America, your country is now a fucking mess so do something – we don’t want the rest of the world to be dragged into your lunacy!

I have no idea whether you now reading this are from Asia, Europe, Africa, an Aussie or an American. And if you are American, I have not idea whether you support Trump and voted for him last November or whether you think not only does he have several screws loose but is worse than clever and dangerous – as Stalin was: Trump is stupid and dangerous (as the man with the funny moustache was whose ‘Empire of a thousand days’ – das tausendjähriges Reich – lasted just 12 years). Ironically, as far as that is concerned it doesn’t matter either way.

I have already posted several blog entries making it clear that I think Donald J Trump is a $9 bill who should not get the time of day from anyone and who is bad news all round, and not least the millions who voted for him, so there seems little point in repeating all that.

But what I haven’t written about is the odd situation that – as far as I can see – in America there is an elephant in the room which everyone is ignoring. And that – the head in the sand – is far more troubling than even the fat orange fraud occupying the White House and the damage he will do to his own country. Patriot? Really?

The elephant in the room is this: the United States now has as its president – it’s legitimately elected president, and that feature of the matter is pertinent – a man who is a convicted felon, whose sexual assault on magazine journalist E Jean Carroll has been adjudged to be tantamount to rape, a man who, most probably knowingly, inspired insurrection and so on. But none of that is new.

The question is, and I’m sure it is being debated in some parts, not least in the US, but which oddly seems to get no public showing: how on earth did such a ridiculous situation come about? How on earth did such an apology for a man get within 1,000 miles of the White House, a man who, for example when he was first president, had to be told that ‘the Balkans’ were not the same as ‘the Baltics’?

And you don’t have to be a Democrat to think that: the GOP is full of staunch conservatives who are in despair at what Trump is doing and think he is a ‘fucking moron’ (© Rex Tillerson).

If, of course, you are one of those who ‘like what Trump says, he gives it too us straight’ and that ‘he will make America great again’ and don’t believe, as I do, that he us full of 24-carat bullshit, I am the one you will insist is ‘an apology for a man’.

Well, that’s as maybe, but I certainly fancy my chances of coming out way ahead of Trump in any morality beauty parade.

. . .

The essence of the problem facing America – and I suggest it is not at all too dramatic or pretentious to describe it as an existential problem – is that Trump has tens of millions of supporters, tens of millions of folk who we can only assume are as straight-up as everyone else. So he does have a lot of folk backing him, although despite Dumpy Trump’s crowing and bragging, he did not enjoy a ‘landslide election’ of any kind last November. And that claim needs some unpacking.

In terms of ‘electoral college’ votes, a case might be made – as does Trump – that his election was ‘landslide’: because then the votes were tallied up in different states and the different state electors were divvied up, at the finish line he won 312 of the electoral college votes, 86 more than his opponent, Kamala Harris.

But hold on: the crucial detail here is ‘the electoral college’ and in terms of how many of the popular votes he won, it was a very narrow victory if not close run, though given the electoral college set-up pretty much every US election in recent times has been close run on the popular votes metric.

Nationwide Trump won 77,303,573 votes with Harris taking 75,019,257 of the popular vote on a turnout of 63.9% of those eligible to vote). That is certainly not a landslide in anyone’s book, unless you are state-registered fantasist

 

like Trump of which, apparently, in MAGA land there seem to be quite a few. The bottom line is that Trump won the White House because of America’s decidedly wacky electoral college system

That 238-year-old electoral college system is archaic, hugely flawed and as the man once said ‘not fit for purpose’. You can even hear it creaking every four years from this side of the Atlantic, in cosy Old Blighty. But although that is not news to anyone and many – though not all – Americans agree the electoral college needs root-and-branch reform, it would be easier to establish total harmony in the Middle East in perpetuity than get agreement on how – even whether – to reform: getting the 50 US states, all intensely jealous of many aspects of their autonomy is seemingly impossible.

. . .

In the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia it was at first proposed that Americans should elect their leader (i.e. the President) by a direct popular vote. This was rejected, partly because the mover and shakers in Philadelphia writing the constitution were not keen on the ordinary man in the street (or as then was the ordinary man in the field).

There was also additional concern from the southern, slave-owning states where almost 90% of the five states population was black and didn’t have a vote. Thus the number of voters they had would be far fewer than in those states in the north which was equal in population size and so the north would always dominate the union.

So the compromise was the electoral college system whereby each state was allocated a certain number of electors and the five southern states were allocated a disproportionate number of electors given the size of their population.

Whether or not it was noticed that under that arrangement the boot was very much on the other foot and the south would dominate the union does not seem to be recorded. And unsurprisingly, for the next fifty-odd years the US president came from the southern states given that part of America’s electoral clout

Since then there have been two constitutional amendments to sort out this and that, but the number of proposed reforms – more than 700 over the past 250 years – highlights how dissatisfied many Americans are with the system.

