Why I don’t dig Trump (USA Elections II)

 

Reading my previous post I realize I have deviated from my usual style of sober and detached analysis and indulged in what amounts to a florid collection of belittling epithets towards the current USA administration and, most pointedly, its nominal leader, the 45^th president. But heaping a lot of adjectives, florid or not, a solid argument does not make, and I owe it to my readers (and, to a certain extent, to myself) to flesh out what may be understood as an outburst, long on emotion but short on sober reasoning. I will develop, then, in this post my arguments for disliking Trump and his clique (which right now seems to comprise the whole of the republican party, although the prospect of electoral defeat seems to be causing the first cracks in what until now has been a rock-solid union), and how my particular misgivings maybe entirely irrelevant for the future direction of American society, as this “most important election ever” probably will decide little, and in the great scheme of things be entirely irrelevant. I will present my objections to the current occupant of the White House under three headings: linguistic, professional and political (regardless of alignment), and devote a fourth one (in a separate post) to how they may play out in the remaining two weeks until Americans vote, and what may happen afterwards.

You may not have noticed it, but I love dearly the English tongue. It’s not the language I grew up learning, but I mastered it soon enough, and since my childhood I’ve revered its richness, the vastness of its seemingly endless vocabulary which gives it the ability to transmit the subtler nuances and develop the most sophisticated arguments, be it from cool reason or passionate emotion. If I had devoted to guitar playing half the time I have devoted to improving my language ability (by reading or writing in English) I may not have reached the level of Jimi Hendrix (blessed by the guitar Gods with a unique amount of natural talent that simply cannot be equaled), but I would be at least at the level of Tom Petty or Bob Dylan (not master players, but competent enough). If I had spent lifting weights a quarter of the time I’ve spent scribbling and reading just XVI and XVII century English poetry and philosophy I wouldn’t be at Dimitry Klokov’s level, but I would have probably qualified for the Spanish national championship in weightlifting. Now, I don’t expect a politician (English-speaking or otherwise) to have the mastery of language of Shakespeare, but I do appreciate a bare minimum of proficiency in its use. And Jesus Christ, is listening to Donald J. Trump a chore for a lover of English! the guy mistreats it every time he opens his mouth, uses a syntax that would seem coarse for a second grader and limits himself to a vocabulary that a deprived bricklayer of a Gujarati village would already consider poor. I recognize for some enthusiasts of the Don that’s a willful, wily conceit, a show of his genius, as he voluntarily controls the sophistication of his speech (he doesn’t seem to write anything longer than his bombastic and absurdly baroque signature) to adapt it to the level of his audience (some praise! that essentially assumes that the average level of the American voter is that of a semi-illiterate moron, which even in my most elitist and hifalutin days I’d consider an unduly harsh slander)… something I would believe if I had seen him in other environments showing his ability to express himself competently and to convey some elaborate thoughts (when addressing the UN general assembly, say). I’m afraid the real reason behind his apparent communicational shortcomings is that there is really nothing behind the façade, but a similarly undeveloped, unsophisticated, inarticulate intelligence (that is, not much intelligence at all).   

Which leads us to the consideration of to what extent we can say he has taken seriously his responsibilities as commander in chief and president of all Americans. We may stop for a moment to reflect what such exalted position requires, other than communicate clearly with the population what direction he wants the country to follow (something we have already settled he is just not very good at). In a presidential system with separation of powers, like the American, the president (who has no legislative or judicial power and delegates to the secretaries of his choice the executive power vested on the government) is supposed to be a representative of the Nation, both internally and externally. Somebody they look up to, that inspires them to be the best possible version of themselves and shows to other dignitaries (or to the public of foreign lands) the greatness and the promise of the whole people. Who embodies the virtues they want to project, assuages allies and appears fearsome to enemies. From that standpoint, as I mentioned, the Trump administration has been an abysmal failure. Not only America’s image is at an all-time low between its traditional allies, but adversaries like Russia, North Korea or China do not seem to have been much impressed by 45^th bluster. As for his ability to inspire the best angels of the inhabitants’ nature… I’d refer to the comments of his former chief of staff, sadly recognizing he had been more a divider than a uniter. We may see what election day brings, but it is difficult to find somebody in modern political history, in the USA or abroad, who has tried less to expand his base and to attract people who did not initially vote for him to his camp (at least as long as we circumscribe our search to nominal democracies, I reckon that Stalin, Pol-Pot and the like where even less gracious than Trump towards possible dissenters and non-sympathizers).

