TRUMPDOM. No. 1
In Donald Trump’s first four years of the Presidency of the United States, the reporter Bob Woodward in a telephone interview told him that he wished to interview him to “know” him. Trump replied “You don’t know me.” In other words, “You don’t know what I am capable of.” The world has a greater knowledge in Trump’s second term as President of the depth of evil to which he will descend. His MAGA supporters, many of whom are seniors who believe his promises to make their lives better despite Trump’s reckless cutting of the social benefits they depend on to survive such as medicare and social security, refuse to acknowledge the truth about him as if to do so will leave them bereft of meaning. Trump controls Republican politicians by threats to unseat them or unleash his violence on them and their families through his thuggish supporters and by persuading them that his right-wing policies to make the rich richer will give them power or, at the least, the certainty of lasting control of government. (The veiled autocratic mindset of Republicans may account for their behaviour; recent polling reveals that the Republican voter is very supportive of their representatives.) The change in character and beliefs of Republican Congressmen and voters to obey the dictates of a man whose amorality they despised before converting to his practice of deception and corruption has mystified citizens who believe in the sanctity of their Constitution and the rule of law. The millions of Christian and Jewish worshippers who see in Trump either a saviour or a warrior forwarding their far right ideologies seem like lemmings dashing towards the cliffs of destruction while destroying the lives of everyone else.
Trump had no difficulty in filling his administration’s offices with inexperienced puppets declaring their absolute loyalty to him and helping themselves to the spoils of a criminalized government. Republican Congressmen, who form the majority in Congress, thanks to a duped electorate, applaud Trump’s whims and “unhinged” actions, indifferent to signs of the nation lurching into a more dangerous rogue role than formerly. Years ago, Noam Chomsky, the much respected analyst of world politics, declared Israel to be the most dangerous nation and the United States the second most dangerous. Now the two nations have melded into one and become relentless in genocidal war and obsessed with manufacturing and selling the most powerful weapons that man can devise.
Trump began his second term with slapping tariffs on all nations exporting to the U.S. This caused chaos and the stock market to lose 10 trillion dollars.1 Citizens protested in the millions his destruction of government agencies and their loss of social supports as his billionaire cronies dismissed thousands of government employees without cause. Trump’s threats to annex nations such as Canada are met with dismay while his alliance with the Russian tyrant Putin against the democratic nations of Europe and especially Ukraine fighting for its life against an invading Russia jolted its allies to mistrust the U.S. and realign themselves against it to safeguard their democracies. Meanwhile Trump creates opportunities to fill his pockets, as exemplified by his encouragement to favoured insider traders during his manipulation of tariffs.
As a Canadian who lived decades in New York City and experienced the U.S. slide into untrustworthy governments intent on plunder by armed force, I see the divorce of Canada from the U.S. as rescuing Canadians from American pressure to join in its mass murders and demolition of ancient cultures. Canadians watch in alarm as lawful Americans struggle to maintain honesty and respect for law against the breakdown of both and Trump’s mad drive to prosecute those who exposed his lies, those who enforced the laws to stop his many criminal activities and those who showcased for public knowledge his treachery in attempting to overthrow the elected government by armed rebellion. The democratic body of citizenry, abandoned by indoctrinated Republicans in Congress and betrayed by Trump’s obsequious organs of justice, must rely formally on the courts to save the nation from autocracy and informally on themselves by mass protests throughout the country. The loss of integrity, the menace of unjust arrest and imprisonment when freedom of speech becomes a crime, the subservience of masses of persons in positions of authority—police, army reserves, etc—the absence of empathy for an unarmed, imprisoned people of Palestine exterminated by ruthless predators using weapons of unimaginable mass destruction and of indiscriminate shooting, torture, starvation, spread of disease, converting those predators into ravenous animals devoid of thought. Americans aware of their predicament but paralyzed to remedy it cannot escape the fate forewarned by writers such as George Orwell and many current writers who have been shouting warnings unheard by a citizenry reduced to watching television in place of reading. Timidity, ideology, whatever enslaves the mind to dismiss the horrors they witness daily must be overcome; otherwise humans become robots and lose the will to honour the truth. The remorseless control of Jewish and Christian Zionists over the media in Western nations, particularly in the United States, Britain and Canada, has deadened the minds of the public so that rather than the citizens rising up as one to throw Trump, Netanyahu and their acolytes out of office and try them as war criminals, they stand by, some approvingly, as innocent young students are rounded up for speaking the truth and immigrants are falsely accused of criminality and sent to prison without due process.
A blog by Rimar Najjar, “The Ugly Israeli Denounced” in June 2024 illustrates the vile character that shapes Israeli and by extension many American lives: “Even before Israel exposed its heart of darkness to the world in the aftermath of Oct 7, the term ‘the ugly Israeli’ was already a thing. According to many reports, Israelis traveling internationally have developed a reputation for unruliness, rudeness, and assertiveness; observed instances of Israelis arguing, yelling, and disregarding rules have led to negative perceptions by airline staff and other travelers abroad, and even to a Ynet news report that wonders, “Are Israel’s tourists the worst in the world?” . . . The Zionist Jewish entity controls not only the content and limits of Jewish identity, but also the content and limits of Palestinian lives. It is their grandiose and self-absorbed national character, their “distance from humanity,” their “millennia-old disdain for non-Jews” (i.e., their racism), shaping the horrendous and unjust world in which Palestinians have lived for more than 76 years, that makes the Israeli public complicit in genocide. . . . Is it really possible that the Israeli public is unaware of the story the whole world is watching with horror, a story of “famished Palestinians killed outside aid trucks on Al-Rashid Street in February; of tent-dwellers in Rafah burned alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day? Do they honestly believe what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilization against barbarism?’ . . . Like the Nazi regime in Germany, the Zionist regime has been highly effective in its use of propaganda (hasbara), including exploitation of the Holocaust, to shape public opinion, especially the Jewish-Zionist entity’s own public.”
Has the public gone as mad as Donald Trump, vicious, deceitful, cruel and uncaring? Some Americans realize that by being acquiescent they have lost rights that the U.S. Constitution used to ensure and can be arrested on a whim without due process to be sent in chains to a third-world nation eager to imprison them for life if the U.S. pays for their disappearance. U.S. courts, when not corrupted, constrain in vain an executive reflecting Trump’s disregard for their decisions; thus they are alone in upholding the law while the Democrats out of power try to warn the public of the autocracy stripping them of their freedoms. Trump’s readiness to imprison citizens because of thoughts critical of him they might think in the future highlights the lunacy and remorselessness of his governing. These dangers became real within the first fifty days of his rule; what is to come will change that nation and affect the rest of the world in the cruelest way. Anyone, including his supporters, if they annoy him, will be imprisoned as severely as a serial killer, that is if the serial killer is not working for Trump. “The crazies are running the asylum.”
Huge citizen protests of Trump’s policies, angry condemnations of Republican congressmen for supporting them do not restrain Trump from pursuing his agenda for dictatorship and alliance with murderous dictatorships the world over. In the final confrontation brute force will determine our future. Some see nuclear war as inevitable because world leaders of unsound mind and self-importance have seized control. Reason alone confronts them.
1 [Donald Trump’s tariff policies have triggered a historic $10 trillion loss in global market value, with U.S. tech giants like Apple and Amazon suffering massive drops. This market crash is hitting economies worldwide, creating widespread instability. Experts warn that without trade negotiations, the volatility could persist, signalling a possible shift away from the global stability led by the U.S. ]
