SEXIST TRUMP’S SICKLY LAND OF LAND OF GROPE 'N GLORY
ISUPPOSE I could go ‘why oh why’, like many of the people I know and most of the people popping up on social media feeds. I could proclaim the death of the age of liberalism.
The world is more complex. I would suggest the battle has only begun.
Donald Trump is President-elect of the United States of America. He is about to become the most powerful man in the world. And just like people who want the Brexit referendum re-run, those clinging to the ‘Hillary won the popular vote… he’s not legitimate’ mantra suggest that antidemocratic instincts don’t just belong on the hard left and alt-right. If those in the centre can’t abide by the people’s will we are truly up the creek.
I agree it is important that journalism does not forget who Trump is and what he has said. The mantle of the Presidency does not magic away his history of misogynistic, ethnic and sectarian abuse and the damage that has done to the politics of America. Trump appealed to the worst instincts of the alienated because he knew it would work.
But only in accepting the fact of his presidency can we start to make sense of where Trump can take us all, and how states and individuals might respond.
That reality is potentially scary. I wasn’t convinced by the acceptance speech with its praise for Hillary as a tough fighter who has given great public service. Nor was I comforted by the photo op with President Obama. It was as if President-elect Trump was daunted in those first days after victory, awed at the scale of power and responsibility that has fallen into his hands.
The danger is that the very different personality shown on the campaign trail, the vast ego with all its bombast and taste for vengeance reasserts itself.
As for the promises of his campaign there are some basic assumptions that need interrogating. They have to do not just with America but the entire post-war western economic model. They are not just about Trump and his responsibilities. It is one thing to desire to go back to a time where work and a good standard of living were regarded as part of the manifest destiny of families, but quite a different thing to believe these are entitlements that politicians must or can deliver.
Suppose they cannot? Suppose that the burgeoning other world to the east has different ideas about who owns the prosperity of the future? Trade protectionism will not change the global reality. But it might just launch a trade war that makes everybody poorer.
As for Trump’s vaunted infrastructure stimulus, Obama tried that and made some inroads on unemployment. But it is not a panacea because none can possibly exist to deliver the paradise Trump has promised.
The same with immigration and those citizens of other worlds to the south — in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America — who want some of our shrinking prosperity and political stability.
Trump’s wall won’t keep them out of America, no more than the barbed wire fences of Europe will end the daily migration across the Mediterranean.
People will wish to believe it will. Nothing is more pronounced in the condition of 21st century Western humanity than an aversion to unpleasant realities.
In foreign affairs we know even less about what to expect from President Trump. The campaign offered us soundbites. He will go after Isil. He will make friends with Russia. He will be the best friend in the White House Israel has ever had.
But this is not like the George W Bush presidency which seethed with the ideological fervour of the neo-cons. Trump has instincts not ideas. There is no Trump doctrine.
The people being touted for high profile roles in national security and foreign affairs are mostly from the Republican fringe or are old die-hards like Newt Gingrich and John Bolton (a relic of the neo-con age and as difficult a customer to deal with in the modern history of diplomacy).
Getting foreign policy right is damnably hard. Look at Obama and his failed ‘red line’ on Syria, or the faltering pivot towards Asia.
There are now vast swathes of the earth where American might is no long regarded with awe.
In the Kremlin and Beijing Obama was perceived as a weak President. Putin was emboldened to snatch Crimea and start a war in Eastern Ukraine because he correctly assumed Obama would do nothing. Still, Obama presided over the most powerful military machine on earth.
Trump inherits this power with a promise not to engage in overseas conflicts unless American interests are directly threatened. They will be. And repeatedly.
Can you picture what happens if there is another 9/11 style attack under a Trump Presidency? The natural response is to say it doesn’t bear thinking about, but the prospect of goading America into a new ‘war on terror’ will be very tempting to the extremists.
Obama did not talk tough. He let his Special Forces and drone-deploying assassins do the killing. Trump has talked very tough and will be under pressure to match his words. If he gets it wrong the consequences for millions in the Middle East and elsewhere could be catastrophic.
The assumption that a new age of peace is about to break out with the Russians is naïve. Putin may feel he has achieved his strategic aims, now that he has most of the states on his borders jittery in the presence of Russian power.
The Trump pledge to make Europe pay for more of its own defence has gone down well in the Kremlin. But this idea can also work against the Americans.
It isn’t only the underfunded armies of Europe who lose out, initially at least, if America backs away. The USA will abandon its post-war status as defender-in-chief of the western democracies. It will encourage the expansion of European defence. This is not only a question of optics but of different balances of power.
The Chinese, always patient, always resourceful, will be watching that American retreat and wondering how it might be encouraged in Asia.
Already leaders in the Philippines (admittedly an unstable figure) and Vietnam have made unprecedented overtures towards Beijing.
Donald Trump will find that he cannot have the world he promised without big sacrifices. I am conscious I have been analysing the challenges we already know about. Every presidency is defined by how leaders respond to the unexpected. So I reach for Philip Roth’s magnificent The Plot Against America (which imagines the victory of the right-wing populist Charles Lindbergh in a 1930s election) and the following words:
“And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as ‘History’, harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”