“You see how low you have fallen,” I expected Trump to say,
“You have embraced an ignorant buffoon I’ve been playing all this time,
insulting everyone in sight, spewing inanities and hatred and offering you
solutions that are unworkable, violate the Constitution and go against your own
ideology. You guys should take a long hard look at yourselves.”
Along with many other people, I just couldn’t conceive that
anybody could say the things Trump was saying and act the way he was acting in
dead earnest. I still can’t.
Obviously, I underestimated Trump, his narcissism, nastiness,
venality and ignorance. But that’s not a major problem. Who cares about a
septuagenarian reality TV star and yet another sleazy New York real estate
magnate? What’s important is that Trump, whose campaign has been spreading
rumors and innuendo about the health of his Democratic opponent Hillary
Clinton, has become a gauge of the health of the nation. Like a cardiologist
who puts a patient on the treadmill, Trump by his crazy never-before-seen
presidential run has administered a stress test to the United States. The
country has failed it, revealing not only the existence of wide social strata
that are rotten to the core, but that its heart, soul and mind are seriously
diseased.
Even if he goes down to defeat in November, Trump has raised
important questions about America’s leadership in the world, reliability as an
ally and commitment to safeguard the global political and economic system.
Regardless of its outcome, after this election, discussions of a
“post-American” global arrangements will likely move from the kook political
shows on Russian TV into cabinet meetings and corporate boardrooms around the
world.
It has been a stress test for America’s society as a whole as
well as for its hallowed institutions. First and foremost for the Republican
Party, whose elected officials are backing Trump while paying lip service to
political correctness by deploring his racist, sexist and anti-constitutional
“excesses.” They are ignoring his kowtowing to Vladimir Putin and claiming that
he doesn’t actually mean what he says.
True, neocon intellectuals have mostly rejected Trump and
signed on to the #NeverTrump movement, but they have refused to acknowledge
their part in creating this monster. Their crime has been to promote American
jingoism, start the war in Iraq, support tax cuts for the rich, promote
“market-based” solutions for problems of poverty and unemployment and obstruct
President Obama for the past eight years.
After three decades of relentless rightward drift – with the
neocons constantly baying for more radical policies and more radical economics
– it’s small wonder they have woken up to outright fascism.
The Democratic Party has failed the stress test too. Faced with
a challenge of a rightwing revolt, it thought of nothing better to offer to the
electorate than the status quo of the most craven variety, promising Obama’s
third term and selecting a candidate who, although highly qualified, is driven
by some strange ambition and is perceived negatively by a large number of
voters. Worse, the party apparatus blatantly used its institutional power to
exclude Bernie Sanders, alienating many of his young idealistic supporters in
the process.
No one doubts that the fourth estate has been found wanting
during this election cycle. Struggling with the collapse of its business model
which now prevents it from informing the public and keeping watch over
politicians, the media welcomed the opportunity to make a quick buck by
covering the dishonorable Trump circus on a 24/7 basis. Trump has thus received
billions of dollars of free coverage.
Since the sorry spectacle of the Veterans’ Forum on board the Intrepid aircraft carrier people have
started to realize that Trump has also been getting favorable coverage from the
corporate media – or at least a kids’ glove treatment. The media has promoted
the view of Hillary As untrustworthy and a crook while largely ignoring massive
lies constantly told by Trump, his ignorance of basic facts and swindles that
he habitually perpetrates on his partners, investors, creditors and customers –
and now also on donors to his campaign.
America’s business comes off no better. In the early postwar
decades senior managers of major US corporations saw themselves as national and
global leaders who, along with elected officials, felt that they bore
responsibility for the fate of the world and the future of the nation. No more.
People who run American companies have bought into the free market ideology and
see their job mainly as enriching themselves, with no responsibility for their
stakeholders or society at large. Trump represents a clear and present danger
to the US political system and to the global economic system, which will have
an immediate negative bearing on their companies. Yet we rarely hear a peep out
of them.
The military is another institution Trump has shown to be
hollow. It is, we hear, the most respected institution in the country – perhaps
the only one to which Americans accord any respect. But active members of the
military and veterans support Trump overwhelmingly, with a 19 point advantage.
They clearly want to be led by a man who said that John McCain was no hero to
him because he had been a POW – since Trump, who had received several fishy deferments
and never served, apparently likes his heroes to choose death over
surrender.
While others fought, Trump claims he too was risking his life
for his country. By his own admission, he was having random sex in Manhattan
during the AIDS epidemic.
America’s warriors support Trump despite his bromance with
Putin – at a time when Russia has been swept by a wave of anti-Americanism and
claims to be in a hybrid war with the United States. The US military is
reportedly using mock Russian tanks to train its soldiers for a possible
military confrontation with Putin’s Russia.
I’ll discuss patriotism later, but the key questions about a
military that could be swept off its feet by Trump are a) whether you can rely
on it to fight Russia and b) whether you can trust it to uphold the
Constitution. If Trump loses, he’s hinted at possible civic disturbances. You
wonder on which side “America’s most revered institution” will come down if
push comes to shove.
With tens of millions of Americans voting for Trump, it can be
said that American society as a whole
has failed the stress test. First and foremost, it has shown itself as a nation
of poorly educated people who don’t know history – even their own recent
history, dating back to the times of their grandparents. It’s a nation of dupes
who are incapable of deriving lessons from the past. It’s a nation for whom
television has replaced thinking, stripping them of their ability to tell facts
from lies.
Americans are now given to magical thinking and inhabit the world
of make-believe. They believe that Trump is a strong leader and a rich,
successful and competent businessman merely because he plays one on TV. They
believe that a strong leader knows all the answers even if he doesn’t deign to
share them with the led.
The New York Times
recently reported that the electorate regards Trump as a high-risk but
potentially high-reward candidate. That’s exactly the kind of people Nigerian
swindlers target with their off-the-wall offers to share millions of dollars of
their deceased clients’ money.
The way to think of Trump’s campaign is, in fact, as a Nigerian
swindle perpetrated on the American people. Once proud of their practical
sense, realism and prudence, Americans have turned into a nation of sheep ripe
for this kind of scams.
It gets worse. There has been great outrage about football
players who refuse to stand when the national anthem is performed before every
regular season game. Many feel very self-righteous in their patriotic zeal. How
that combines with the affinity for Trump is anyone’s guess. And, for that
matter, how does their patriotism jibes with the neo-Nazi support Trump so much
relishes? How do they reconcile their patriotism with the fact that they are,
effectively, betraying the “greatest generation” who fought the real Nazis?
America’s commitment to equality, democracy and freedom is also
suspect. Trump’s attacks on ethnic, racial and religious minorities have been
greeted by delighted hoots at his rallies – as have been his threats to punish
journalists whose reporting he doesn’t like. His entire run has been a mockery
of the United States Constitution. A substantial proportion of his supporters
would rather be ruled by Putin than by Obama.
It may not be malice – just stupidity or ignorance. It doesn’t
matter. Trump’s run for presidency has revealed that this country will need to
sort out its own domestic affairs first. People aspiring to freedom and
democracy and fighting against aggressors- most notably Ukraine – should expect
less and less direct support from Washington in coming years and should rely on
much broader alliances. .
