This post is dedicated to reader John OC and the millions of other MAGA morons who have fallen for Donald J Trump’s bullshit

Yesterday I posted a dire warning about what Donny Trump’s presidency will mean not just for America but, given the size of of the US economy, the world. In response reader ‘John OC’ took me to task and commented

‘Wow - such a rant. Thanks for reminding me to come back to you on your
superb TDS rant last week. Was thrilled with the result last night’.

Well, to that all I can respond is ‘sucker’. But time will tell what a disaster Trump will be, given his economic naivety, his ultra-short attention span, his narcissism, his fatal flaw in believing his own bullshit.

Readers such as ‘John OC’ who were ‘thrilled’ by the election result will be crying into their beer with a year or two when Trump manages to make inflation soar again, millions are made unemployed and Trump manifest health problems – why are your afraid of releasing your medical records, Donny? – make him just a figurehead for the crooks and right-wing thugs such as Musk and Thiel who wanted him in the White House.

NB First of all the global covid epidemic, soon followed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine sparked global inflation – as in throughout the world not just America – and as such it was beyond the control of any government.

The problem with inflation is that its effects lad. So although it is right down again everywhere, prices are still high and that has fooled cretins like ‘John OC’. Don’t believe me? Well, take a look. This chart (below) showing US inflation over the past five years is provided by YCharts.

But morons like ‘John OC’ and his fellow MAGA suckers aren’t interested in ‘detail’ and ‘facts’ and they take the view, rather like six-year-old children that if a ‘fact’ doesn’t suit them it is ‘fake news’.

Remember, it’s all very well for ‘John OC’ to sneer at what he calls my ‘rant’ but he conveniently forgets the ranting is orange pin-up is a master of: take time out to listen to any of Donny’s speeches to see and hear for yourselves.

Morons like ‘John OC’ prefer to cosy bedside story, cut kittens and kindly fairy godmothers and all the other bullshit Trump provides for them for the real world.

The writer H L Mencken is supposed to have observed (though he probably picked it up somewhere) that

Nobody ever went broke underestimating
the intelligence of the American people

Trump has now proved just how true that is.

MAGA suckers, you will have no one to blame but yourselves

We have a saying in Britain, ‘Turkeys don’t vote for an early Christmas. To adapt if for American readers (and for the sake of those such as ‘John OC’ I shall use BIG LETTERS)

Turkeys don’t vote for an early Thanksgiving.

The problem now facing the US is that 72,641,564 of the nation’s voters have done just that.

PS Get a good night’s sleep, y’all, you’re gonna need it.

Thanks a bunch, America, you have now fucked up the world for the rest of us: are you guys even sane? Trump? This is not a party trick? Dear soul!

Although I’m merely an interested Brit addressing Americans, PLEASE be assured that despite what some might think when reading the following, it is NOT and is NOT intended as ‘anti-American’.

As a friend, a former Brit now a US citizen will confirm, there is unfortunately among ‘the left’ in Britain (to which I don’t count myself although I am in sympathy with many of its policies) a marked knee-jerk anti-Americanism and not only do I deplore it, I despise it.

Such thinking is sadly not unusual, but as far as I am concerned it is intellectually on the low level of MAGA thinking. So I repeat, please consider carefully what I write in the following.

As for this headline, taken from today’s Guardian, to do what, fuck up the US? Whatever his backers might like to believe, or better might like the voters to believe, Donny is economically illiterate, his ‘business success’ was

nothing but TV marketing hype and he is now immune from criminal prosecution for ‘presidential acts’.

Given the MAGA top-heavy Supreme Court, every dodgy decision Donny takes such as pardoning himself of his fraud conviction will be ruled a ‘presidential act’, and protests will get nowhere now that MAGA also control the legislature.

Such a ‘presidential act’ will take minutes to be put into practice but months if not years to be challenged. Yet a majority in the US seem quite happy with such a state of affairs. So much for ‘the world’s leading democracy’.

