Hurricane Donald comes to Washington

“The American carnage stops now”

President Donald J. Trump

By Tassos Symeonides RIEAS Academic Advisor

On April 3, 2016, in the commentary titled “Hurricane Donald” that appeared on this page, we noted:

Whether he wins the presidential election 2016 or not, Mr. Trump has accomplished something that could not have been probably accomplished any other way: he has shaken both American political parties in ways never seen before, and he has bluntly articulated the inner thoughts of tens of millions of Americans, ignored by “mainstream” politicians, without a shred of the now all-conquering, mandatory dialect of political correctness.

            On January 20, 2017, the man who upended the Washington political establishment, and defeated an unparalleled massive smear and scare-mongering campaign by the liberal left to discredit and ground his candidacy into the ground, took the oath of office as the 45th President of the United States.

            In his first speech to the Nation as the commander-in-chief, President Trump ditched the customary musings on “values” and lofty didactic aims in favor of a hard-hitting “America First” list of priorities, the same that carried the day throughout his campaign. [i]

            Pulling no punches, President Trump delivered a first jolt to a DC establishment, and a “progressive” camp feverishly waxing poetic about the legacy of his predecessor in a stark emotional crisis of longing for the “good old days” now forever gone. Those attending the brief ceremony under cloudy skies included the unexpected loser of the election, Hillary Clinton, and her husband ex-president Bill Clinton. The couple, one report said, sat “glumly” through the swearing-in. The Clintons, however, the same report said, “rebuked” on Twitter those Democrats who boycotted the new president’s inauguration.

            “Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost” President Trump intoned. “Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.” One of those attending later observed that lines like these were “both a jab and an uppercut in quick succession.”

            Such is the confusion on the losing side that, as the very inauguration progressed, the hottest and almost hallucinatory talk[ii] in town was, and still is, the possibility of impeaching the new president because he is, liberal media insist, in cahoots with Putin’s Russia, or because his administration is leading to a military coup d’état.[iii]

            This atmosphere of anger and fear is compounded by disparate protest groupings promising an energetic campaign of civil disobedience to force President Trump from office.[iv] A first taste of this nascent campaign was delivered on January 20, with demonstrators in Washington D.C. streets going through the usual anarchist paces of smashing storefronts, burning cars, throwing missiles at, and being tear gassed by, the police who made a reported two hundred arrests.

First steps

Within minutes of the inauguration ceremony, the White House web site was updated to purge all mentions of climate change, the lgbt community, and the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and the wobbling EU. Shortly afterwards, a memo from the President’s chief of staff directed all federal agencies to stop issuing regulations immediately.[v]

            Both steps are in line with Trump campaign pledges to realign policies in “new pragmatic” ways. In another gesture which outraged liberals and “progressives,” and triggered another avalanche of abuse on Twitter accusing the new president of fascist tendencies, President Trump instituted a National Day of Patriotism.

            The president, in an announcement right after the election, outlined his plan for his first 100 days in office. The list reads like the ultimate nightmare of the liberal left and those already lamenting the departure of the previous “academic” president. The words “restore” and “eliminate” are major hinges of the announcement focused mostly on what needs to be done about what President Trump has described repeatedly as the “broken” system at home.

            The 100-day plan leaves foreign and security policy largely untouched thus increasing anxiety across the Atlantic but, also, among the established foreign and security policy elites whose members have repeatedly dismissed the idea of any radical revamping of the core of U.S. policies conceived in the aftermath of the Second World War.

            To their grief, however, President Trump appears ready to challenge these principles sooner rather than later as part of his pronouncements to stop America “losing” from defending those who do little for their own defense--a not-too-subtle thrust at Germany who, in his view, uses the EU in her plan to beat the U.S. in international trade.

            President Trump has also ruffled more than a few feathers by suggesting that NATO is “obsolete” because it has failed to address international terrorism. This turn of phrase was enough to prompt Mrs. Merkel to make an unprecedented call for “dramatically boosting” German defense spending and for European countries to do more for their own defense through a “European Army” in order to reduce reliance on American military power. And President Trump has not hesitated to bluntly suggest Merkel has hurt her country by allowing “all these [Moslem] illegals” to pour across Germany’s borders. 

            Also to the horror of Cold War traditionalists and semi-retired warriors, President Trump has suggested sanctions against Russia may be lifted if Russia is “helpful” in U.S. efforts to battle Islamic terrorists and pursue global stability; said the new President: “If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?” and he announced also a meeting with Vladimir Putin in the coming months is “absolutely fine with me.”

