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
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.
