Trump is demonstrably inept and ineffective

By Charles Dunaway

US President Donald Trump points to the crowd as he leaves after speaking during a Make America Great Again rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport October 28, 2020, in Goodyear, Arizona. (AFP photo)

Donald Trump ran as the consummate outsider.  He was going to “drain the swamp” and is the only anti-establishment President since Andrew Jackson.  He is in office today because at least half of American voters are rejecting the imperialist, neoliberal consensus in Washington.  He also is the first President in many decades to actually listen to workers and acknowledge their struggles.  He talked about the loss of US manufacturing jobs and the hunger, homelessness and desperation that has brought to workers, particularly in the northern Midwest Rust Belt.

Trump also reaped the benefits of the Democratic Party’s complete abandonment of the working class.  They are responsible for the job losses of NAFTA, the Most Favored Nation status of China, the end of welfare as we knew it, the punitive crime bill that has made the US the incarceration capitol of the world, and the deregulation of the banks that enabled the 2008 financial crash.  They held the White House for 8 years, and the Congress for the first two of those, and not only did nothing for workers, they bailed out Wall Street and increased inequality.  Then they nominated an entrenched politician who supports all these fiascos and supported the war on Iraq as well.

Trump has managed not to start any new wars, although he certainly did his best to provoke Iran into an attack, has issued dozens of illegal and punitive sanctions on several nations, and is now provoking both Russia and China.  On the domestic front, he has accomplished nothing other than further cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans.  If he was serious about his campaign rhetoric, he is demonstrably inept and ineffective.  There is no reason to think that a second term would change that.

Biden would bring back the humanitarian interventionists that dominated the Obama administration.  They will certainly continue to assert that the US is the exceptional nation and should dominate all others.  While they may engage in more diplomacy-like activities, their objective will always be domination by the West.  What feeble attempts Trump has made to disengage from Afghanistan and Iraq will be reversed by Biden. 

The US political system limits voters to two choices.  This year once again, both are repulsive.  Will voters roll the dice in hopes that a second Trump term will be better than the first, or will they vote for Biden in the vain hope he can be moved to the Left?  This is the form of democracy the US seeks to impose on the world, and they still fail to understand why the world doesn’t thank them for it.

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*Charles Dunaway is an American political commentator in Oregon. He is a retired computer systems consultant who has been producing and hosting a radio program called Wider View for the last 4 years. The program is distributed nationally by the Pacifica Network and is available as a podcast at widerviewradio.podbean.com.  The program focuses on the United States' imperialist role in the world and the political stagnation in the nation that helps maintain that role.

Dunaway recorded this article for Press TV website.