Of course, being perceived by almost everybody with an opinion as a complete failure at his day job is not something that probably would have fazed our man, as the idea of measurable professional competence seem to be as alien to him as feeling sympathy for anybody outside his immediate circle (or even inside it, given how he has treated longtime allies like his erstwhile lawyer/ fixer Michael Cohen) and, furthermore, he seems bone-chillingly convinced of his excellency on that area (as in any other area, really). And it makes me wonder to what extent he may be so self-deluded as to not realize just how incompetent he is. Although, come to think about it, I have had bosses like that (heck, I’ve been like that myself), who could pronounce the most unbelievable, bald-faced lies with total conviction because they had persuaded themselves first of its veracity. In the case of Trump, the first and foremost lie seems to be that he is an able businessman, the inspirational leader of a vast and successful company (Trump Co. yesterday, the US of A today) that underwent multiple bankruptcies and is nowadays deeply in the red with no viable plan to get back to profitability; a visionary strategist that is unable to articulate his strategy; a master dealmaker that is incapable of closing any deal, be it with a foreign leader or with a Congress dominated by his own party in the first half of his mandate; a sly operator and judge of the value of his subordinates that found it supremely difficult to keep in his team anybody with a shred of conscience, that keeps being left by his underlings who unfailingly sign book deals in which they portray him as a bumbling idiot… If “managing” is a science, or at least a craft (or, more humbly, what Alasdair MacIntyre would call a “practice”), and one whose skills and capabilities could be profitably put to use in the highest echelons of political leadership, as conservative parties everywhere tend to argue, Trump has shown to be supremely bad at it. But Alas! he played a successful, accomplished manager in a TV show and that seems to have been enough for his followers to make up their minds and stick with that image through four years of utter chaos.

And he certainly seems to have enough of those followers around him (or in channels where he seems to pick most of his opinions, both about the world and about himself, like Fox News and One America News Network) to stay convinced of his own greatness, and the unalloyed depravity and baselessness of any hint of criticism. Not the kind of balanced, unbiased, poised views you would want a true leader to be able to ponder… Which leads us finally to the last aspect of this sad business that makes me so wary of the whole thing. For those with eyes to see, it was crystal clear since he announced his campaign that Donald J. Trump was doing it for the same reason he had done every single thing in his life: to enrich himself, to gain status, to satisfy his own (apparently insatiable) ego. Of course, getting the vote of enough people required him to at least pretend he would have their best interest in mind, he would “fight” for them (remember his leitmotiv of “American carnage” during his first campaign? of course you remember, he is still campaigning along the same themes as if he hadn’t been the president during the last four years!) but I cannot avoid thinking that you had to be extraordinarily naïve to believe him even for a single millisecond. The interesting question, at this point, of course, is how could so many people fall for it? enough, at least, to give him an electoral college majority (even after losing the popular vote by a historically unprecedented margin).

