The world divided up among Strongmen. Hard to imagine a greater, more obvious, anti-American position adopted by an American president. Kinda mind boggling to see this view of the world being installed by Donald Trump, while those American people who recognize how wrong this is, sit slack-jawed, doing nothing but watching the movie. Demanding Democrats fight back…
Meanwhile MAGA wants this movie to be the future. MAGA is eager to destroy every ideal the American experiment ever held, ideals reflective of our higher angels and good nature. MAGA wants an American president modeled after the leader of North Korea. One would think this would alarm even them. We should not underestimate their stupidity.
If you are an observer of Washington events, you may have noticed that every White House press briefing and pronouncement by a member of the Trump team is preceded by an effusion of adulation for the President himself. Whatever action has been taken, decision made, or objective (supposedly) achieved, it is directly attributed to the Great Leader whose personal will is apparently the only force that determines the fate of the nation.
This
North Korean level of idolatry for the magnificence of the presidential persona is not normal. It is, indeed, out of character with the spirit of the nation’s historical conception of itself as an egalitarian democracy in which anyone – the child of any family – may rise to the highest office in the land while still remaining, at heart, an ordinary American. Being elected president does not make you a god – or even the bearer of a sacred truth.
According to the Constitution, it does not even give you the power to do what you like. You are simply the head of the Executive branch of the federal government whose intentions may (indeed, should) be held in check by Congress and the courts.
I reiterate this point,
which I realise that I have made before on these pages, because I still find myself endlessly shocked by the flouting of the basic assumptions of American nationhood which were once ingrained in the consciousness of every schoolchild.
Many presidents have been admired, lauded and even idolised – Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan. But they were not given this bizarre superhuman status which implies that any criticism or doubt about presidential policy is a form of sacrilege or subversion. Such treatment would have seemed, to put it bluntly, un-American: a betrayal of the ideals on which the country was founded.
The White House press spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, who can switch from gushing sycophancy to sinister threats in the blink of an eye, is now banishing established media organisations (like the Associated Press) whose questioning of the Glorious Ruler has proved too persistent. In their place, she is inviting supportive outliers from the wilder shores of social media to White House press conferences.
She makes it clear, in quite unambiguous terms, that any expressed doubt about the logic or efficacy of a Trump policy – such as occurred recently when the Associated Press representative tried to make clear to her the sense in which tariffs become taxes – is a form of disrespect which will not be tolerated.
All of this is completely consistent with what appears to be a larger plan which the Trump White House openly endorses: that power in the world should now be shared by two or three emperor figures who will carve up global territory and resources between them, stepping over (or on) any annoying smaller states whose populations are too inconsequential to matter. The Trump army of sycophants is a mirror image of those thuggish Kremlin spokesmen
who retail Putin’s outrageous lies about the “neo-Nazi” regime in Ukraine, in broadcast interviews with the Western media.
World peace is to be enforced by a tiny group of monopolistic super rulers who will seize whatever lands or facilities they require. In return for this annexation and extortion, they will offer security from each other’s predations.
The United States and Russia (and maybe China eventually too?) will run a kind of protection racket in which independent states have to agree to give up ownership of their assets to secure them from marauding attacks by the other side. This was precisely the “deal” that Trump offered to Zelensky last week when he proposed an American takeover of Ukraine’s energy production. Presumably the White House will now take some satisfaction from the knowledge that the Ukrainian president will have to accept responsibility for the consequences of his refusal.
www.newsweek.com
www.theguardian.com
