Anyone bothered by last week’s inauguration irritation should get used to it: it was no error that Donald J. Trump triumphed in the U.S. presidential election.
The billionaire’s campaign (which seems unending) was a well-crafted no-brainer, especially at reaching folks who may prefer infomercials to information and Jerry Springer cat fights to Shakespeare plays.
Trump had name recognition and acting chops because of his reality TV show, willingness to trumpet enough controversial bigotry to guarantee free airtime and sufficient personal lucre to splurge on emergency negative ads when necessary, thus sparing him the need to pander openly to the usual cadre of political donors.
Literally, he could afford to appear authentic and to not be trailing a Wall Street price tag. His “blame-somebody” tactics won him bad press, sure, but also free press, and they positioned him as an honest populist as opposed to a machine politico who always says the expected (and offensive), especially when it targets the powerless.
Given the outsized role of money-money-money in U.S. politics, you could argue that the republic has been devolving from democracy to plutocracy (Barack Obama’s first campaign being a tick in the reverse direction) over the past 50 years.
As a proud plutocrat boasting of his billions, then, Trump is the logical person to head the U.S. government.
True, Trump’s opportunistic deployment of sexist attacks against his Democratic Party opponent, Hillary Clinton, and racist insults aimed at the first African-American prez undoubtedly motivated rednecks and Tea Party types to vote for the Richie Rich look-alike and Richard Nixon copycat. To Trump’s credit, he at least called out the globalist plutocracy that’s shipped away factories, outsourced employment, and offered the desperate McJobs and bankrupting levels of household debt so they can pay their medical bills and buy goods now being made by oppressed labour in China and other developing redoubts. Yep, gotta give the could-be Devil his definite due.
But his “America First” rhetoric echoes the name of the discredited isolationist party that sought to prevent the country’s entry into World War II. It carries the pungent smell of fascism, as does his cry for a wall along the Mexico border, the mass deportations of “illegals,” the McCarthyite and Nixonian adulation of the police and (much too easily abused police powers) and Trump and Co.’s Berlusconi-esque efforts to bully journalists into accepting “alternative” facts.
In some ways, Trump is the inverse of what Obama could have been, could have achieved, if he’d been a bit less like Jimmy Carter and a whole lot more like Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Instead of trying to “reach across the aisle,” Obama should have maintained his original coalition and leaned on it, not only to support the program he was elected to pursue, but to ensure that the fraudsters who blew up the global economy faced trial and went to prison.
Instead of handcuffs and dates with the Big House, they got photo ops at the White House and golden parachutes.
Arguably, the uneducated white working class used the election to exact delayed revenge for the grotesque economic collapse of 2007-09. Only they chose the wrong targets, and the wrong champion.
What’s worse, they rallied behind a plutocrat whose speeches gave them licence to mock, punch, spit at and loathe their neighbours, especially if Brown or Black, Latino or Muslim, queer or female, social activist or environmentalist – as if anyone from these communities were responsible for the ongoing financial crisis.
It’s impossible not to compare the promotion of such civic violence with Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism, or J. Edgar Hoover’s Red Scare witch-hunts and Negro-phobic attacks on civil rights activists like John Lewis.
Trump’s inaugural address, peevish tweets and enraged retaliation to perceived slights continue to reveal a seemingly Humpty Dumpty-fragile ego as well as an apocalyptic us-against-them America Against Everyone (save Russia) perspective.
The happy news is that, as we have seen before with movements for civil liberties, women’s rights and nuclear disarmament, and with protests against the U.S.’s burn-the-skin and poison-the-soil war on Vietnam and invasions of Iraq, the global commons will oppose such pernicious policies.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
In other words, now is again the time to defend our civil liberties and human rights. We stand on the verge of a new era of citizen engagement in our democratic processes. As Sarah Connor says at the end of The Terminator, “A shit storm is coming.”
George Elliott Clarke is E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Canticles I (MMXVI) (Guernica, 2016).
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