What future?

In a poignant comment titled “Restoring the balance,” a veteran Greek observer (one of the very few in Greece who have not succumbed to anti-Trump hysterics) wrote:

US President-elect Donald Trump is moving into the White House on Friday [January 20], yet the world has already changed. The niceties have been cast aside, political rhetoric has assumed a rawness that until now was associated only with military action, and political correctness has been replaced by directness in the conveyance of the political message.

            This is as crisp an encapsulation as possible of Trumpism’s very core: tell them what it is, tell them how it’s done.

            “Rawness” is the declared anathema for all “progressives,” let alone “cerebral” academics still nurturing, almost to the very last, end-of-history theories first broached by Francis Fukuyama in 1989. But, as the above comment also points out, the “end of history” has failed to materialize. The assumed supremacy of liberal notions of “global governance” and open borders, not to mention the ubiquitous liberal must of “equality” and “inclusion” within societies, directly collided with the traditions of the nation state and of those born and raised with an indigenous national identity; for all the mocking and ridicule piled upon them, they proved themselves resilient and influential way beyond the tolerances of both “progressives” and “cerebrals” who dismissed them early on as living “proof” of “bigotry” if not outright barbarity.

            Presidential candidate Trump was called “fascist” (among many other insulting and scornful epithets) with unfailing regularity and President Trump continues to attract the rage and condemnation of all those who believe, in their hearts and minds, his presidency would be catastrophic for the United States and the world. But the virulent, and even violent, self-appointed protectors of domestic peace and defenders of political correctness as the core value of the republic,[1] remain (deliberately) blind to the true reasons Donald Trump so easily pushed the Ancien Régime out of the way. To quote in part from the Spectator magazine:

[Trump happened] ... Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs. Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult. Because you used slurs like ‘denier’ and ‘dangerous’ against anyone who doesn’t share your eco-pieties.... Because you policed people’s language, rubbished their parenting skills, took the piss out of their beliefs. Because you cried when someone mocked the Koran but laughed when they mocked the Bible. Because you said criticising Islam is Islamophobia. Because you kept telling people, ‘You can’t think that, you can’t say that, you can’t do that.’

            As John B. Judis warns in his recent book The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, what the “progressive”-liberal-neoliberal “wisdom,” both in the U.S. and Europe, scornfully calls “populism” is an often repugnant but true early warning of failing domestic politics pointing “to tears in the fabric of accepted political wisdom.”[2] Judis also cautions the U.S. neoliberal “circulatory system” of deficits designed to fuel domestic demand won’t survive forever--and when the time of reckoning arrives the Trump campaign “will have prepared the way” for the fundamental change of course that will be required.[3]

            In the end, President Trump, the “populist,” could instigate a process by which the current canon of neoliberalism demanding the subjugation of politics to economics begins to unravel.[vi] It would be perhaps farfetched to read this as a product of some inner “Trumpian” philosophy of democratic organization. Yet, his promised dismantling of the liberal left “legacy” could lead to what Alain de Benoist has called a democracy of “political participation” as opposed to the pet liberal model of democracy of “natural rights” and blanket “equality” based on vague metaphysical exegeses.[vii] And this would be the single most radical transformation which the Trump presidency could produce offering historians material to argue about for the next one hundred years and, even, beyond.

Time (and money) will tell.

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[1]Which assumes that those who disagree with the “truth” must be automatically excluded from everything as “enemies.”

[2]Location 2122, Kindle Edition.

[3]Ibid., location 2176.

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[i]Left-wing commentators rushed to call the speech “dark” and “radical” as in this case.

[ii]CNN took this continuing anti-Trump “stream of consciousness” hysteria to new levels when, just before the inauguration, host Wolf Blitzer and correspondent Brian Todd discussed on air what would happen if both President Trump and his vice president Mike Pence were to be assassinated as they took the oath of office. The discussion concluded that in such case the Obama administration would naturally continue in office.

[iii]The presence of two retired generals on the Trump cabinet apparently kindles this “possibility.”

[iv]This is as radical and unprecedented a promise as it can be but mainstream media have not expressed an opinion on the subject.

[v]But “The memo is careful to exclude any rule that's in response to an emergency situation or other urgent circumstances relating to health, safety, financial or national security matters.”

[vi]The canon is failing both in the U.S. and the European (dis)Union rather disastrously as the steep rise of “populists” signifies.

[vii]Alain de Benoist, The Problem of Democracy (2011) Kindle edition, location2492.

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