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From: Irish Political Review: Editorials
Date: February, 2021
By: Editorial

After Trump!


Donald Trump has left the White House, but has refused to concede that he lost the Election.
Some time before the Election he was asked if he would concede if his lost it. He replied that he would decide when the time came. That was taken as meaning that, if he lost the election, he might possibly remain the governing power nevertheless. That is what the Irish and British media represented him as saying.
What he actual said is that, depending on the circumstances, he might—like Hillary Clinton—refuse to concede that he had lost it.
Media commentators do appear to have genuinely forgotten that Hillary Clinton refused to concede that she lost the election, and maintained that that it had been stolen from her by the Russians—and that they themselves had for about three years held it to be a fact, though entirely unsubstantiated by demonstrable evidence, that the Russians had stolen the Election for Trump.

A veteran BBC reporter, John Humphrys, retired a few months after the 2016 Election. He said on his retirement that the BBC staff on the whole were shell-shocked, traumatised, by the election result, and that they went into denial about it.
Nobody on RTE or Newstalk has come out and said the same thing happened in Irish broadcasting, but it was patently obvious that it did.
We know of no more evidence in support of Clinton's contention that the Russians stole the election from her than we do that the old Establishment stole it from Trump by massive vote-rigging. The one seems to be about as plausible as the other, and the only relevant principle is that is what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander.
A Florida Congresswoman told British Channel 4 television, which campaigned actively on the ground in America against Trump, that it had no grounds for fearing that Trump might win again. The Virus, combined “with the fact that Joe Biden has so much money, and can literally overwhelm the Trump ads, that will make the difference” (see Irish Political Review, Novemher 2020, p4).

An interesting discussion took place on Russia Today on January 16th between Scott Ritter (A United Nations Weapons Inspector in Iraq), who was not a Trump supporter, but said that in 2016 he expected him to win because of the disillusionment with the Democrats that he saw in working class circles, a Trump supporter, Brian Trascher (”Trump Campaign Surrogate”) and Laura Fink (CEO Rebelle Communications), a Democrat.
Trascher compared the Republican mob that demonstrated in the Capitol with the Democratic mob that demonstrated against the appointment a couple of years earlier of Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court:

“Not only did the Democrats start lying about him, they dug up a mentally ill woman… to try to destroy a perfectly good an who has become a perfectly good Supreme Court judge. And, not only that, the Democrats, presumably Democrats of the left wing, took over the Hart Senate Office Building. Senators were locked in their offices. They couldn’t come out because Security lost control of the crowd. And they were trying to disrupt a Constitutional process of confirming a Supreme Court Justice. The media said nothing about insurrection. They said nothing about an attack on democracy.”

And, in the “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations, Democratic leaders encouraged mayhem.

Laura Fink did not indignantly deny any of this. Why should she. Felt truth in a democracy is partisan. Democracy in the only form recognised by the West is partisan and divisive. It operates through the conflict of parties. The United States has the most thorough democracy, and therefore the one with the leasts holds barred. That is the source of its demonic energy.
The partisan divisive, nature of democracy is, of course, also the reason why it is not easily reproduced in societies where it is based only on dictated principles rather than being a product of history.

There was never any practical possibility that Trump could remain the governing power after the election result, as authoritative presenters said he had lost. We assume that he knew he couldn't. And he never said that he would try to.

The scuffle in the Capitol after it was opened to demonstrators can be mythologised either as a Storming of the Winter Palace event that was defeated, or as a Reichstag Fire event that succeeded. If we had to choose between them we would opt for the latter—a success by the Democratic Party in providing for a propaganda assault on Trump's development of Republicanism. But it remains to be seen whether Biden will be reckless enough, in the grip of ideology, to try to restore the status quo ante of freely operating globalist capitalism.
After Trump!
The distinctive thing in Trump's Presidency is that it did not launch any wars or destroy any states.

One has to go back a very long ay to discover another President with such a record. In the early, 1950s, only a few years after the supposed establishment of international law by the formation of the United Nations, the US Government overthrew the Government of the Trump ads in the interest of the United Fruit Company, and that set the pattern until Trump was elected.
When he was elected the United States was the master of globalist capitalism which was investing capital abroad in pursuit of cheap labour, with the effect that industries were being destroyed within the USA.