Also remember that as part of the legal argy-bargy that played out before the Supreme Court in the run-up to its ‘immunity’ ruling, it was admitted that even murdering a political opponent would be legal if it is ‘a presidential act’. Will Donny be that stupid?

Well, don’t bank on him not being that stupid, though he might well pull up short and simply – as he repeatedly threatened to do – jail those who opposed him. Doing so was a key part of the 1930s euro-fascist rulebook and Stalin and his ‘socialist’ fellow leaders also found it useful.

RIP Navalny, first jailed then murdered – watch out Dubya Bush, Liz Cheney, Mark Milley and the rest of those patriotic Republicans who had the guts to call out Trump for the utter fake that he is.

Judging by almost all of the comments made on Truthsocial by MAGA men and women, the US which has just elected as its next president an ineffably nasty sociopath and it can no longer boast that it is the ‘leader of the free world’.

That was fatuous claim at the best of times – the genocide of several million native Americans and the continuation of semi-official racism until about 60 years ago gives the lie to all of that.

More recently there were the stalinist HUAAC hearings led by Senator Joe McCarthy, ironically billed as ‘anti-communist’. And Joe’s main henchman was one Roy Cohn.

Cohn – a closet gay who blackmailed and denounced other closet gays – later went on to become young Donald Trump’s ‘mentor’, and taught him always to ‘attack, attack, attack’, ‘deny everything, admit nothing’ and ‘always claim victory, never admit defeat’, lessons Donny learnt well and which he applied again and again.

We might also care to recall America’s incessant tendency to manufacture ‘popular uprisings’ to topple democratically elected governments in nations which showed even the slightest indication of becoming less ‘friendly‘ to US business interests.

This was all done, nominally, ‘to protect democracy’. Some very cock-eyed thinking takes place there if we take the claim seriously, but of course we don’t.

Look up the coup In Iran in 1953 when the US covertly help to topple – with British help – the democratic government that had just nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company after it refused to open its books to confirm whether it was paying agreed royalties to Iran.

A year later, in Guatemala, the US created a ‘local’ militia to topple the government that had taken over unused United Fruit Company land for use by landless and very poor peasants and installed a more ‘US-friendly’ dictator.

The Vietnam War disaster is another case in point where America was only interested in ‘helping’ if its interests are in danger.

With Trump back in charge – and remember, this is a man who has no scruples, not principles (least of all Republican), is considered by pretty much all sane Republicans as a total potential disaster and a moron which is why so many of them backed Harris for president – that kind of global bullying is sure to make a comeback. Ukraine – nice knowing you, shame how it all turned out through no fault of your own.

Trump will have not boundaries, not checks, not impartial courts and no independent legislature to keep an eye on him. How’s that for a functioning democracy?

He will be free, courtesy of his ‘presidential immunity’ to go after and eliminate in one way of another all those who ‘did not support him’ – and he will do so as he has assure the world he will.

So America, remember this: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

You have largely had your years in the sun, America, though certainly not for those of you who were black, believed in unions and social democracy, welfare for the worst off and so on. But those years might now be drawing to a close.

Changes in history are rarely dramatic – though some are – and take years to gestate, but we might – and I merely say might – be witnessing the slow dissipation of ‘the Union’.

The well-known Chinese curse is ‘May you live in interesting times’. Well, they are now getting more interesting. At may age – 75 in two weeks – I might not make it to see them become rather less interesting again.

Might a new American civil war break out – irrespective of who wins on Novmeber 5, 2024? Guess who's the wild card? What the Orange Jesus himeself, Donald John Trump

Over the years I have joked about my age, pretending to be over 90 or even over 100. Were someone else to do that, this cynic would suggest it was essentially some kind of rather sad displacement measure by someone who was not quite as happy about growing older as he or she (but more probably he) might care to admit. However, here I shall come clean.

In twenty days, on November 21, I shall turn 75. But as this blog entry is not about me and shall explain why I mention my age: in my 75 years – or better about 60 as like most people did was not much aware of the wider world until I was in my early teens – I have seen many changes and heard about many more which occurred before I was born.

