonus for Trump-haters is that after these four years are up, Trump will never run for public office again. Sure, many of you will simply transition to calling Vance or Desantis Hitler reincarnated, just as you did once Dubya Hitler was gone, but that’s par for the course with Republican candidates. It’s also why those ‘fascist’ attacks don’t stick. You can only cry wolf so many times before people start ignoring you.
“WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF IN A HOLE, STOP DIGGING.”
An old saying but appropriate. As Andrew Bacevich pointed out in 2027, the vote was a referendum. If you were
against the ruing elite, millions voted for Trump. (Despite the fact as many know, that he did not do what he promised.)
Jack Rasmus (blog of Nov. 3) put his finger on it: the economy etc. And the realities of US elections (number of states to
reach election and so forth.)
No one knows what will happen. Having survived Trump before, let’s survive once more.
More of the same old, same old will not do it.
The fact that Trump won rather undermines his claim that the previous election was stolen from him. If that one was stolen, then we might have expected this one to be stolen as well.
I wonder how much money was made from the ‘Stop the Steal’ scam and what happened to it.
It is interesting that Trump supporters in England such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage rejected his claim that the last election was stolen.
American elections are traditionally a contest to see which party is the best at stealing them. America does not have a history of honest elections.
When Hillary was complaining after ’16, to my ear, she was screeching ‘but I had that election stolen fair and square’.
Both parties are always trying to steal every election. Its just a contest to see which succeeds. In a ‘democracy’ where neither represents the people, and where the people constantly say that we are going in the wrong direction, then this is the only way either ‘unpopular’ party wins. They do it the old fashioned American way … they steal it. This has been going on since Tammany Hall.
I am not, nor was I ever a ‘stop the steal’ true believer in 2020. But I was concerned by the voting irregularities caused by rushing to do mass mail-in voting without proper legislative approval in states across the country. An extra 10-20 million or so votes came out of nowhere in 2020 that weren’t there in 2016, and that disappeared in 2024. There are a lot of Democrats today where those votes went in 2024, just as Republicans were wondering where they came from in 2020. Hopefully, dregs of the Democrats conduct themselves with a bit more decorum than the dregs of the Republicans did on 1/6/2021 and we don’t get another Capitol riot.
Thank you John Wight – you have written my thoughts for me!
Diane Randall.
Excellent summation of the American situation.
As a Navajo I can attest thar this same critique could have been made every year since 1776.
Only now the John Wights of the world are confronted with irreversible deindustrialization, unsustainable debt and a rising BRICS.
Sanders spoke truth in the wake of the almost inevitable disaster – and the party’s bigwigs dismissed his comments with the tone-deaf and elitist arrogance that cost them the election, but more importantly moved the nuclear clock closer to midnight than at any other time, including Cuba. These creatures – the Obamas, Clintons, Biden, Pelosi, just about the whole wretched party – are barely human by my reckoning.
I quibble with your comparison of Biden to Claudius. Claudius was at least smart.
As for a second American civil war, I find it less likely as both factions are led by the same neoliberals. I see something more akin to the Troubles in Ireland than a full blown civil war.
It comes down to the fact that the majority of Americans can’t afford to live in America, and in the end, Trump paid better lip service to that than Harris did. As the saying goes, you can’t con an honest man. But you can con a desperate one.
Cretins like Pompeo, Cotton and this Lutnick guy. Also, the Palantir boys, fascist Wall St parasite Ackman, and Miriam the psychopathic billionaire’s widow all have Trump’s ear whenever they desire.
For anyone willing to see, it’s been looking for several months now that rabidly pro-Israel partisans will be stocked full in Trump’s impending regime.
So, it’s axiomatic that over the next few years any likely inevitable drive for a Washington attack on Tehran be stopped dead in its tracks. Make no mistake, these hypersensitive racist paranoid arrogant and sadistic Zionists and Zio sympathizers want nothing less than to see Iran totally pulverized.
Fight like hell to make damn sure the Trump pro-Israel zealots are ultimately unable to send young men from the American heartland off to die in a Persian desert for the Zionist supremacists.
Already our mass media are fomenting highly incendiary stories about supposed Iranian assassins under the direction of Tehran on the loose in NYC jockeying to murder Trump. (Though after what happened to Soleimani this isn’t a totally improbable scenario.)
If you can’t name the enemy — the hegemonic Zionists — you will lose every battle.
I cannot understand why, in face of the obvious loss by USA/NATO in Ukraine to the isolated weak Russia(!),and the “laughable” attempts to defeat the mighty China we all depend on, that nobody influential in the USA seems to accept that there is no hope or value in trying to destroy Iran. Iran is now strong, allied with powerful friends, is reasonable and is endowed with history, culture and desire for peace and cooperation. What on earth is this hubristic behavior doing to help make America great?????
You don’t understand why “nobody influential in the USA seems to accept that there is no hope or value in trying to destroy Iran”? The answer is in the comment by Drew Hunkins to which you replied: “the hegemonic Zionists”.
It’s the lunatic paranoid Zionist supremacists in Washington who are just about the sole cheerleaders for war with Iran.
They’ve very rational reasons (to them) that are grounded in total irrationality to desire the complete annihilation of the Iranian govt. In their paranoid delusions they believe Iran’s going to attack Tel Aviv, destroy their precious Israel, and orchestrate another holocaust.
Of course, some of their delusions are kind of true in that it’s due to Israel’s hegemonic and ultra violent behavior which makes the region so dangerous for the Zionists!
Right now as I’m writing this, Iran is indeed gearing up to launch strikes against Israel, all bc of Israeli instigation and provocations.
ALL HAIL JOHN WIGHT!
You have succinctly summarized this pseudo political clusterf–k very well good sir.
The present Clown-In-Chief and his dethroned Senate minions are said to be contemplating some convoluted scheme to cash in
a Supreme Court appointment to feather the Clown’s legacy, before the deplorables assume the mantles of power.
Thanks for putting the Kaos in perspective.
As Usual,
EA
To those who read history more than news, nothing said here is new. The players have now become so grotesque it is more obvious.
I’m old enough and have studied enough to have noticed some of the the patterns history provides us.
We’re either still far too unevolved or unable to collectively rise above our base animal Selves, or reality is, at its core, fractal and we’re doomed to repeat ourselves thanks to being indelibly coded with a fundamental and *finite* set of actions that ultimately necessitate conflict in some form.
We’re proverbially spinning around like tops, waltzing in the maniacal battle of Life that seemingly always ends up somewhat Faustian when we pause for breath before subconsciously returning to our set script.
50 Trillion in debt as the Bond market approaches some form of apocalyptic reckoning.
At the other end the rich elites through their Corporations on Wall St make obscene amounts by hollowing out the financial system as the majority of its citizens sink into poverty.
Salvation is now at hand as ” a Snake Oil Salesman par execellance” will now lead the Country as it “swirls around the plug hole”.
At the same time a shell shocked elitist group in Washington claim ignorance about why a majority of deplorables wound elect a ‘braggadocio el grande’ as saviour.
Once apon a time in Americia………………..Sergio Leone where are you ?