In brief, Donald Trump can stick his ‘landslide election victory’ where the sun don’t shine: it is 24-carat nonsense.

. . .

All that, though, is a side issue to the problem which dare not speak its name: that even were Trump to die tomorrow or otherwise leave the stage and perhaps deflate the MAGA movement, the political sentiments in America which sustained the rise to power of a man who is akin to a lunatic would still be be present.

And as eggs is eggs another similar cynical character – and quite possibly far cleverer man or woman than Trump – would step up to tap into those feelings.

Thus the elephant in the room is that American men and women in their tens of millions are happy to condone rule by a man who is a contradiction from every angle.

So how did that situation arise? I ask because I am certainly not suggesting that all those tens of millions are terminally stupid or plain evil: a great many will want the best for their country as the next voter.

They pledges their allegiance to Trump and gave him their vote because he said the right things: he promised ‘to beat inflation and bring down prices on day one’, but now (as I write) we are on day sixteen of his regim and the signs are his ill-advised tariffs will push up inflation and prices.

However vacuous and insincere his slogan Make America Great Again might be, it did and still does resonate with a great many Americans, though frankly, given America’s economic clout I’m at a loss to call to mind a time when America, more or less, was not great. But that is beside the point.

Similarly with the angst he is stirring up about immigrants: yes, there are a great many immigrants living in the US who did not enter the country legally, apparently as many as eleven million. Unfortunately, a vast number of them are so well-integrated that in many industries they have become crucial and those industries would be in a jam if they were no longer available. This is particularly true in the agricultural industry in the states to the west and southwest.

Just days ago I read a report – the usual caveat, of course, that we should not necessarily believe everything we read in the papers – that when in California and at Trump’s instigation Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers set about rounding up whatever illegal immigrants they could find, on orange farms where the picking was done my illegal immigrants on the first day 25% of pickers did not show up for work, and on the following day the figure rose to 75%.

They are scared to be caught. Meanwhile, the orange grove farmers are going spare because their fruit is remaining unpicked.

Then there the question that these immigrants, partly no doubt because they are keen to keep a low profile don’t object to doing the dirty jobs good ol’ patriotic Americans feel is beneath them. Well, get rid of the immigrants and someone will have to do them. It seems ‘joined-up thinking’ is not in the Trump MAGA playbook.

Several years ago, the magazine the Economist organised a survey in Britain about ‘the number of immigrants’ and how people felt about immigration.

The odd result was that opposition to immigration and condemnation of the then government’s immigration policy was highest in areas with almost no immigrants at all. And those who did live in those – quite affluent – areas were professionals who rubbed along quite well with their neighbours. On the other hand in cities where a large number of immigrants did live, there was not a great deal of enmity to them.

At least 80 million of its people are prepared to accept the kind of violence we saw live on our TV screens on January 6, 2021; that at least 80 million people are prepared to believe that black is white, that ‘the election in was

 

An American patriot exercises his constitutional right on January 6, 2021, to smash his way into Congress to disrupt the peaceful handover of power

stolen’, that Donald Trump is ‘the victim of “lawfare” and is as innocent and pure as the driven snow’; the list would go on, but you reading this are familiar with it.

The elephant in the room which is studiously ignored by the United States of America it that this state of affairs did not develop from overnight, or from one week to the next, or from on year to the next or even from one decade to the nest.

There is something very rotten in the United States of America yet no one, but no one is prepared talk about it. Trump has been guilty of many crimes, but perhaps the most egregious because as supposed Republican who professes to champion law and order, he pardoned all those convicted of any crime committed in the January 6 invasion of Congress.

Some of the crimes were compartatively minor, rather a lot were violent. Trump pardoned them all: he had continually described those jailed as ‘hostages’ so one wonders why rather a lot of those hostages admitted violent acts on January 6.

Pertinent is that at least 78 million Americans are quite happy to accept Trump’s hypocrisy and see nothing wrong with what in less blinkered eyes was an insurrection. Yes, it is now that bad in America.There is a very long, very broad yellow streak in the US and it will only grow longer and broader if it is not addressed

I might end on a gratuitous gibe, but one which from these shores seems less fantastical than might at first appear: what else can expect in a nation where millions insist on their right ‘to bear arms’ so that shooting up a nearby elementary school and killing fifteen young children is now something of a weekend sport.

America: do something before you go the way of the dodo!

Think 2024 was bad? Breaking news: 2025 could get a lot worse if Lady Luck doesn’t smile on the world. And from what I hear Lady Luck has taken the decade off

There was a comment by someone or other in one of the Times Radio interviews (many of which are available on Youtube) which, for me, sums up why after 80 years of comparative peace, the world might now be in for a colossal and very unpleasant shake-up.