Over those years I also became accustomed to the standard media hyperbole which assures us that this gadget / this event / this revolutionary loo roll / this new leader in Somewhere or Other / this groundbreaking new law / this new what-fuck-ever is ‘probably the most significant in the past fifty years. And, of course, it was and is not, not by a long chalk.

I’m a great believer in the French notion of plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose or as Prince Tancredi had it in Tomasi di Lampedusa novel The Leopard Everything must change for everything to remain the same. That last doesn’t quite imply the same thing, but it is related.

So pretty much in for us pampered paps in the Western World, pretty much everything has remained the same, despite ‘changes’.

I have lived through the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Nixon Watergate scandal – which, by the way, I’m now beginning to believe was by far not quite what it seemed to be and that, ironically, Tricky Dicky himself might have been taken for a ride – and much else.

Then there was more than thirty years ago the collapse of the Soviet Union and its attendant satellite client states, the evolution of the internet and so on. You get the picture.

Certainly, many of these developments seemed significant at the time but in retrospect – and as we have become more accustomed to a new dimension to reality as in ‘going online’ and using a mobile / cell phone is now standard for pretty much all of us – that ‘significance’ has somewhat faded and much ‘remained the same’.

Over the past two centuries, however, there has been much which has not just remained the same, but which few saw coming or even suspected was on the horizon. One example might be the First World War or as was at the time The Great War, so-called because no one expected another ‘great war’ to follow on its heels just over twenty years later.

And, I suggest, the coming US presidential election next Tuesday, November 2024, might prove to be an exception to the rule that all ‘significant’ changes become less significant as time passes. Could America slowly then quite quickly fall into civil war? And outlandish suggestion, of course: don’t be so bloody mad, you lunatic – of course not! And I agree (but . . .)

. . .

The choice America faces in four days is between electing former President Donald Trump and the current US Vice-president Kamala Harris as its new president. Trump is – I have to say nominally – ‘a Republican’ and is standing for the Republican party (or what is left of it now). Harris a Democrat. According to ‘the polls’, the candidates are neck-and-neck and frankly who will be inaugurated in January next is anyone’s guess.

In my 75 years there have been sixteen presidential elections and the first I was aware of was the campaign fought between John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when I was almost ten years aold. All US presidential elections have been fought hard and dirty and each side of the battle has predicted dire consequences if its man (and in 2016 woman, Hillary Clinton, its woman) was not elected. But this 2024 election is in a different league entirely, in many ways.

For one thing in the 2020 election between the then incumbent president Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s VP when Obama was in the White House, had very curious outcome: Biden won by a tiny margin in that he won the votes of the most delegates to the electoral college, although Trump won more voes nationally.

But that isn’t what was notable (and by 2020 is was not unique, either). What distinguished that election from every preceding US election was that Trump point-blank refused to accept the result.

Instead he declared that ‘the election had been stolen’ and that there had been ‘widespread voter fraud’ which had rigged the result against him.

This was unprecedented: despite previous electoral confusion, notably in the fight between George W Bush and Al Gore in 2020, one of the closest in American history when the issue of contention was whether votes in Florida which had fallen foul of a mechanical voting machine (the ‘hanging chads’ controversy) but also allegations that some votes intended for Gore were misdirected to a third candidate.

In the event the issue went to the Supreme Court which considered the various issues involced and decided 5-4 that Bush had won the election, even though Gore had, nationally, won more of the popular vote. And Gore graciously accepted the decision. ‘Grace’ is certainly not a trait in the Trump personality make-up.

. . .

I shan’t get into the US Electoral College system, but frankly it is now wholly outdated and has in recent years has caused ever more problems and is in dire need of reform. But given how it came about and evolved and the deep-seated political antagonisms which have riven the US such reform is less likely than the Pope entering into a civil partnership with one of his cardinals. So like it or not America is still obliged to live with its inane nature.

Who gets how many Electoral College votes is crucial. Each state is allocated as many Electoral College votes as it has senators. And even more crucial is that about five or six so-called ‘swing states’ and who is awarded their electoral college votes determines who will enter the White House.

