Arrayed around him in the Capitol’s rotunda for his inauguration were people with more blood on their hands than every serial killer in U.S. history, says John Wight.
Donald Trump delivering his second inaugural address on Monday. (C-Span)
By John Wight
Special to Consortium News
Leaders who assume power promising a “new golden age” have littered human history since the beginning of time. From Alexander the Great to Julius Ceasar, Augustus, Napoleon Bonaparte, Otto von Bismarck, Adolf Hitler — for such historical and historic figures megalomania and grandiosity have walked hand-in-hand on the road to hell.
In our time we have Donald J. Trump, the newly sworn in 47th president of the United States. Technically a convicted felon, Trump with his re-election represents America with its mask of propriety removed.
Yet, in grim irony, arrayed around him in the Capitol’s rotunda for his inauguration were people with more blood on their hands than every serial killer in U.S. history. There they were — the Clintons; former President Barack Obama, George W. Bush et al. — war criminals all yet with the temerity to regard Trump as an outlier.
Trump’s real crime is that he refuses to play the patriot game. An isolationist and white supremacist by inclination and instinct, for such as he is, the real enemy is at home on the American continent.
The Gulf of Mexico is to be renamed the Gulf of America. The Panama Canal will be restored to U.S. ownership. Canada is to be brought to heel via trade tariffs. Illegal migrants are to be hunted down and deported. The U.S. Justice Department is to be cleansed of rogue elements. As are the intelligence services.
Further afield, peace in the world has been declared. President Vladimir Putin and Russia will be respected as a strong leader and country, not derided as an official enemy, while those Europeans who have been sucking at the teat of U.S. largesse vis-a-vis NATO have been put on notice. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Does Trump’s re-election bring with it the promise of a new dawn when it comes to U.S. foreign policy? If the rhetoric and bombast is to be believed, it would seem so.
But here’s the thing — John F. Kennedy arguably attempted to steer a similar course when he entered the White House and ended up with two in the head.
If Trump and his people really are serious about “draining the swamp,” they’d better buckle up, because the huge vested interests in the maintenance of the status quo ante at the apex of power — economic, military, judicial — in America will not go quietly into that good night.
From left in front row during the inaugural address on Monday: Outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. From left over Harris’ shoulder in second row: former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and former President George W. Bush. (C-Span)
That Trump has a mandate is not in doubt. Republican control of both the House and the Senate gives his administration the launchpad to implement just about anything it desires at this juncture. The first 100 days is traditionally when a “change administration” makes its mark. Think Abraham Lincoln, think Franklin D. Roosevelt — presidents who changed the course of history did so within this precious window of time
The underestimation of Trump by his establishment detractors has been the story of his foray into politics. First they laughed and ridiculed, then they scorned, and finally they tried to destroy him in the courts.
None of it worked. Why? Simply because like or loathe him, he understands America more than they ever could from the vantage point of a Washington insider’s establishment bubble, which by the time he came on the scene was despised across the country’s heartlands with the passionate intensity of a Yeats poem.
America as a nation is sick with division, hate and alienation. Nothing makes sense anymore. The chasm between the ostentation of the nation’s billionaire class and the lived experience of those denied healthcare due to a lack of means is so wide that when Luigi Mangione allegedly assassinated healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in December last year, the sense that justice rather than murder had been done was palpable.
If Mangione represents revolution in the name of the put-upon masses, Trump represents nativism in the name of distraction. He wants Americans to punch down at illegal migrants rather than up at rogue billionaires and corporate CEOs.
Unlike FDR, Trump is no traitor to his class. His ability to posture as an anti-establishment man of the people is merely a metric of how cowed the masses have become in this time of late stage capitalist chaos. It’s all guns and God and God and guns. White is right and brown is down.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump in November 2024. (Office of Speaker Mike Johnson, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Which brings us to Elon Musk. That this ketamine-addled billionaire and product of white South Africa has been able to get within such proximity to power in Washington; this only confirms the veracity of the adage that when a clown enters the palace, the palace becomes a circus.
The man is a crackpot and crank combined, a Bond villain straight outta Central Casting. “Department of Government Efficiency?” It sounds positively Orwellian. Be ready for swingeing cuts to social programs — to welfare, Medicaid and Obama’s Affordable Care Act — all in the name of efficiency.
Be ready for tax breaks for the rich and attacks on the working class and labor movement. Be ready for anything actually. Musk will take up his post like a sorcerer conducting experiments in a laboratory of the damned.
The issue is not “efficiency,” the issue is not “weak leadership,” the issue is not “making America great again.”
The issue is an economic and value system that has reduced the human experience to mere dollars and cents, resulting in the mass alienation cultivated thereby.
The issue is the normalization of genocide in Gaza in the name of ethno-supremacy and ethno-fascism.
The issue is war in Ukraine in the name of hegemony and imperialism not sovereignty.
Trump does not possess solutions, only questions. When Father Georgy Gapon led the poor bedraggled masses to the Tsar’s palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, he did so in the belief that one man had it within his gift to transform the lives of his subjects if only they believed in the concept of a saviour.
Trump has managed to bewitch his own subjects with the idea that he is their saviour.
Their disappointment is guaranteed.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else.
Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. 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.
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Best take on our predicament I’ve read today. We are in so much trouble.