Without Donald Trump as President, the United States Would Have Gone On Hoodwinking Half the World for a Few Decades More
Now, thanks to the most ignorant and arrogant American President in history the bare truth is out front for all the world to see. The United States today is a dangerously misguided missile. Virtually everything President Trump says and does is, first and foremost, in his own personal interest, either electorally or in business. He’s constantly preaching to his choir of unlettered, white supremacist, machista thugs, and fanatical religious leaders who “speak in tongues” and promise “rapture” experiences. The bitter irony is that there may well be enough of them to get him re-elected. But that does not compensate the litany of outrages that is making him persona non grata not only in half of his own country but in the rest of the world.
Former British ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch’s recently leaked remarks in memos to the British Foreign Office about the President–“dysfunctional… incompetent… inept… insecure…”–are just the first pieces of evidence that come to mind but they are indicative of the tenor world opinion. The President gives himself away in the above quote when he affirms that he’s “…like, really smart.” Can anyone even halfway normal imagine a “really smart” person saying that? Unfortunately, declarations and actions that discredit the President also discredit his country.
Trump Unveils America in All Its Toxic Glory
The United States has dedicated two centuries to cultivating the myth of a beneficent, democratic, egalitarian, humane country. Though it has only occasionally lived up to those labels it has, until recently, been able to wave them as justification for its actions at home and abroad. They haven’t fooled anybody who is serious about discovering the truth, but that’s a small percentage of the world’s population. The rest have always been happy to accept the portrait that Hollywood and Madison Avenue have painted of America–and “the American dream.” This we-export-democracy ruse has worked well for many decades. What makes an upstart shoddy real-estate speculator think he can stumble in and start revealing the most scandalous truths about his country’s “full spectrum dominance” in world affairs, effectively “jerking the blanket off” their most sordid secrets, without encountering some blowback.
The world’s response to the new US President evolved quickly. At first, the citizens of other countries couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing on the news. But they quickly got the message: President Donald Trump is a person with limited intellectual capacity; infantile, narcissistic; and crude, who embraces oversimplified notions of governance and geopolitics, in consonance with his impoverished mentality. These elementary observations are backed up by his reckless and cynical actions at home and around the world. One of President Trump’s first big policy gaffes, on June 1, 2017, was withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement. Then he announced last October that he plans to “terminate” the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, despite universal concerns about the return of Cold War-style tensions over U.S. and Russian deployments of intermediate-range missiles in Europe and elsewhere.
The alleged principal motive for rescinding the Iran nuclear agreement came to light just recently when former British ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, affirmed that President Trump had annulled the agreement “for personal reasons.” According to the seasoned British diplomat, the President broke the nuclear pact with Iran due to “diplomatic vandalism,” in order to negate the legacy of his predecessor, Barak Obama. Many people inside and outside the United States think that this mixture of infantilism and racism is improper in a President of the United States and ill represents the decent people of his country.
The Trump Tsunami Rolls On Toward Receding Beaches
The frosting on this macabre cake was the President’s decision to approve concentration camps where illegal immigrant toddlers are locked in cages in deplorable conditions. There is some esoteric discussion as to whether those camps should be referred to as “concentration camps” or “internment camps.” As far as I’m concerned, “internment” is just a wimpy euphemism for “concentration.” Whatever you choose to call it, there are the children, separated from their parents and locked in cages like laboratory animals, a stunning poster image for the United States of America, 2019.
Once this clear vision of the American President was assimilated by the citizens of the world, it was a short hop to the inevitable conclusion: This man and his country are to be feared, not trusted, shunned, not embraced. This palpable truth has been obvious to people who do their homework from the early stages of the 2016 election campaign, but now it has become a viral truism that is sweeping the world like a tsunami. In response, countries around the world, notably Russia, China and most European nations, are busy seeking workarounds to the Trump administration’s spider web of tariffs, sanctions and bans. This realignment could have important repercussions, to say the least.
Is President Trump Up to the Job?
Not many relevant people around the world think so, excepting of course those with their snouts in the American trough, and there are more than a few of those. In fact, in today’s United States, “doing the job” seems almost irrelevant. I’ll refer you to Michael Lewis’s book, The Fifth Risk, which details the deliberate and systematic dismounting of a whole series of vital federal government agencies by President Trump and his motley crew of fanatics and mediocrities. If you google “federal agencies gutted by Trump,” you will find an article on thehill.com entitled The 22 agencies and programs Trump’s budget would eliminate. And this list does not include the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) nor the Department of Energy (DOE), in charge, incidentally, of the nuclear waste program.
What Has Uncle Sam Been Up To for the Past Three-Quarters of a Century?
Instead of reciting a list of America’s outrageous–and generally homicidal–global interventions, I’ll recommend William Blum’s book, Rogue State, A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Blum was working for the State Department with the goal of becoming a foreign service officer when his disillusion with the Viet Nam war persuaded him to resign in 1967. Since then, for half a century until his death in 2018, Blum was a political journalist, author, U.S. foreign policy critic, and historian. The list in his book, published in 2000, in a chapter entitled A Concise History of United States Global Interventions, 1945 to the Present; was too early to include Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Libya, but it will give you a clear idea of what we’re talking about.
Let’s let Umair Haque, today’s most cogent critic of US society, sum up the current situation:
American institutions have come to work backwards. They reward the worst qualities in people now — and punish the best. What economists call “adverse selection” results — things work backwards. Instead of institutions selecting the best — think of someone like Elizabeth Warren, smart, principled, tough, determined, fierce, gentle, wise — they select precisely and exactly the opposite.
Corporations don’t reward people for being wise, compassionate, just, and kind. They reward cunning, ruthlessness, flamboyant greed, absolute selfishness. Display all the former — you’ll be fired in days. Display all the latter — you’ll skyrocket up the corporate ladder. America’s public sphere doesn’t reward truth, honesty, fairness, wisdom — it panders to the lowest, dumbest, common denominator.
Umair concludes:
How did the worst person in America end up becoming its President? Because America let itself turn into a place where the worst ended up the most powerful, rich, and admired. But that means we ourselves have been made, forced, rewarded, punished, coerced, cajoled to be increasingly terrible people for a long time now, my friends. To one another, to the world, to our planet, to our future, to our country.
President Trump Has Made a Gift of Truth to the World
By dispelling the long-hovering mist of lies and myths surrounding recent United States administrations and their predatory dealings with their own citizens and those of the rest of the world, President Trump has illuminated the playing field. It is now clear to everyone with eyes to see that neither the President nor his country is motivated by healthy, decent intentions. President Trump and his dubious cohorts are openly and whole-heartedly dedicated to plundering the world–and their own country–for their own benefit and that of their corporate overseers. Although the President’s self-revelation is rooted in the basest arrogance and self-aggrandizement, it is a service for which we cannot thank him enough.
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Trump and All the Rest 