Some states are either solid Republican or Democrat, but the ‘swing states’ to and fro, their ultimate result depending on the outcome of the vote in just three or four of of their counties.

Traditionally, and however bitter an election campaign was fought, at some point the losing candidate will ring his opponent and concede. This did not happen in 2020.

As I point out the crux of the danger here – and if you accept my outrageous suggestion that if things get really bad, the US could find itself in a civil war – Trump simply does not play by the rules. This, too, was unprecedented, but it got even worse.

Here I should declare my partisanship: I think Donald Trump is a nine-dollar bill to whom I would not even give the time of day. The man is what we Brits call ‘a toe-rag’. He has been convicted of fraud and in a separate fraud case has been ordered to pay more than half a billion dollars in ‘disgorgement’. He has been adjudged guilty of rape by ‘finger-fucking’ a woman in a department store changing room, and in my book he is not only a crook but a despicable human being.

Others in the US reading this might well take the opposite view, and I accept that they entitled to it. Others still might even agree with me about Trump’s very dodgy character and morals, but, for a number of reasons, not least issues on which the 2024 election is being fought, they might still choose to vote for him not Harris because he is the Republican candidate.

And whether or not Trump is elected the US’s 47th president and what it’s consequences might be is what this blog entry is all about: from where I stand a new Trump presidency would be a disaster, not just for the US but for much of the world given the economic role the US economy plays in global affairs. Trump strikes me as a man who understands as much about economics as I do Han Chinese, which is nothing at all.

. . .

The 50 odd days after the 202o election were frankly very unsettling and confusing, not least because despite America’s smug boast of being ‘the leader of the free world’ it did not know how to deal with development. Then there was the problem that Trump’s behaviour was downright bizarre, and none of it in a good way.

Even before the November 2020 election, perhaps suspecting he might lose or simply as a precaution, he began insisting that if he did not win, it could only be because of fraud by the authorities. Pertinently, he never specified which authorities, just the ‘they are were to get him’.

In that way he was already – and not so subtly – laying the ground for what in the event became his post-election strategy: that fraud lay behind Biden’s victory and that he election was stolen from him.

He did not produce any solid evidence at all, and what ‘evidence’ he did produce was investigated and dismissed by the courts. All 60-odd cases he brought before the courts were dismissed, every last one of them.

But curiously that did not matter: his cry that the election was stolen was enthusiastically taken up by his supporters, and when he made a metaphorical call to arms to congregate in Washington to ‘stop the steal, several thousand turned up, their ‘protest’ got out of hand and they smashed their way in to Congress to attempt to delay certification of the election result by VP Mike Pence.

Shamefully, yet again ‘the leader of the free world’ was had no idea as to how to handle it and in practice did fuck-all.

All this has been well-documented, and it is redundant to repeat chapter and verse here. What is pertinent is that Trump is once again insisting that if he is not elected next Tuesday, it can only be because of fraud and that the election had been rigged. Yet it gets even worse.

Trump has repeatedly been asked to confirm that he will acknowledge the result of the election, and he has repeatedly refused to do so. This is unprecedented – as far as I know – in US history and worryingly America seems paralysed by Trump’s tactics and strategy: they do not know what to do. To be blunt, they are clueless.

This is where – whatever the outcome of the election – America could find itself in a dire constitutional crisis, and despite the outlandish theme of what I write, it would be better if I were completely wrong than that there should be any traction at all in what I suggets.

The Republican dominated US Supreme Court has already ruled that a US president would be immune from criminal prosecution for any ‘presidential’ acts and decisions.

In the legal preamble to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the question was broached – in all seriousness – as to whether the US President would be liable for criminal prosecution if he ordered the assassination – for which, let’s again be blunt, read ‘murder’ – of a political opponent. The answer seemed to be ‘no, he would not, he would have immunity’.

In that one Supreme Court decision America degenerated in an instant from the – supposed – fount of all democracy to the status of a totalitarian state. So far the court’s decision has not had to be tested. If Trump’s becomes the 47th president, he will have criminal immunity for ‘presidential acts’.

