Note: This essay is aimed at readers outside the USA who may not be up to speed on the present political mechanics of how US government operates. Fellow Americans, for you this is old news.
The entire world is aware that America is under the control of a wealthy property developer with a focus on golf resorts and gold leaf. His malignant world view is on a long held transactional footing. He may not be suffering from an actual mental illness, but he certainly has multiple, overlapping personality disorders. He is widely viewed as a dangerous a$$hole, but in America this is not a legal or practical barrier to elected office.
President Trump is a walking, talking monument to “Greed is Good”. The man is intelligent, but he does have negative personality traits that have been amplified and sustained by his wealth and election as President. The man has over time developed a reputation for having an uncanny knack for business deals and the accumulation of hotels and resorts, all aggrevated by his successful reality TV show. Afterall, he is a billionaire, isn’t he?
That wealth facilitates power should not surprise anyone. It exists everywhere. In America children are taught that anyone can grow up to be president. You just need to study hard and achieve. Anything is possible, it is often said. In reality, this is only approximately impossible, not completely.
America is a stratified society with the ultra-rich occupying the top social layer with the dirt poor and criminals at the bottom. In between are layers of the highly educated and the poorly educated. Upward mobility across the layers is sometimes possible, but transition to the millionaire and billionaire layers is difficult and highly reliant on luck. Your own good luck may depend on the bad luck of others.
As a group, Americans are inclined to believe that the wealthy are imbued with superior abilities but manage to discount the effect of luck. A large bank balance is enough math needed to measure a person’s overall merit. Whether or not wealth was achieved without having committed hard or soft crimes or keeping your sanity is not a metric. To many voters, merit stands on wealth accumulated where wealth stands for cash, credit or real estate.
The judgement of a person’s merit is neither inherently right nor wrong since such determination is subjective. A person’s lifetime merit is the sum of their actions and intentions and is inherently qualitative. However, if the operating policy of your life is transactional like our President’s, then the barrier to offensive behavior and ill-gotten gains is much diminished. A charitable person may claim that there is goodness in everyone, but if “goodness” only rests on the avoidance of a heinous crime as with our President, then I beg to differ. In his 2016 campaign Trump admitted in public that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York City and get away with it. This was a revelation about him, but nobody took it seriously.
In America, there is the common view that wealthy people are deserving of our fascination for having achieved their wealth. Add this to the support of certain religious groups and you can win elections. In the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a concentrated effort was made to recruit religious groups, namely southern conservative protestant denominations, into the fold of the Republican Party. Decades of harping about abortion and moral majorities was a political strategy that diminished liberal candidates and brought throngs of single-issue voters to vote Republican. It worked and continues to be a strength of the GOP.
Today the hot-button issue is not so much abortion as the lurking specter of socialism and even communism. Socialism is presently found in the form of local fire and police departments, utilities, schools, Medicare, social security and more. Take away any of these services from conservatives and the howling will begin. I suppose they are against your socialism, but not theirs.
At present, the United States is functionally unable to control President Trump. The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party or GOP, has a majority of votes in the House, the Senate, owns the Presidency and has a majority of life-time justices in the Supreme Court. Trump is party leader and is supposed to be balanced by the Supreme Court, two houses of Congress. These are the much praised “checks and balances”. The US Constitution was designed to prevent a chief executive from becoming a dictator. Regrettably the Constitution did not anticipate the present circumstance and is inadequate to provide a remedy. The Republican members of the Congress are deathly afraid of being subjected to a primary vote where candidates are selected for the later vote directly into Congress. They have refused to apply their checks and balances, so here we are.
Besides the constitutional branches of government is the so-called 4th Estate, the news media. Historically, newspapers unofficially held some amount of influence over politicians by virtue of fear of bad publicity. Until Trump came along, this fear was quite influential. His habit of continuous complaining about the media led to the formation of media businesses based on his every utterance. This has greatly diminished the influence of the 4th estate.
If you intend on starting a new democratic nation, pay attention to the manner in which the US is self-immolating on the global scale. Note how a malevolent political party took control of the government by simply getting elected. The conditions under which a Trump-like person is elected along with his party being in total control of Congress calls for an official body that can physically remove him from office if Congress finally gets around to voting him out in case he refuses to relinquish power. Electing a malevolent president supported by an ineffectual congress and cabinet is a dangerous condition requiring preplanning. America has to endure this situation by law.
The seemingly ideal condition of citizens electing candidate as president by a simple majority is hobbled by the electoral college. This college consists of electors designated by each state whose number is based on population and who unanimously cast their votes for a presidential candidate. This was put in place at the demand of southern slave states whose populations were greatly increased by slave populations. The result was a system that compensated slave states with an increased number of votes for the white population.
The US is locked into a terrible condition where a minority of neoliberal ideologues who, from in the shadows of Trump, are forcing their malignant theories of capitalism on the nation. No one voted for a libertarian society. Malignant because it seeks to transfer much more wealth and power to a small caste of oligarchs at the expense of the majority of the public.
Look at the rise of Elon Musk. He controls a space program, a media empire called “X”, an electric vehicle manufacturing enterprise, a large orbital telecommunications constellation and has the ear of Trump. He recently exercised his own foreign policy by shutting down access to his telecom satellites to Ukraine, thereby crippling Ukraine’s access to satellite telecommunications and much to the detriment of Ukraine’s war effort.
US President Trump must be reined in for many reasons, but here I refer to his support of Putin. Offering to back off sanctions on Russian oil exports, Trump has thus given aid to the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Trump’s strange affinity for Putin remains unexplained.
