TRUMP ERA 3.0 – FULL PRE-WORLD WAR RETROGRADE

 

Just when you think Donald J. Trump can’t swing any further to the right of Genghis Kahn, he does. It is as if emulating his most-admired-dictator, Vladimir Putin, and bringing the US as close in character to czarist Russia as he can while he’s in power—it no longer makes sense to say “in office”—were a point of national pride with him.

And also just when you think, okay, this has to be the breaking point, the last straw, before even his own party moves to stop him, you find that it isn’t. Because Donald Trump’s is no longer the “Grand Old Party”, but rather, a new and completely different animal, a party feeding on the insanity of its chief, a party that has become unapologetically authoritarian and accommodating to its leader (or perhaps we should capitalize it, Leader, as in Führer ).

Meanwhile, the leadership of the opposition party continues to make the mistake of thinking it is involved in a boxing match under Marquis of Queensbury Rules. Like it or not, this is a barfight, where you are either punching it out down on the floor in the blood, the puke, the snot and the beer, or you are the loser. This is a brand new world, in which you may draw scattered cheers for “going high when they go low” but in which the choice to play it that way means that you will, ultimately, get your ass handed to you.

In short, the United States, a country with what was once one of the most stable and admirable systems of government on earth, has become a third-world-style, tin-pot dictatorship, which is now considered a rogue nation by most of the rest of the free world, and one that is no longer respected for its leadership, but merely feared for its military might, and for the unhinged madman who wields it.    

Donald J Trump is someone who, as president of the United States, has no concept of the consequences of his actions on either the domestic or world stage. There are several reasons for this beyond the complete lack of third-party talent or interest in restraining him that I just mentioned above:

First, he doesn’t care what the consequences are. He is oblivious to anything but how big of a splash what he does makes in the news cycle, and how much more power he is perceived to have because of it. He truly believes that, good news or bad, it doesn’t matter as long as they’re talking about you. He is a psychopath, in whose mind neither morality nor consequences exist.

Second, Trump is the most gobsmackingly ignorant man ever to sit in the Oval Office. He has repeatedly shown zero knowledge of even the most basic American, let alone world history. For example, in a July 4^th, 2019, speech commemorating the 1776 American Revolution,  he careened recklessly off-script referring to the Continental Army under the command of General George Washington in the following anachronistic terms. “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.” (What a disappointment for those two Wright boys from Dayton, who could have sworn they were the ones who invented the airplane 127 years later). This was such a blatantly inconceivable gaffe that it left even his most loyal followers scratching their heads. He has also consistently confused World War I with World War II and vice versa.  He simply can’t keep them straight in his head and easily confuses who was on whose side in which war. (It’s hard, I image, to take any interest at all in who fought whom, since for him, they were all “suckers and losers”, the fools the men with the real power use as cannon fodder, while going all out for the spoils of war).

Third, most presidents have, not only professional, experienced cabinets—unlike Trump’s which is made up of some of his billionaire oligarch cronies and all of his favorite millionaire Fox News TV anchors—plus a broad cadre of top independent experts in every field imaginable, foreign and domestic, to judiciously advise them on every major policy decision they make (and still they frequently get it wrong). Trump doesn’t figure he needs a good cabinet—or any eggheaded academic experts. Or rather, to his mind, a good cabinet is one that will, quite literally, sing his praises, never contradict him, tell him he’s a genius, and say, “Wow, why didn’t I think of that, sir?” no matter how outrageous, harebrained or demented the president’s latest idea may be. In short, he doesn’t need “knowledgeable people”, because, like every other good malignant narcissist, he knows everything.  In his mind, there is nothing he can learn from anyone. Because he is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-comprehending. He is, in a word, God!   Or, as “the most powerful man on earth,” as close to being God as any mortal can get. So why ask an inferior anything before implementing that latest big idea you had while eating those last three Big Macs, guzzling Diet Coke and watching Fox and Friends?