There was nothing new about freely operating capital creating boom towns around the United States which then became ghost towns. This was past of the way of life when the capital movement was chiefly within the US. But it seems to have been felt differently as capital movement increasingly went abroad in the course of constructing an American-dominated global economy.
The outlook of the working population began to part company with that of the advanced movement of Finance Capitalism. Instead of appreciating the internationalism of capital, they remained lodged within the routine of American nationalism, and they saw good jobs being given away to cheap foreigners and resented it. They became Hillary Clinton's " to ”. They failed to see themselves within the perspective of America's historic mission in the world and sacrifice themselves to it. They were unable to relativise themselves. They voted to keep jobs at home. That was "Trumpism".
It has been estimated that about 45% of the population felt that way four years ago, and it does not seem that four years of intense media propaganda against Trump has significantly reduced that percentage.

Trump has been described as a 'white supremacist'. Nothing he has actually said warrants that description, except by means of a far-fetched process of deduction. He increased his non-white support in the election he has lost. But his main support came, of course, from the swathe of society which suffered from the export of capital/jobs, which was white—but white trash rather than white supremacist. And the blacks he attracted were those who were effectively making themselves an integral part of the American system, as distinct from being patronised into a subset of it.


The United States is white supremacist in origin, development, consolidation, and expansion. It exterminated the populations that inhabited the Continent when the Mayflower landed, and it is not very long since its intellectuals pointed to Latin America as the horrible example of what happens when the dominant white race engages in race-mixing with native populations under Roman Catholic influence, instead of exterminating them..
It inherited a slave population from Britain. Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery as a tactic in his War to establish a Continental super-state, did not intend that the freed black slaves should become citizens of that state, but rather that they should be sent back to Africa. And the great liberal Democratic President, Woodrow Wilson, half a century later celebrated at the White House the essential service to the American nation performed by the Ku Klux Klan.
The United States is the supreme construct of white supremacism. The white trash population created at home by the export of jobs in recent times is the least of its manifestations, but they are Americans too, and they have refused to be discarded as a deplorable proletariat. Trump gave them a political presence. The immediate problem for the Democrat globalists is how to make them vanish. The political theatre at the end of the end of the Trump Presidency was directed to that end.
***
What Trump did to upset Europe was to say that the US should stop trying to run the world and should tend to its own interests as a nation among the nations.

Obama asserted universal American sovereignty in the most extreme form. He said that sovereignty followed the dollar into currencies that were in any way dependent on it, and he acted consistently in accordance with that principle.
He also said that the US was "the exceptional nation", and "the only indispensable nation". The meaning was that it was justified in sacrificing every other nation to its own interests—a thing that previous Presidents had done but not said. And the EU, despite its Great Power pretensions, was content with that.

Angela Merkel was greatly upset by the British decision to resume independent action in the world. Britain had saved Europe from Fascism, and now was abandoning it.
What Britain did as the Super-Power of the inter-war period was facilitate the growth of Fascism, particularly in Germany where it had a formal right to act against it under the Versailles arrangements. It collaborated actively with Hitler from 1934 until March 1939. When it declared war in September 1939, its action was such that it provoked Germany into a position of dominance in Europe, which led to the German/Russian War. It was Russia that rescued Germany from Fascism. And it was then that the United States that saved Germany from the Power that saved it from Fascism.

Europe was on the whole content with Fascism. There were no internal overthrows, not even during the War. And who can tell but that it would have been content with Communism if the US had not joined the War and compelled Britain to return to Europe in 1944, after a four-year absence?

Post-1945 capitalist-democratic Europe is a construct of the United States in the context of its Cold War antagonism against the Russian State which broke the power of Nazism, and of the hot wars by which that Cold War was carried on in the outlying regions, and Trump wanted the US to abandon responsibility for the running of its creations and leave them to look after themselves.

Europe, accustomed to functioning under US financial and political hegemony, felt lost—Angela Merkel especially so.

It might be that the world of substantially independent states, which existed before Britain launched its destructive World War a little over a century ago, cannot now be restored. It might be that the power achieved by the USA as a result of the disruptive effect of the British Empire's two World Wars, is too great for it ever to revert to being a state among the states, tending to its own interests, as Trump proposed. If that is the European view, then the ideal of the United Nations is Utopian and should be discarded, and the world should be systematically remade with the one indispensable nation at its core.

But steps have actually been taken during the Trump Presidency towards a restoration of a world of independent states, which relate to each by means of accommodations and limited conflicts. The Russian State is stronger than it was four years ago. The Chinese sphere of influence has extended. The Syrian State, de-legitimised by Obama and Clinton has survived by means of an international alliance. Iran has maintained itself against intensified US sanctions and remains influential in Iraq amidst the shambles brought about by the USA and Britain.
Biden will not find it easy to do what Ms Clinton was poised to do when the deplorables deprived her of the opportunity.