Former President Donald Trump
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
Anyone who thinks my story is anywhere near over is sadly mistaken.
― Donald Trump
Caught as we are at a deeply polarized moment, so intensely consuming, that it’s hard to recognize that, to quote Ecclesiastes, time and chance happens to us all. In other words, things will move on. Or just move. The curtain comes down.
Although some may think the extremes of convictions and imaginaries we now face make it near to impossible to project what change might be and where things end, I hold that such extremes make the matter transparently predictable.
From one line of sight, Donald Trump is arbitrary and capricious in temperament and disrespectful of any icon other than his own self. Changing conditions outside himself do not affect a megalomania of Ahab chasing the White Whale proportions. With Trump everything he knows, from immunization and climate science to Keynesian economics and Reaganomics he knows instinctively.
This is perfectly fine by those who know in the same fashion. The devout bear witness to the rightness of Trump’s life-world in a fashion comparable and just as unreachably mystifying as Jehovah Witness bearing witness to their conception of the One True God. This is a line of sight in which his megalomania would not be dangerous at all to the country were he once again elected. He can say and do the truly shambolic and absurd but for the Trump devout such a description is a bearing of false witness, which in Proverbs will not go unpunished. Project 2025 does not frighten the Trump devout for in the end, it is not he or they who will perish.
Beyond the attachment to Trump, MAGAs do respond to a cleansing of a Deep State controlled by Leftists who they know instinctively place Leftist governmental restrictions on personal freedom. They are passionately behind any talk of jettisoning a liberal WOKE corruption of Christian morals.
From one sight line, this is all mass paranoia. They have their delusions. Once again, the dimension of witnessing overrides rational dispute. Facts are casualties of this sort of warfare. There’s astounding impunity in conducting this warfare on the side of “alternative facts” but neither Trump nor his acolytes shy away from it. There’s also an equal amount of astounding compliance with the greatest amount of “conspiratorial” and “weaponization” absurdity on a Marx Brothers Duck Soup level. The ways in which any statement is now refuted is to simply say “You’re wrong” even in the presence of refuting evidence. We’re in a knowing climate in which nothing can be validated to common acceptance. Trump has played on this crisis in understanding and exacerbated it.
The growing wealth divide is well supported with evidence but it has no value in the eyes of those attached to Trump, or to the Republican Party. There is no incentive for wealth and power to recognize as fact such inequity. Such recognition would put them on a path in which unbridled Market Rule was established as the culprit. Republicans have left that pursuit to Democrats who have chosen to go down other roads. Up until Biden, Democrats haven’t opposed but leaned into neo-liberal economics (see, Clinton), obscured their New Deal legacy, and dug deeper into cultural politics that incite in ways that discussions of obscene wealth divide cannot. Everything from Occupy Walls Street, Black Lives Matter, WOKE memes, LGBTQQIP2SAA, and DEI are raw meat thrown at Republicans. Their incendiary “platform” is fed by Democrats.
We would not now be hoping for an ending to the nightmare Trump creates if the grounds for his coming had not been tilled by the absence of a Wage Earner party and the failures of a capitalist-obedient center of the existing Democratic Party to assume that role.
If Donald Trump regains the White House, some or all of Project 2025 will be enacted. Whether he can replace potential obstructions to his will before those obstructions can operate would occupy the four years were he to be elected. The first day Trump promises us of dictatorship would be an incredible St. Valentine’s Day-like massacre of all those people and institutions that could oppose his will. In this, he is as always delusional. He cannot measure the resistance of an established political order because he has only a sneak thief’s awareness of what that order is.
Not hard, though, whether he wins or loses, to see roiling confusion filling the land. A House in Democrat’s charge would not be expected to kiss the ring at Mar-a-Lago. A Democrat Senate also in play would most likely successfully convict. Charges and indictments sure to come as our man Trump is apt to do un-Constitutional things the way a scorpion is apt to sting. Roiling confusion and anger more likely than these victories.
Trump not winning is a prophecy fascinating in its unknown consequences. Kamala’s winning has consequences that may surprise as to how far she’ll do Biden’s New Deal-like revival, or Clinton’s “triangulating” politics, or double down on DEI, or show signs of Bernie and Warren tutorship. But this is a tangle that’s same old same old. We’ll have seen this psychomachia before.
What’s also more of the old, namely top 1% lobbying, may reveal early on a President Harris’s stand. For instance, if billionaire support for Kamala’s campaign involves the removal of a “billionaire minimum income tax,” a floor levy of 25% on the total of regular income plus capital gains on all taxpayers holding a net worth of over $100 million, the joy of many might be considerably deflated while the joy fest of billionaires will go on. Also, right now on the campaign trail, Kamala has revealed “pretty adroit political gymnastics, where Harris had to completely reverse herself without showing the strain over long-held positions on fracking, immigration, asylum, a human rights-based foreign policy, student loan forgiveness, torture, the death penalty, and a single-payer health care system.” (Jeffrey St Clair, Counterpunch, August 30, 2024)
Kamala has explained more than once that her values remain unchanging although her positions might change. There’s a problem here. Disconnecting values from thought devalues values, straw dogs as such, unless the thought is admittedly opportunistic and hypocritical and therefore without value. What the values are remains hidden.