In short, Donald Trump is a madman, who has been placed in charge of a nation with more fire-power and might than any other country on earth. And his insanity appears to be contagious, with the most “vulnerable” segment of the population being all ranking members of the Republican Party. A symptom of the contagion seems to be mass hypnosis, leading to zombie-like behavior in which the Republican Party appears to have become brain-dead and willing (or willed) to be a walking-dead army that surrounds and protects the zombie emperor no matter how deep into madness he ventures.

It was disastrous enough when the nation suffering the worst effects of this devastating sickness was the very same nation that was imprudent enough to re-elect Trump, despite having witnessed his raving insanity during a previous term—a term in which he was already pushing the limits of constitutionality and of the law, and a term that he ended by trying to overthrow one of the longest-standing democracies on earth. But now the zombie emperor is venturing out into the world at large to wreak havoc. And still, it appears no one is willing (or capable, in the case of the minority party) to stop him before he creates a worldwide catastrophe (not at all unlike another madman did in the lead-up to World War II).  

Nicolás Maduro

Someone has given Trump a term for his new adventure—the un-consulted, preemptive takeover of another sovereign nation, not to free it of its dictator and to re-establish democracy, but (and he is actually bragging about this) to steal its natural resources. His advisors have (erroneously) told him that it is the Monroe Doctrine—which, of course, he has re-dubbed, the Donroe Doctrine. What it is, in fact, is a retro bastardization of the Monroe Doctrine, disastrously imposed by certain administrations in both the pre-and-post war eras, as an excuse to intervene in the internal affairs of other sovereign countries in the Americas. But for the last 40 years, the US had seen the error of its ways, and sought to win hearts and minds rather than dominating neighboring nations by force. Something that, pre-World War II, was done as openly as Trump is doing it today. But which, up to the post-war 1980s, was done through spy versus spy subterfuge and by supporting far-right dictatorial regimes.

Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, and on the list goes of nations in which the US intervened in other sovereign nations’ internal affairs, not to establish the basis for democracy in those countries but simply—as Franklin Roosevelt is alleged to have said regarding Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, that the SOB in charge was “our sonuvabitch.” The most active time for these interventions was the 1960s and early 1970s, when the US directly or indirectly laid its heavy hand on the scale in other American nations every 13 months on average.

I will write more about US interventionism later, but in nearly all cases, the results of these interventions served only to sow chaos. But it is interesting to note that, in nearly every case, US intelligence (the CIA) assured Washington that, as stated in the 1968 National Intelligence Estimate, “In no case do insurgencies pose a serious short run threat…revolution seems unlikely in most Latin American countries within the next few years.” And in a great many of those cases, we now know the CIA got it dead wrong.

Back then it was done with at least the pretense of political ends, with the idea “promoting democracy”, and of ridding the world of communism—when, of course, the real goal could always be discovered by “following the money”. But in Trump’s “New Age” brand of imperialism, not even a pretense is being bothered with. The excuse is drugs, but the goal is US exploitation of other nations’ natural resources. The excuse is so lame and the goal so open—Trump can’t quit talking about how the US is going to go in and take Venezuela’s oil—that we might as well call a spade a spade. On the whim of a single madman, and with the backing of the most political industry on earth, the US has gone retro and re-embraced its “ugly American” profile—an era that led to chaos, war and violence throughout the Americas and to US actions consistently blowing up in our  face.

In one fell swoop Donald Trump has just unilaterally erased those four decades of progress in the self-determination of nations by seizing an entire country and openly declaring himself and his corporate friends the owners of its resources. And still his GOP zombie army closes ranks around him and cheers, with no regard whatsoever for the extremely long-tailed consequences of this reckless adventure. And they cheer despite the fact that they have just been trodden on and stripped of every shred of authority or dignity that they ever had as legislators. But then, what are they going to do. They are, after all, the walking dead.

This is Trump 3.0. Trump on steroids (and, apparently, fistfuls of aspirin). Trump gone completely off the rails. This is Trump being a mean kid with a magnifying glass. It’s Trump bullying everybody else in the sandbox (but not the big kids over there on the monkey bars).

