My overwhelming emotion in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is despair.
My crushing depression is not caused just by the attempted assassination. It has been triggered by the host of events that led up to and followed the shooting in Pennsylvania.
It started with the Republicans thirst for power at any price. Between 1933 and 1995 they were the minority party in the House of Representatives for all but four years. Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich had the answer. He embraced wedge politics by unjustifiably labelling Democrats as “traitors,” “communists,” or “un-American”. Republicans were “patriots,” and the only “true Americans.”
It worked. Republicans have held the majority in the lower house for 22 of the past 30 years.
Then in 2009 along came the Tea Party with its demands for lower taxes, a reduced national debt and federal budget and decreased government spending.
The Tea Party was followed in 2015-16 by Donald Trump. He married wedge politics to the populism of the Tea Party. At first the Republican old guard opposed him. Then he started to win with a mixture of wedge rhetoric, scapegoating, and dangerously over-simplified answers to complex problems.
After winning the presidency in 2016 he set himself up not as the leader of the Republican Party but as THE Republican Party. If you wanted to secure the Republican nomination for an elected office you first had to pledge fealty to The Donald and his increasingly right-wing policies. If you refused you were branded a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and destined—in many cases—to fail at the first hurdle.
Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 should have been the end of the cult of Donald Trump. It wasn’t. He kept it alive by donning the mantle of victimhood and claiming– without a shred of evidence—that the 2020 election was stolen by Biden and that he was the real winner. On January 6, 2021, a mob incited by Trump’s lies and rhetoric stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
During the riots there were calls for Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be hanged. They escaped. But five people died. 1,265 were arrested and tried. 460 were jailed. Trump says he will pardon all of them. One of the hallmarks of a democracy is that the loser graciously accepts defeat and allows the peaceful transfer of power. Trump refused to do either in total defiance of the US constitution and his oath of office.
Out of office, Trump continued to exercise a Svengali-like hold over the Republican Party and its nominating process. He also faced four court cases with charges ranging from fraud, unlawfully keeping secret documents, racketeering and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Only one of the cases has come to court and Trump was found guilty on 34 charges. It now seems highly unlikely that any of the other cases will ever be aired in a courtroom. Trump has successfully delayed their prosecution and if elected, will simply pardon himself.
But it is too easy to place all the blame on Donald Trump, American conservatives and the right-wing of the Republican Party. The extreme positions taken by some on the left-wing of American politics has driven moderates into the arms of the extreme right. They fear that their very identity is under threat.
Immigrants can be a social positive. They refresh our culture and provide workers that drive economic growth. Many of America’s entrepreneurs are immigrants who by their very nature our adventurers and risk-takers. They had to be to leave the social safety net of family, friends and a known culture. But immigrants also threaten the sheltered homogeneity of a single race or dominant race culture.
Almost everyone now accepts that climate change is happening. Not to do so would be to deny the evidence of their own eyes. But is it as bad as many say and is it manmade or a natural climactic shift? Either way, it is difficult for American society to adjust. Its twentieth century success is built on fossil fuel-driven motor cars and aeroplanes. Shifting away requires painful economic dislocation of the sort to which most people have a natural aversion.
Socially speaking the world has become a bewildering—almost frightening– place. Many are embracing change and the freedom and diversity it brings. But just as many are seeking sanctuary in conservative norms which are exploited by even more conservative politicians.
Perhaps the Democrats greatest failure is to successfully manage the centre ground of American politics. Joe Biden is one of the best and worst presidents in American history. He has created jobs; brought down inflation; boosted American manufacturing; helped the green economy and fought tyranny. All great successes. But he has failed to convince the American public of his achievements. Communication is the first required tool of politicians.
But Joe Biden’s greatest failure has been his stubborn refusal to relinquish power. He is too old to be the leader of the Free World. He is too old to save America from a Trump presidency. His debate performance was the final proof. Yet he stubbornly clings to power and the arrogantly mistaken belief that only he can defeat Donald Trump.
It now looks as if Trump will be elected president in November. If he only delivers a fraction of his campaign promises then he faces the threat of a violent backlash from the American Left. He will almost certainly meet that response with even greater violence. Violence begets violence which is why I am in despair.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".
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15 Comments
This strikes me as a bit overblown. The American civil war killed 600,000. What will be the death toll under a new Trump presidency?
I agree with most of your analysis though I think your conclusion is overly pessimistic. The USA survived Trump being President for a full term so I see no reason to believe that is should not be capable of surviving a second full term.
However, you make a particularly telling point: you state, correctly, that “one of the hallmarks of democracy is that the loser graciously accepts defeat”, but later point out that if Trump “only delivers a fraction of his campaign promises then he faces the threat of a violent backlash from the left”. This seems to imply that the real threat to democracy comes from ‘the left’ as they may resort to violence to oppose a democratically elected president enacting his campaign promises.
