Trump will,
inevitably, pull the rug out from under his own feet.So this is what the victory of Donald Trump means.
It means that the reactionary forces of the far-right are resurgent. Trump’s victory is the latest in a global trend which was previously manifest in Britain’s Brexit vote, which saw Britons vote to get out of the European Union. That itself follows a growing wave of popularity for right-wing extremists across Europe.
It’s no surprise that among the first in Europe to congratulate Trump on taking the White House were far-right leaders like France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders.
That is because, as I’ve documented elsewhere, Trump’s advisory team has close ties to Europe’s fascist political parties.
His campaign rhetoric has meant that the forces he rode to victory are hardly a secret.
As the incoming president and commander-in-chief, Trump represents a threat to ethnic, religious and sexual minorities inside the US; to women and women’s rights; to the people of Iraq, Syria and beyond, where he thinks massive aerial bombing and oil-grabbing is the solution; to the environment, because he’s a rabid climate denier who wants to burn all the fossil fuels available everywhere; and to Europe, which he thinks should be broken up (a view he appears to share with his mutual admirer, Vladimir Putin).
But Trump won because more and more people are fed up with what they see as ‘the establishment’. Voters bought into Trump’s rhetoric about ‘corruption’, about being a maverick operating outside the Washington beltway. They believed his promises to shake up power.
Never mind that his ‘vision’ of making America “great again” is shallow, self-contradictory and vacuous. It appeals to so many because since the 2008 financial crash, and the convergence of economic, energy, and environmental crises that have escalated since then, it is clear to most people that business-as-usual isn’t working.
The problem is that there no alternative.
Faced with the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who of all the candidates received by far the most campaign funding from Wall Street, Trump won by playing up the fact that he is not part of the establishment two-party machinery.
Neither was Adolf Hitler.
It also proves that it’s only a matter of time before the self-serving fantasy he has woven to win the White House unravels. Trump will, inevitably, pull the rug out from under his own feet.
Representing the most predatory, machoistic, egoistic dimensions of what is politically possible, Trump’s efforts to follow through with the outlandish, destructive policies he has proposed throughout his campaign will not make America great again.
They will hurt America, and they will hurt all of humanity, and they will hurt planet earth. They will do so because Trump does not represent any sort of alternative at all, but merely a more regressive, aggressive version of business-as-usual.
And the more Trump, in his raving glory, does so, the quicker America, the world and humanity will wake up to the folly of what he stands for.
In the meantime, we must raise our voices together and louder than ever in the fight for fairer, cleaner, safer and more inclusive societies for all.
Read more: Trump’s dystopia is coming – but it will destroy itself | openDemocracy
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