09 July 2020
Will Trump Fail?
The AfD party and its
affiliated faction in Germany’s military KSK unit are only few in number; but
given the country’s history, they have raised concern in the country’s press
and civic groups (cf. New York Times 7/4/2020).
It is easy to dismiss that worry as alarmist. However, in light of
President Trump’s Mt. Rushmore speech, it may signal a dangerous global trend.
Or is it another example
of the stupid vulnerability of the Donald to being taken advantage of by
nefarious schemers who know a wealthy blowhard when they see one. How many times has he gone bankrupt by
undertaking casino or real estate projects that made someone else rich while
harming his own creditworthiness? It is
thankfully becoming more likely that the
only political beneficiaries of his chaotic White House tenure will be
xenophobic hate-mongers and racists when he fails to win reelection.
Trump is not personally
a racist or xenophobe—the people closest to him are foreign-born and
Jewish. However, his solipsism blinds
him to his unearned advantage over most other folks. He behaves as if all inequities are just a
matter of fate, only to be played as they are given, like a poker deal.
Trump doesn’t believe it
necessary to change anything. How could
ld he make anything
better for himself? If it’s good for
him, why should anyone want a change? With
no empathy for he plight of others, Trump cannot understand their desire to
alter their circumstances. Like the
nationalists in Germany, Trump sees a threat to his self-satisfaction in any
realignment of the society in which he lives—no addition of foreign-born
population, no rebalancing of the distribution of wealth.
That literally makes Trump
a conservative. He is a natural ally of
rightist Republicahs. But he has wrongly
interpreted their risistance to improvement of social conditions as allegiance
to irrational prejudice. Defending and
egging on the fringe elements who espouse nativism and racial hatred has begun
to alienate the natural conservative political base that brought him to power
in 2016. Moreover, it has started to
energize the more liberal segments of the public to realize that they have
a lot to lose by being inactive at the
polls in November.
It appears that the
installment of Donald Trump at the top of the American political heap is not an
isolated event. Singleminded right-wing
leaders have arisen in other modern countries, including Jair Bolsonaro, Mohammed
bin Salman, and Tayyip Erdogan, to name a few.
They are all would-be buddies of the Donald along with Vladimir Putin
and Kim Jung Un. Some of the eastern
European leaders in the EU also espouse radical rightist policies; and there
has been no weakening of the statist policies of China, India, or Iran either.
Forgive me for believing
there is too much sense in America’s voting public to allow a Trump’s awkward
appeal to a coalition of politically bored electorate and reactionary minority
of the public to continue. A rejection
of Trump’s clumsy and harmful presumption of the presidency seems likely to
happen in November. Hopefully it will
also weaken the grip on power of other more competent autocrats overseas.
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