THE TRAGEDIES OF TRUMP

The U.S. so needs a new broom to sweep clean.

Trump claiming he was it, failed in almost every respect. He promised a lot but was just another faulty political product, incapable of much and in fact created more dirt than he cleaned.

Trump made great claims on all sides, a political trick used by a majority of politicians these days. Be all things to all men... and women. Advocating an end to regime change wars while being a proponent of outdoing waterboarding. Talking of creation harmony, not wishing to destabilize nations then attempting to unseat the president of Venezuela. Now, after four years of Trump we know that almost nothing he says can be trusted. He took political lying to Guinness Book of World Record levels.

Yet he was the closest we have come to a radical president of the USA. The tragedy is that his mentality was not fit for purpose in the role many believed he was suited to, destroying the old, established order and putting something better in its place. The first part of the task he accomplished to an observable degree (though this will be seen to be temporary, not permanent). The second part, putting something better in its place... he hardly seems to have had any notion of how to do it, I suspect he didn’t even try. In fact what he created was arguably much worse.

Why do I say it was much worse?

I need only name three men and two women:

John Bolton
Mike Pompeo
Mike Pence
Nikki Haley
Gina Haspel

By bringing these five people into his administration at one time or another you know immediately that nothing fundamental was going to change regarding U.S. foreign policy, one of the primary issues he stood on as prospective president.

This was an absolute betrayal of all who voted for him on the basis that he would be beneficial in regard to world peace and harmony. Trump has created the most divided world since the Cold War with aggressive policy decisions regarding multiple nations from Venezuela to China to Russia to Iran to Syria to Ukraine and on. His presidential campaign promises on foreign policy ring totally hollow now.

Imagine what someone who truly believed in what Trump only claimed to could have done.

Such a person in the White House would certainly NOT have surrounded himself with the most blatant war-hungry hawks, black site managers and CIA zealots as Trump did. He or she would have set about finding people who could deliver the cooperation with other nations he promised. It was at this earliest possible stage of Trump’s presidency that I realized that like Obama, we had been gulled once again.

A true and trusted individual could have made the changes America needs by getting money out of politics, ended the pernicious lobbying system, stopped Big Pharma and Big Health overcharging, focused on benefits to U.S. citizens, not to donors on Wall Street and ended regime change wars and all the attendant propaganda and covert pseudo-diplomacy, dirty tricks and Machiavellian plots that go with them.

Such a person could have really cleaned up... at least to the maximum degree his or her powers allowed.

Trump messed up instead.

Yes, I know many millions of Americans still believe he had the right stuff. He talked a good game about bringing jobs back from overseas and solving trading inequities. Perhaps some of what he did even worked (though the data is patchy). But really, taken as a whole I fail to see how more of Trump was going to bring the ideal America that some clearly visualized back into being. Such views are a triumph of fantasy over reality in my view and in truth a sign of the utter desperation many feel due to the Wall Street fix that is killing them day by day vacuuming all wealth up to the elite there. I’m sorry but Trump wasn’t going to fix that... in fact one of his greatest boasts was that the stock market was booming. This “boom” didn’t transfer either into good jobs or vastly improved lives for American citizens.

Trump failed. Yet tens of millions still believe in him. And in January and beyond most of them will continue to do so in a continued war against ‘the other side’ that can only have the most bitter harvest.

Trump is clearly incapable of consistently formulating policies that can lead to new and stable realities. The vast majority of his decisions appear to be on the spur of the moment, informed by emotion and little else, ad hoc plans and plots that are simplistic, taking no account of deeper realities, nuance or any consequences involved. Often they appear to be products of personal prejudices and nothing more.

If Trump had been an individual informed by the best minds in America and in the West in general there is no limit to the good he could have done. By the best minds I mean those such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, Ben Norton and others. But like unrelated chemical elements without the appropriate receptors there was no good fit, there was no way that they could connect to create a new and powerful way to the better place we all know is possible.

Trump, with his enormous ego and mafia-like mentality has an inability to connect which is almost total. He feels omnipotent, all-knowing. And he choose the most arrogant, fixed-mentality people to be a kind of Praetorian Guard around him. This was not the act of a man seeking great change but rather great protection for himself.

These were just some of the failures of a Trump who, like Obama, had offered the carrot of change to a hungry American people. But like Obama he almost totally failed to deliver.

Much was promised. So very little was delivered.

These are the tragedies of Trump.