Let’s talk about Nicolás Maduro. Maduro is a reprehensible authoritarian who has a great deal in common with America’s own reprehensible authoritarian. Until last weekend, he had been in power as president in Venezuela since 2013. Prior to that, he had been vice-president to Hugo Chávez, a military officer and politician who was amply elected by Venezuelans for three consecutive terms, but who, with that mandate, ran the country with an iron hand, repressing his opposition, censoring the press and developing an intelligence apparatus whose goal was to track and repress democratic development.

Assuming the presidency on Chávez’s death from cancer, Maduro ruled Venezuela by decree as of 2015, through special powers granted to him by his ruling party legislature. (Sound familiar)? He eventually stripped the legislature and Supreme Court of their power. This sparked a wave of protests, on  which Maduro unleashed a cruel crackdown.  

Since that time Maduro has headed an authoritarian regime characterized by election fraud, corruption, censorship, human rights abuse and such severe economic hardship that more than eight million Venezuelans have fled the country, taking refuge in other nations throughout the region and worldwide. Human Rights Watch estimates that the Maduro regime has carried out, not hundreds, but thousands of extrajudicial executions to cow his opposition into submission, while imprisonment without trial and institutionalized torture have been common practice.

In the country’s most recent elections, despite Maduro’s fraudulent machinations, the opposition, headed up by conservative politician María Corina Machado won 67% of the vote. But Maduro claimed fraud and remained in office as de facto leader. (Too bad about his leftist rhetoric because this is a dictator after Trump’s own heart).

María Corina Machado

This stunning win came despite the fact that Maduro jailed Machado until the elections were over. Her hand-picked surrogate was Edmundo González, who, despite being a pinch-hitter, pulled off a major election victory.

Trump’s intervention story could have been much more “heroic” had he at least tried to look more democratic, citing Maduro’s election fraud as yet another of his crimes, and, on overthrowing him, ensuring that Machado-González, the people’s choice, were immediately sworn in. My heart bleeds for the cheering Venezuelans who danced in the street both at home and abroad on learning that Maduro had been taken out by the US, only to hear their new dictator, Donald J. Trump, say that Machado was “a very nice lady” but not the right person for the job.

Edmundo González

Instead, Donald Trump has slapped Venezuelans in the face by chopping off the head of the Maduro government, but leaving his regime in power. It’s that Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice-president and oil minister, has shown a willingness to give Trump whatever he wants (read: oil) in exchange for remaining in power.  Democracy is messy. Trump disdains it at home, so why should he have to put up with it in a country that he has just conquered? Better to hang onto a regime that answers to no one and is willing to play ball. And democracy be damned.

Delcy Rodríguez - Trump's choice

A random thought that occurs to me is that if Maduro had not been the same sort of loudmouthed megalomaniac as the US president is, this never would have happened. Had he smooched Trump’s behind until his lips were chapped the way President Javier Milei did in Argentina, giving Trump anything and everything he wanted, he could have stayed on indefinitely as dictator, since, again, Trump doesn’t care what SOB is in charge, as long as it’s his SOB.

Meanwhile, Russia and China have just—incredibly—gained the moral high ground and are ra
iling against US imperialism in the UN Security Council. For Xi and Putin, the Venezuela invasion was an incredible year-end gift. They not only get to put on their white hats and play good guys to Trump’s villain, but they’ve looked on as the US has stripped itself of the moral capital to say a single word against Putin’s continued advances on Ukraine and the rest of Europe, or Xi’s plans to grab Taiwan and to keep setting up bases strategic to world domination on invented islands in the South China Sea.

Thanks to the fuse lit by Trump last weekend, the zone of peace that the Americas have been for the past forty years just evaporated, as Trump continues his saber-rattling in other Latin American nations and as those countries start to gird for battle in defense of their sovereignty. Back home in the USA, we citizens are merely spectators to this international drama, just as we are to the abuse of our civil rights and those of our neighbors on our own turf. It is a nightmare in which we watch our supposed representatives either bend to the will of the Executive, or wring their hands in the hope that they will win the next elections…if they ever take place.