The Death of Trump

Trump’s a scared man not a strongman but this makes him more dangerous than ever.

Last week there was much speculation about Donald Trump’s health and some unkind people were enthused by the idea that he might be dead. It turned out that, like Mark Twain, these rumours had been somewhat exaggerated. But in many ways Trump has died politically this summer as the tsunami of sleaze and absurdity has overcome his regimes faltering hand on the tiller of the good ship America.

First we have the repression of the Epstein Files which seem to appear and then disappear according to whim. As a hundred survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s behaviour gathered on Wednesday morning to speak to the world about their experiences and demand justice they were drowned out by a series of military flyovers many thought had been ordered to do so. The American writer Rebecca Solnit has written [[The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy ]: “Mike Johnson, the House speaker, adjourned Congress earlier this summer to prevent votes on measures relating to Epstein and thereby protect Donald Trump. As the New Republic reported on Tuesday, “House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full.” Johnson’s main concern in this (and pretty much everything else he does) is to protect Trump. He is not alone. Jamie Raskin said in July: “They’d conscripted a thousand FBI agents to be working around the clock 24 hours going through a hundred thousand Epstein documents and told them to flag any mentions of Donald Trump … This might be one of the most massive cover-ups in the history of the United States unfolding before our eyes.”

The significance of the Epstein Files disappearance is not that it reinforces the reality of Trump’s war on women, that it confirms his crass authoritarianism, or that it signifies his abuse of power (both personal and political). The significance is that it hit home with his MAGA following, many of whom wait on tenterhooks for the next dispatch from QAnon and millions of which supported Trump because they believed there was a cover-up of pedophilia in elite circles. Now, faced with an actual cover-up of pedophilia in elite circles, the penny has dropped. The swamp remains undrained. America is not going to be great ‘again’. In fact, as Michel Bauwens and others have noted what we are witnessing is “the end of the 100-year hegemonic cycle of American power.”

Second, Trump’s whole brand is centred around his ‘strength’ – whether its his overbearing repulsive sexual boasting, his ardour for Putin and other dictators – itself with an interesting homoerotic subplot – or his attempts to humiliate opponents (remember him stalking Hillary Clinton on stage) such as Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But this construct is faltering badly as his cognitive decline and illness is increasingly obvious for all to see. Trump’s need to project power is crucial for him, and more importantly crucial for his followers.

Third, Trump’s catastrophic mismanagement of the economy has led to comedy moments, like his sacking the Bureau of Labour Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer for bringing him bad news on jobs. His behaviour hovers between Tin-Pot dictator and toddler, but the consequences of his behaviour are already devastating. As the economics editor Heather Stewart notes: “The idea that before Trump arrived on the scene, free market US capitalism was motoring along unchallenged is misleading, but the pace at which he is crushing its remaining norms is extraordinary.” She goes on:

“Whatever emerges from another three and a half years of this maelstrom is likely to be unrecognisable as the US economic model of recent decades.”

“Its destruction has not happened overnight. The days were already long gone when the US, as the world’s undisputed economic superpower, could export free market, financialised capitalism worldwide.”

“After the 2008 crash, the conditions for which were created in Wall Street boardrooms, any moral or practical claim the US had to offer an economic example to other nations evaporated.

As the turmoil rippled out through the global economy, and the US government responded by bailing out large chunks of its financial sector, the lie of laissez-faire was laid bare.”

“The crisis exposed the risks of turbocharged capitalism to countries outside the US, too – not least in the former Soviet bloc – that had been advised to adopt the model wholesale.”

As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes put it in their compelling polemic The Light that Failed, “confidence that the political economy of the west was a model for the future of mankind had been linked to the belief that western elites knew what they were doing. Suddenly it was obvious that they didn’t.”

Trump’s tariff deals are disastrous, not just economically but politically. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Friday ruled in a 7-4 decision that Trump cannot legally use his presidential emergency powers to impose import taxes on goods from nearly every single country. It upholds a May decision by a federal trade court in New York.

This reinforces his image as a weak and unstable leader, dabbling in chaotic mismanagement and appalling optics (such as the vision of someone throwing things out of the White House windows).

The summer ended for Trump with this tirade by Oliver Kornetzke which has gone viral and distils much of how the world views Trump:

“Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul— all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair.”

“Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been— arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshipped like gospel. It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul— it sh*ts out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.”

The Department of War

But if Kornetzke’s eulogy has hit home, and Trump’s faltering brand descends further into chaos, he is arguably more dangerous than ever. His regime may have felt the summer falling apart but it also has lurched even further to the right, almost continuously foreshadowing the threat of martial law. Yesterday Trump signalled his intention to send troops to Chicago to ramp up the deportation of illegal immigrants – as he has done in Los Angeles and Washington DC.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’. Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” This unhinged remarks follows him renaming the Pentagon the ‘Department of War’.

“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, wrote responding to Mr Trump’s post.

“This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”

In the worst case of life imitating art, it’s been revealed that Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale has been banned in Edmonton, Alberta – under direction from their provincial government. It’s another sign that the alt-right can’t be contained within borders and that Trump’s movement can outlive him, even if he goes down in the flames of his own absurdity.