This is not About Donald Trump
Yangon, Myanmar, 22 September 2015
Salaroche


Everybody thought that the ringleader of the spectacle presently unfolding at the Republican circus was just another wealthy clown out to regale his ego under the limelight of the national arena, but time has revealed Donald Trump as an animal trainer who instead of taming the ugly instincts usually lurking at the heart of the Republican ideology is just stoking them and rerouting them toward his own political goals.

Nobody had ever imagined that the wealthy clown could actually understand his Republican audience as well as to rouse them to the levels he has mustered thus far, just as many would not have thought that such a large section of Anglo-Saxon America could harbor in their hearts such levels of irrational resentment, not only against other ethnic and religious groups, but against their president as well. 

But the Trump phenomenon is not really about Trump; it is about the people who follow him.  If American men really disapproved of the Donald’s contempt for women, for example, national polls would have placed him at or near the bottom of the Republican candidate list a few weeks ago. If Americans in general still held some respect for the office of the President of the United States they would have booed the Donald out of the stage just a few days ago in Rochester, N. H., when he failed to correct someone publicly claiming that Barack Obama was a Muslim. But they don’t and they didn’t.

There is something particularly ominous going on in America today. We have recently seen incompetent arrogant individuals gain the White House in the form of G. W. Bush, so it does not sound like news when we watch immature Republican voters getting irresponsibly emotional once again, but the prospect of having an unpredictable looney of Trump’s caliber sitting in the Oval Office is a scary scenario that only shows how little have the American people learnt from their mistakes of the past.

Things have been changing fast in the world lately, much faster and in ways that nobody could have foreseen just a few years ago. No doubt a paradigm shift has been gradually unfolding since 9/11, and it involves a palpable decrease of rationality levels in the American population. Foreshadowing that shift was an emblematic conversation I had with a Political Science professor just a few days after that event, a guy with a double PhD from Harvard.

In a complete reversal of his customary rational thinking, he told me that “9/11 had awakened the sleeping giant”, meaning that, in his view, the United States would then go out and show the world its mettle and set the world straight again as it had done with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during WWII. “But there is no defined enemy line out there”, I said, “there is really no clear enemy in sight”.

No doubt the professor was only one among millions of gun-ho Americans swept away in the irrational wave of patriotism that followed in the wake of 9/11 and no doubt he and his ilk were all equally mistaken in falling like panicky children for the Bush administration’s immoral hoax. “Where did his Harvarite double-PhD rigorous intellectual training go?” I thought. It all went down the drain of patriotic absurdity.

As a result of the utterly stupid and ill-conceived US invasion of Iraq, American intelligence agencies were largely discredited and the US armed forces fell in disrepute in the eyes of the rest of the world, not to mention the shame the American press showered upon itself in failing at each turn to bring the Bush administration to task for its poorly concocted delusional casus belli.

Many Americans still cling fast to the idea that Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs. They have never been able to accept the fact that they were taken for the ride of the century by the Bush administration.  Bush et al intentionally fooled a good majority of the American population and now it seems that such fissure in the people’s perception of reality continues to widen as the world keeps getting much more complex than ever before.

The President of the United States threatens retaliation if the Syrian government uses chemical weapons on its own people and when the Syrian population is doused with deadly chemicals the United States does nothing. China tells all airline companies to report to them whenever they fly the international skies along Chinese shores and the US government advises all US airlines to follow the Chinese orders. The Russian president Vladimir Putin takes over the entire Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea and the United States barely imposes travel bans and banking restrictions on some of Putin’s friends.

Meanwhile the American people helplessly watch as their country’s glories of the past vanish like smoke into thin air in the present. The US is on the brink of being downgraded to the second slot in the world economy, the Department of Homeland Security is in a constant state of insecurity and in a justifiable constant state of paranoia, Muslim extremism, the sworn enemy of America, is running rampant in the Levant and the Fed’s interest rates are near zero as the US economy remains in a fragile state.

In a few words, 9/11 seems to have put an end to American rationality and pragmatism and seems to have put American overall supremacy in serious doubt. That event brought about two disastrous American wars, one of them totally uncalled for, and seven years later generated a financial debacle like it had not been seen in three quarters of a century. Recklessness seems to have toppled rationality and religious superstition seems to be upending pragmatism. 

Kim Davis, an elected clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, feels entitled to disobey a Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage egoistically and arrogantly claiming that the ruling goes against her religious beliefs. When she is jailed for contempt of law, Mike Huckabee, a Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States, declares that Christianity is under attack in America, while the rest of the Republican candidates demur to questions on the issue. Meanwhile, a good amount of commentary on the media praises Davis’ stance as courageous and principled.

It is not difficult to find amusement in the Davis episode. It is widely assumed that the United States is a Republic founded on laws, not a Theocracy based on religious dogmas and superstitions, yet now there seems to be a growing number of Americans that would gladly substitute the Bible for the Constitution.

Given the present state of affairs, the “land of the free” looks increasingly like “the land of the fools” where African Americans are constantly murdered by the police forces in what could be easily perceived as some sort of slow-motion final solution while Latinos are demonized in Republican rhetoric as if they were Austrian Jews right after the Anschluss.

And riding on top of that senseless wave of events there comes Donald Trump, the unbridled champion of discontented Americans, the man who speaks truth to the masses, the next Pied Piper who would lead the country into its next disastrous chapter, the affluent charmer of hearts who love to hate, the messiah of all Americans who no longer feel their country is number one and need a savior to guide them in their fight against the culprits for their misfortune. i.e., blacks, Latinos, Asians, non-Christians, the poor and all of those other “losers” who don’t think, behave, or look like them.

But Donald Trump didn’t materialize out of thin air. He is actually a finalized product of American capitalism: Arrogant, loud, self-righteous, nearsighted, stubborn, unrepentant, and that is why he is leading the Republican pack, that is why people favor him over the rest.

Donald Trump is not a kink in the American fabric; his rhetoric is actually a permanent fixture in the American cultural landscape. He is leading the group of Republican contenders to the presidency because he dares to say out loud what many other Americans only dare to say quietly while in the company of their most trusted friends. The Donald is rude and simplistic, he is not politically correct, and that is why many Americans like him.

No doubt Donald Trump is at the moment the most popular topic of conversation in the world’s media, but the issue at hand is not really him. If the irresponsible lunacies spewing out of his mouth did not resonate in the hearts of those who listen to him the Donald would have been relegated to an ephemeral political aberration a few months ago, but he is still regularly on the front page of most international news outlets, which means that his appeal extends beyond this political campaign. 

At the heart of the Trump phenomenon is not whatever ideas the Donald might express in public, but how much those ideas find echo in the American hearts. By himself, Donald Trump is just a wealthy narcissistic individual. As the frontrunner of the Republican candidates he is a worrisome liability for the Republican Party and as a candidate for the presidency of the United States he is a harbinger of very unsavory things to come to the American society and a general threat to the stability of the world in general.

Do not be amazed if Donald Trump goes on to win the Republican nomination and do not feel shocked if later on he wins the national elections. Nobody can predict the future, so it is all in the hands of the American voters. But watch out because, after all is said and done, people usually get the leaders they deserve.

Salaroche