At that point all the subseqent arguing about what might be, or better have been, a ‘presidential act’ would be crucial but de facto redundant. We have seen in the past, in 1930s Germany and later elsewhere and most recently in Viktor Orban’s Hungary how democratic institutions and their attendant support structures – a free media and an independent judiciary – can every swiftly be neutralised then demolished unless they are constantly sustained.

One might argue as some do that Trump and his backers have already destroyed the neutrality of the Supreme Court. The only sanction the legislature and thus ‘the people’ have over the Supreme Court is financial: funds could be stopped.

But however ‘serious’ in theory, that is no sanction whatsoever in practice. Like it or not, rather too many pieces are now in place for Trump – and I’ll repeat ‘his backers’, because I think they are the brains behind all this, not Trump – to behave dictatorially.

. . .

The outcome of the 2024 can be only one of two possibilities: eventually either Trump or Harris is inaugurated as the US’s 47th President.

If Trump is ruled to have lost, it is more than likely that he will simply again refuse to accept the result and again call on his supporters to ‘rise up’. He is already reported to laying his plans to cry foul if he loses.

And judging by the response on January 6, 2021, thousands will respond. And what happens then?

If, on the other hand, Trump is eventually declared to have won the election, he will be free to act precisely as he likes.

Here we should remind ourselves that the number of military personnel, law agents and police who might have voted for Trump will be unknown. Of these many might feel as did General Mark Milley that his loyalty is to the US constitution not to the president, in this case Trump.

Others might not agree and when, say, called upon by Trump not to oppose any violent actions by his supporters, they might well decide that their loyalty is to the man they voted for. We simply do not know. Furthermore such a scenario has never been tested.

If Trump wins, what might be the reaction of the losers? We should remind ourselves that gun ownership is as widespread among those who identify as Democrats as Republicans. Will they peacefully accept the transfer of power to Trump?

Or might they declare that what was sauce for the goose should also be sauce for the gander and themselves now join the protests, many of which could turn violent?

If those protests did turn violent and if – as Trump has suggested he would be entitled to do and as he would not shy away from doing – he called on the US Army to repress them and those being repressed then shot back, it would all get seriously out of hand, and a new civil war could not be ruled out.

That is, of course, fanciful, but what is not fanciful is that the likelihood can be completely ruled out.

And American friend of mine, rather bemused by my then patchier knowledge of the US, once advised me, broadly, to view the 50 US states as ‘different countries’. They are, of course, not different countries: what he meant was that they all have their own traditions, often their own version of particular laws, their distinct cultures and so on.

It is this, for example, how jealously the different states guard their difference, which would be one of the many stumbling blocks in any attempt to reform the electoral colleges system.

So we might ask: do all the inhabitants of each unique state feel loyalty more to their state than the union? Or is it the other way round?

What if a staunchly ‘liberal’ as in Democrat state – California, say – felt it had been outplayed, especially given what it regarded as the partisan nature of the Supreme Court, and decided slowly to loosen its federal ties. What if a now powerful Trump administration retaliated by declaring martial law in that state? What if then the national guard of that state took up arms again the federal forces?

One so far accepted law is that in extremis federal law is always superior to state law. What if a state declared it now longer intended abiding by that agreement?

OK, we could carry on the ‘what ifs’ till kingdom come, but the point is that given the pronouncements, the publicly declared intentions by Donald Trump and the, it seems, real hatred between the MAGA republicans and the Democrats, such what ifs are not longer quite as fanciful.

. . .

Russia will be hoping for a Trump victory given his vow to withdraw military support and funding from Ukraine, and it seems Putin is getting a tad desperate.

The conventional wisdom holds, is more hopeful that Harris will prevail: for trade reasons it would far prefer a calm relationship with the US, steady as you go, despite the sanctions imposed by Biden, and given Trump’s wacky promise to impose severe sanctions on all US imports (although not just Chinese, it seems China would rather not have Trump as prezzy thank you very much.