Peace? Well, the relevant word above is ‘comparative’, and certainly when we think of the Congo, Libya, Vietnam, Biafra, Malaya, Cyprus, Korea, the Gulf and so on, there has been precious little peace for those living ‘locally’ in these past 80 years.

But, ‘locally’ is the second relevant word: however awful each war was, it was always ‘local.

What the Times Radio interviewee (I think it was Phillip Ingram) pointed out was that the huge danger facing the world – except, possibly, South America which tends go its own merry way, though it, too, has its troubles – is that the current crop of ‘local’ danger hotspots might ‘merge into one global hotspot’ (though cv above South America).

What do we have? Well, as far as war is concerned there is, at present, Ukraine and the Middle East. But a growing danger is the indisputable rise of and the indisputable growing support for the the far-right in Europe: in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and, if Nige’s Reform does hi-jack the Tory Party much as a virus can hi-jack a body, contentiously even Britain.

Hungary already has it’s own – in his own cynical words – ‘illiberal democrat’ in Viktor Orban (below right with his pal Vladimir Putin). Slovakia and Georgia are heading down that road, and there is active, if as yet reasonably

dormant and ineffective, far-rightism in Italy, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Poland.

One of the attractions of those far-rightists for the many ‘ordinary voter’ is that they are vociferously against, not just immigration, but immigrants who have already settled in their countries. And like all authoritarians those far-rightists like to play on ‘people’s fears’.

I have the usual and necessary respect for my fellow individuals, but something happens to individuals when they coagulate into ever larger groups: they become very stupid.

To be blunt, I have no respect at all for ‘the people’ or as it all too often manifests itself ‘the mob’. Sadly, ‘the mob’ thinks in monochrome – if it thinks at all – and is far too easily led. Furthermore, ‘the people’ is almost wholly an artificial construct which can be used to mean pretty much whatever one likes depending one what you are selling.

More obvious are the dangers in the Middle East: Iran is domestic pressure from a younger generation fed up with the old ’uns and its stooges in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza are getting their comeuppance. We do not have a clue how matters will pan out in Syria.  None.

 

And backed into a corner, Iran might choose to act is desperate ways. It does not, we think, yet have a working nuclear bomb, but it does have the necessary for a dirty bomb.

Furthermore there is the problem of Israel or – a far better way of putting it and more to the point – of its government of right-wingers, far-right-wingers and monsters.

I have and will not make a secret of my initial admiration for how Israel stood up for itself but since October 2023 increasingly Netanyahu (below right) has completely lost it: there’s ‘standing up for yourself’ and ‘how you stand up for yourself’, and the government – which must be distinguished from the people of Israel and, most

pertinently ‘the Jews – long, long, long ago overstepped the mark. Morally it is now on the same level as Hamas.

Putin, too, is in a corner, to put it mildly. And as I’m sure we have all heard over these past few years from someone or other, when in a corner Vlad gets ever more dangerous: he does NOT like giving up and it might seem now he has very little to lose.

Even if ‘after talks’ (and why should Ukraine surrender territory?) ‘the war ends’ that will not be the end of the troubles he will face by any measure.

Finally, there is Trump: the soft-bellied, blinkered, cuddly liberals out there – of which I am usually one, by the way – like to preach that Donny ‘likes to shake things up, he ‘likes to see how others react’, he ‘won’t do most of the things he has promised to do’ and so on. Really?

That thinking is flawed if only because it assumes Trump is rational, that he has an understanding of geopolitics, that he actually does understand economics and does not really believe his own barfly bore interpretations of ‘how things work’. I suggest and fear that he does not.

Ingram (if it was he) also pointed out that if the endgame in Ukraine sees the conflict ending with Putin and Russia acquiring a sizeable chunk of the south-east of the country, there might be ‘concern’ in the West, but after a few months it will die down. As the Arabs say, the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

His point was that Xi Jinping (below) might make the following calculation: take Taiwan now in the aftermath of attention being on the ‘war ending in Ukraine’, settle for the resultant global uproar and possibly hit to China’s

economy but that eventually ‘the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on’.

If Xi did move on Taiwan, what would America do? Trump has vowed he does not want to get involved in any more ‘foreign wars’ and might pass as ‘well, that’s Taiwan’s problem’.

Even far brighter folk in the US than Donny might counsel caution about getting involved as they would not know what outcome they are seeking – what’s in it for America? And Xi will know that and it will be part of his calculations.

Thus 2025 might seem to be taking on a rather bleaker hue than did previous years, however bleak the hue was in previous years.

As Ingram says ‘things are bad, but they would get a damn sight worse if all those ‘local problems’ merged into on big problem, rather was happened in the 1930s.