Thank you for a deeply felt article.
Please do not despair. Despair is not good for you and is unlikely to help the rest of us.
Please listen to the attached as it may help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ8ahL8LsEQ&ab_channel=postingoldtapes
Might a significant some of our problems be the following?
* Mass education systems which fail to teach and facilitate analytical and critical thinking and questioning
* Main stream media, not least the B. B. C., which seriously lack objectivity, clarity and a determination to analyse and criticise without fear or favour and with ruthless determination.
* Governments which have imposed austerity-neoliberalism despite its obvious theoretical flaws and increasingly evident harms to most of society
* Ditto orthodox economics
“It now looks as if Trump will be elected president in November.” November being 4 months away. Way too soon to jump to such a conclusion, especially when the field is wide open for the Democratic nomination.
From the assassination attempt on Donald Trump to Joe Biden withdrawing from the US Presidential race in the space of a week, Harold Wilson’s quip “A week is a long time in politice” seems quite apt.
Biden facilitated genocide …Good riddance.
“Between 1933 and 1995 {the Republicans} were the minority party in the House of Representatives for all but four years. ”
The Republicans haven’t always been the reactionary party of the Right that they are seen as now. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was a Republican. The political right in the Southern States aligned with the Democratic party for well over half of the 20th century.
There is even be some of that still remaining. The history of USA politics is slightly more complex than ‘Democrats are the goodies and the Republicans are the baddies’.
There were strong links between Southern Democrats and the KKK at one time. It is hard to imagine the pro segregationist George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama in the 60s as a Democrat today but he was then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Democrat
Exactly Peter ….Bidens biggest critics state immigration as his failure … Something you could not pin on Obama who deported more immigrants than just about any other post war administration…
Abraham Lincoln was a US republican, but no more a man of the left than say Benjamin Disraeli in juxtaposition to William Gladstone. An honest man (as his nickname ‘honest Abe’ conveyed), he considered slavery morally wrong, but he was not an an abolitionist as he made clear in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1958. Lincoln faced off against Illinois democrat senator Stephen A. Douglas over the issue of slavery in the debates. Lincoln would go on to defeat Douglas in the 1960 presidential elections.
Lincoln was a man of his time and while considering slavery morally wrong, this did not extend as far as advocating racial equality https://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-lincoln-slavery-and-emancipation.
The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t actually free all enslaved people when it wasa issued. Slavery continued to be lawful in states loyal to the Union. It is said that for much of his career, Lincoln believed that colonization—or the idea that a majority of the African American population should leave the United States and settle in Africa or Central America—was the best way to confront the problem of slavery in the USA.
Like Churchill, Lincoln in comon with other great men of history had some troubling character traits when viewed through the lens of current day societal values and mores.
@ Joe,
I didn’t say Lincoln was “a man of the left”. Just that he was an example of the Republican party not always being of the reactionary right, especially when we take into account, as you have correctly pointed out, that we do need to judge individuals in the context of their time.
In the link I posted previously there is a mention of how the both the Republican and Democratic Parties had their liberal, moderate and conservative wings. This seems a strange concept to non Americans. The Republicans like to accuse the Democrats of actually founding the KKK. As far as I can make out this wasn’t done formally but it created by members of the party.
I’d be interested to read Tom Arms’ take on the historical policy shifts of the two big US parties.
The Democratic Party originated after disillusionment with the 1824 presidential election in order to help geimt Andrew Jackson elected in 1828. His support was from the farming and planting community and he was a large slave owner. A rival party called the Whigs formed to oppose the Democrats The Whigs then split between slave abolitionists and non abolitionists. The abolitionists formed the Republican party in about 1858.The Democrats became split over the subject of slavery between the Northern and southern states leading to the us civil war.
@Peter Martin, Christopher Haigh
Andrew Jackson as President in 1830 was directly responsible for the “Trail of Tears” where the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations were forcibly removed from their lands in the South-Eastern USA, so shouldn’t the Democrats be seen as the ‘baddies’ long before there was a dispute about whether new slave-owning states could be set up within the Continental USA?
@Laurence Cox In not quite sure how the Democrat party remained intact after the civil war but such as Texas state was still Democrat held at the time of the Kennedy administration.
Tom,
you are going to have to pen a new piece “Observations of an expat: Hope” concluding it now looks as if Trump may not walk back into the WhiteHouse in November.
The key battegroud states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia all look to be back in play since the presumptive democrat nominee kamala Harris has replaced Joe Biden in the Presidential race Look forwrd to reading your thoughts on the events of this week, the key campaign policy issues of cost of living and immigration and whether the threat of a violent backlash from either side of the divide can be avoided.
American politics is a mess. Perhaps the next President will look at a comprensive review of its constitution. It desparately need a credible third Party. We could learn lessons from its recent history. Modern politics demands more choice, fairness and sensible limits to campaign spending.