PRELIMINARY judgement on any new US administration usually involves waiting for at least 100 days before holding it to account. That arbitrary measure seems particularly inappropriate in the context of the revived Trumpocracy.
On the 75th day after the formal resurrection of Donald Trump, hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — of Americans poured into the streets to demonstrate their resentment against a variety of measures, ranging from sweeping tariffs against almost every nation (and a few uninhabited islands), to expanding curbs on free speech, the depletion of the federal workforce, the incarceration and threatened deportation of students for opposing Israel’s genocide, and the cruel immigration crackdown that, inter alia, is filling prisons in El Salvador.
Trump has been a big fan of tariffs for decades, but restricted them chiefly to China during his first term. This time, it’s some of the world’s poorest nations that have been hit hardest. The idea is to ensure that any country exporting goods to the US must import an equivalent amount of American products. Manufacturing in the US, mind you, has declined for several decades, and its working class has suffered most. A substantial proportion of it opted for Trump because the Democrats — under Clinton, Obama and Biden — offered no viable alternative.
Trump wouldn’t have emerged as a feasible alternative in 2016 had the Obama administration not managed to conclusively dash the hopes it had nurtured in 2008. And he might not have re-emerged eight years later had the Democrats not relied upon a superannuated veteran of the establishment to safeguard its dubious interests. Joe Biden’s limitations were evident long before he demonstrated his unsuitability for office in a presidential debate with Trump. Not all leading Democrats hailed Kamala Harris as the alternative, but other options were no longer available.
In both 2016 and 2020, the Democratic establishment had come down hard on Bernie Sanders for seeking the party’s presidential nomination. Both times, many Democratic voters begged to differ, and in 2016 some of them saw Trump as a better option than Hillary Clinton. Four years later, the supposed anti-Trump triumphed, but Biden’s 36-year record in the Senate was pretty dismal, and he won few laurels as president. His legacy will include whole-hearted backing for the genocide in Gaza, and equally vehement support for stretching the war in Ukraine.
There’s worse to come, with little resistance.
Domestically, his initiatives were compromised as much as his senatorial record. There were some worthy efforts to revive the post-pandemic economy and promote greenish initiatives. The latter did not amount to much, and while the economy showed considerable improvement on paper, the benefits barely trickled down to most voters, all too many of whom succumbed to the Trumpian delusion of making America great once again through antediluvian measures. The idea that a president in thrall to dysfunctional billionaires would champion the interests of the proletariat has inevitably been exposed as a cruel fantasy. Tariffs that protect local industries have been a part of the economic playbook for centuries, but it could take decades to revive America’s capacities as a manufacturing state, and in the long interim the poorest consumers will pay the biggest price.
Other nations will also suffer, which is why so many of them are willing to kowtow to the richest and militarily most powerful nation in human history, whose brutality abroad matches its lack of empathy at home. In what kind of world is it acceptable to ignore homelessness and the incapacity of even people who have employment to dread the idea of seeking out a doctor when they desperately need one? Countries equally aligned to capitalism offer an alternative that America has never seriously contemplated since the Reagan-Thatcher era.
With the exception of Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, plus a few Democrats, the supposed opposition remains largely reticent about offering meaningful resistance to Trump’s clearly authoritarian and potentially fascist agenda. America has not been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” by its economic partners, but that has effectively been its attitude towards the rest of the world since the end of World War II, enhanced by the collapse of the socialist alternative in 1989-91.
American hegemony over the past 80 years undoubtedly plays into Trump’s blighted vision of a world that kowtows to whatever Washington prescribes. With the possible exception of China, that assumption has been ratified by acolytes and hangers-on eager to be sucked into the Trump-verse, with the obsequious EU and several other nations offering zero-for-zero tariffs to the US. Boycott, divestment and sanctions might be the best riposte to Israel’s godfather, but which nation will dare to hurl the first stone?
Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2025
Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1903058/trumpian-delusion