But before I attempt to answer that question I want to note how paradigmatically Trump exemplifies the process of degeneration of political organizations towards which I already pointed a couple of posts ago (How organizations decay ). When a political organization (like the republican or the democratic party) has exhausted its ability to find innovative solutions that can effectively improve the collective well-being/ recognition/ life-satisfaction of its members (as part of a group with which they self-identify) it stops being able to adequately reward them (remember that belonging to an organization always comes with a cost, in terms of more limited freedom, as it imposes the constrains associated with the role members have to assume within it) and thus it becomes an economic organization ,in which each member is really looking out first and foremost for himself (remember, economic organizations are purely transactional, and people join them just to improve their own individual status, the rest of the group be damned… so they stay as long as the status they derive form it, typically in the form of a salary, compensates the freedom of choice they forgo). Political parties in particular become resource allocation machines that reward exclusively their card-carrying members with benefits and sinecures, while the voters they purport to represent are left in the lurch, to be remembered only when the next electoral cycle comes around and they have to be “milked” again, doesn’t matter what unashamed lies they have to be told (in the American case, things like that Roe vs. Wade will be finally repealed, a bunch of inexistent legislation against gun ownership that the other party is supposedly preparing will be blocked and taxes will not be raised, of which only the latter has any real chance of happening).

The novelty of Trump, then, is how bald-faced the lie has become. Even his frequent direct contacts with his fervent base (those otherwise unexplainable rallies he kept on celebrating in the middle of his presidency when the next election was still years away) are for him a way of maximizing the benefits he extracts from his position (in terms of adulation and unconditional approval of an adoring crowd, something it is obvious he relishes like few other pleasures). As is the chance to go on TV and be able to free-associate in front of the nation for hours on end (something that all autocrats, aspiring or otherwise, seem to love), embarrassing as it may appear to any sober external observer. As is the blatant host of conflicts of interest that have bedeviled his administration (from having foreign dignitaries, and his own secret service, staying in his money-losing properties while the American taxpayers pay for it to nominating his daughter and son-in-law to unspecified positions in his administration, even if that meant forcing the vetting process to allay the suspicions of his own intelligence agency that they may be compromised). Profit maximization through and through, intended just for him (who is, according to his own narrative, already very, very rich, a pretense that rested on shaky ground since day one and has become more difficult to maintain after the publication by the New York Times of his famed tax returns). It is like he keeps on saying “I’m milking you all to get even richer” and his adherents just nod along their approval, assuming that is how it has been all along since the beginning of the world, and any possible alternative leader would do the same, and they don’t mind being fleeced as long as the one doing the fleecing says he is “one of them”.

In a brilliant piece economist Branko Milanovic recently accused Trump of being the most refined embodiment of “neoliberalism” (Trump and neoliberalism ), and that he represents the “invasion of the economic into the political sphere”. I think that, rather than an invasion, what he signals is the complete substitution of one by the other. With Trump, a whole set of the population is in fact throwing the towel, assuming that collective representation is pointless (seen from a racial perspective, because they have been told that collective representation in the end meant that “dark skinned people” got more, and they themselves got less in exchange) and that everybody should be in it just for themselves, should pursue their own egoistic ends without much caring or looking out for others. Which, from the point of view of the elites, the best prepared, the winners of the economic game, is a superb proposition, because all those disenchanted voters that feel ecstatic because Trump, their champion, is “owning the libs” and making them foam at the mouth, would be a terrible threat if aligned with those same liberals against those enjoying the highest incomes and the highest social status (they may ask for anathemas like redistribution through taxation, universal health care and who knows what else!). Sixteen years ago Thomas Frank wondered, in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How it was possible that so many white working-class voters were aligning themselves with political positions deeply inimical with their “economic” interests. The question was wrongly posed. What they were doing was giving up the “political” altogether and following those that encouraged them to pursue their own economic interest (which, what a lucky coincidence! would allow the plutocrats financing that encouragement to benefit nicely through tax reduction and deregulation), something that by definition is done alone, in isolation from the rest of the polity. And it was their gradual defection from the Democratic party what would enable the republicans to cling to power, both at the state and the federal level, for years to come, in spite of the demographic headwinds they were experiencing (decline of the white and rural vote as a percentage of the total), as would be spectacularly manifested in the unexpected outcome of the 2016 election.

As for the implications of such analysis for the current election, they will have to wait until my next post!