But this bit of illogic is certainly outdone by Trump’s syllogism that Clorine bleach kills germs, Covid patients have a “virus germ” and therefore should drink bleach to kill the Coronavirus. I select the most ludicrous of Trump Wisdom.
I don’t know how dramatic Kamala’s continuing with Biden’s accomplishments on behalf of wage earners and their families might be given that those accomplishments never went viral. Read Dean Baker’s “Should People Be Happy About the Biden Economy?” (Counterpunch Sept 6, 2023) if what Biden has done is not clear or you’ve heard he’s done nothing of any good, or are just wondering how bad he’s been. And so on.
Kamala’s campaign now and in the future will only be funded by those who recognize what she does for them.
Wall Street attends closely to what’s done for them and against them. One of the ways you can assess how good a job Biden may have done as a thorn in the side of the wealthy is to note how terrible his presidency is loudly and repeatedly proclaimed by those who can pay for those proclamations.
In the line of sight of those who prefer The Market to presidents, Trump is a loose cannon, acting crazier than usual for him, opposed to sacred Reaganomics whereas Kamala, no idealogue like Bernie, may shift toward Market Rule as Bill Clinton did. “She’s no Bernie Sanders,” Bernie Sanders said, when asked to respond to the Trump campaign charge that Kamala was a socialist like him. Sanders’ response was heard on Wall Street, with a sigh of relief. Kamala won’t draw the MAGAs but she may draw enough plutocrats to make liberals wonder how susceptible she might be to Market Rule.
In short, there’s no end in sight regarding the Democratic Party’s anxieties over which Faustian bargain to sign, having already under two Democratic presidents, a total of 16 years of Clinton and Obama not taking on the raging advance of Market Rule. Their failures to act brought Donald J. Trump to life on the American political stage.
This is a sad tragedy and it doesn’t seem like this Democratic Party is up to the challenge of dismantling the plutarchy. It seems already a pundit given that Kamala needs to put distance between herself and Biden. Combine that with the fact that the Democratic Party’s response to Biden’s achievements on behalf of the “middle class” may suffer the same response it made to Bernie Sanders in his 2016 bid for the presidency and it seems more likely that this party will birth another Trump. America breeds Trumps. Charlatans with a thirst for winning.
But this incarnation is now facing a final act..
Whether or not Trump’s end takes the Republican Party with him is the sort of query that assumes his departure will end a wealth inequality which drives one political party toward preservation, aka conservatism, and one toward redistribution, aka liberality. As the wealth gap continues to increase it seems clear who’s winning here and who can’t seem to get redistributive measures off the ground. Biden has made a start, which if continued by Kamala would get the heat up outside and way beyond the WOKE game board.
None of this has the drama of Trump’s last act.
A defeated Trump will deliver a clamorous finale of The Marriage of Figaro proportions. Combine this ending with the farcical theatrics of his launch into politics and expect a dumfounded historical footnote.
How much support Trump will get denying Kamala won the election depends on how much press he gets for another round of “Stop the Steal!” and “Fraud at the Polls!” clamor. We can see right now that this “I Waz Robbed!” is a sequel that won’t play. If the popular vote is sweeping and Harris gets the 270 or more electoral college votes, Trump will be left raging on his Social Truth platform. After sporadic insurrectionary outbursts in various MAGA strongholds, quickly put down by Federal and local law enforcement, ready to respond since their humiliating failure in Jan 6thattack on the Capital, Trump will either hold up at Mar-a-Lago till day’s end or take Aaron Burr’s path after killing Hamilton in a duel ended his political career. Burr went West to find supporters who would join with him to challenge Jefferson’s rule.
Burr traveled west to the American frontier seeking new economic and political opportunities. His secretive activities led to his 1807 arrest in Alabama on charges of treason. He was brought to trial more than once for what became known as the Burr conspiracy, an alleged plot to create an independent country led by Burr, but was acquitted each time. Burr’s true intentions remain unclear and, as a result, have led to varying theories from historians: some claim that he intended to take parts of Texas and the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase for himself, while others believe he intended to conquer Mexico or even the entirety of North America. The number of men backing him is also unclear, with accounts ranging from fewer than 40 men to upwards of 7,000.
Wikipedia, Aaron Burr Jr. (February 6, 1756 – September 14, 1836)
I foresee neither the drama or mystery that attended Burr’s end in Trump’s end. Very likely mini-Trumps will pop up in various MAGA strongholds until the plan of why and how America can be great again dissolves, never having been more than an illusion inspired by a man of delusions. Who was the enemy exactly? Who exactly were we supposed to hate? What were the crimes committed? How exactly was a presidential election stolen?
Trump will be less and less visited as royalty in his Xanadu. Burr, on the other hand, is described at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery as more “democratic in his political philosophy than either Hamilton or Jefferson.”
There is a weight of the historical, the solemnity of the Founding Fathers, that lays a non serviam cast to Aaron Burr, but also we feel a respect for the sovereignty of the individual standing in defiance of the sovereignty of a nation. Donald Trump, of far lesser weight, has an amour de soi infecting others while at the same time respecting no one at all, including this nation.
