By Martin Love
NORTH CAROLINA - Donald Trump is more than halfway through his first term and (insha’a Allah) last term as U.S. President and by most sane accounts he’s been a looming disaster so far -- a disaster that remains mostly prospective because of things already done and decided and which await some kind of unpleasant denouement.
The U.S. economy is doing well, relative to most others, and unemployment is low even if most jobs are menial and most Americans are eyeballs deep in debt. But this is almost certainly because of a dump of $trillions in printed money in to the economy and nearly zero interest rates by the Federal Reserve Bank. This was supposed to be “temporary” and the Fed was supposed to “normalize” policy…but found last autumn it cannot when asset prices plummeted. This Fed’s latest action is akin to keeping a sick patient alive with daily injections of high-grade heroin. Somewhere down the road the entire monetary system will likely crash and have to be replaced with something new. The entire world will be suffering a depression in the transition.
Trump has warped U.S. foreign policy more than any recent President, trashing agreements and treaties right and left (such as the JCPOA and the INF and the Paris Accords on climate). The Trump administration has given green lights to apartheid Israel to do as it pleases, and also to the Saudis. It has sanctioned and threatened allies and alleged foes alike over a host of issues. It is going for overt regime change and resource theft in Venezuela and has largely supported right-wing dictators, not proponents of democracy, everywhere.
The accounts of malfeasance and ill-advised moves could run for pages, and to boot, Trump is a proven liar, a con artist, a tax cheat, a womanizer of the worst kind, a poor businessman, a real estate grifter and a slob (all by his own admission intended or not) and he probably ought to be in prison, but oddly enough his “base” of support in the U.S. happens to be evangelical Christians (and far right wing lunatics and white supremacists) who, in truth, are anything but “Christian” and give the entire “faith” a bad name. As horrified as many Democrats are by Trump, they lack credibility but for a few brave, outstanding voices in Congress that include Rep. Ilhan Omar and 2020 Presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
The Democratic Party leaders may be just as corrupted as the Republicans under Trump, and Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Speaker, claims any attempt to impeach Trump is misguided because Trump is “not worth the effort”. This of course makes no sense at all, for if Trump is worthless, then he surely ought to be impeached as fast as possible.
Never before in the history of the United States has the country been in such potentially dire straits longer term, been governed so badly, and had such senseless and destructive and baldly desperate foreign policies – ones based on greed, hubris, insecurity, paranoia, xenophobia and, worst of all, abysmal ignorance. Countries seem to get the governments and leaders they deserve. The U.S. is a glaring example of this, it seems.
But is there something else afoot with Trump?
One indication of how desperate some relatively thoughtful Americans are for good news and positive directions (who are outside of government) is that they think Trump is far more of a master tactician – which is unlikely although the presumption is based on some reasonable policy postures he had during his campaign for the While House in 2016.
It has been anyway put forth that Trump has figured out that the sole way to “Make America Great Again”, assuming it ever was, is to disentangle from perpetual wars that have done nothing for U.S. security, have virtually bankrupted the country, bolstered a useless system of costly alliances and demonized Russia, which is not an enemy of the U.S.
However, Trump, the theory goes, realized he could do little to change any of this because the notion that the U.S. is “indispensable” and “exceptional” has been so deeply embedded in government and has prevailed against all rational odds particularly overseas. Thus, he has, the theory advances, had to adopt a back-door approach to force change by OFFENDING just about everyone on the planet to force them to unilaterally disengage from the U.S. (One example of Trump offense among others is his recent demand that allies pay for the maintenance of U.S. troops and “protection” on their own soil.)
But still, nothing has really happened yet.
America’s European allies have not yet quit the U.S., but are charting some mildly independent courses including a clear aversion to Trump’s and the Zionists’ and Saudis’ dreams of attacking Iran. And the JCPOA remains alive and the signatories (aside from the U.S.) seem to be honoring it if not doing everything they can to ensure their trade with Iran is not eliminated by U.S. sanctions. (This despite Mike Pence’s exhortation to U.S. allies to quit the JCPOA in Warsaw, which fell flat.) And no one has so far pulled out of useless NATO, too. Thus, what has occurred so far is only that some obvious cracks are growing between U.S. and allies and according to some theorists, this is a SUCCESS for Trump’s alleged schemes to reorder and reorient U.S. priorities more to domestic problems and concerns.
At any rate, desperation even for those who want to believe in positive change (and that Trump is not insane) has become as thick as polar ice, and this is natural, too. But anyone who thinks Donald Trump really understands what he is doing, and has some wildly complicated master plan to impose or transform some decent campaign promises he made in 2016 into real policy, is sadly mistaken. Any President who chooses Mike Pompeo or John Bolton or Elliott Abrams for top positions, all three of them despicable sadists, can’t possibly be thinking of anything but their own survival and the deployment of brute force.
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