T is for Trump
With so many articles about Trump, is there anything I can add? We know he’s childish, self-centred, a narcissist, constantly seeking love and reassurance . He says whatever he believes people want to hear, changing stories as he speaks to adoring crowds, to business leaders, or to the special interest groups that funded his 2016 election, and whom he’ll need again in 2020. Unashamedly, he flaunts his ignorance, commenting on science, technology, economics, inter-national affairs, or any other topic where his ‘unmatched brilliance’ is brought to bear. A bully who browbeats those who disagree with him, a hormonal adolescent, boasting about ‘grabbing pussy’ or ‘putting a babe’ in the White House.[i] George Packer’s recent article nails him.[ii]
All bullies fear being displaced, and so they denigrate, constantly attacking while inciting their followers. All it takes is to make one mistake, even better a retraction, and the bully has you: Senator Warren will never escape ‘Pocahontas’, Hillary Clinton her ‘illegal’ use of emails (“lock her up”). But Trump isn’t just a nasty, vindictive bully; he’s obsessed with fame and fortune. He wants to obliterate any suggestion he was elected by a minority, denying the popular vote (there were ‘millions’ of illegal voters), inflating attendance at his inauguration, and constantly harping on the ‘dishonesty’ of those out to thwart him. In relation to his legacy, he wants to be the most successful president ever, and measures this in economic and business terms. He wants to be up there with the Bill Gates of this world. The slippery pole of fame and fortune: he’s failed in business more than once before; now he needs the popular masses to help push him up.
His technique is simple: talk and tweet, stay relentlessly in the public eye. Commentators keep analysing how he changes his mind, contradicts himself, and brazenly lies. Believing honesty and transparency matter, they miss the point. In an instant news world, Trump knows he has to be the news, and yesterday’s news is old news, forgotten, irrelevant. The term ‘fake news’ was a masterstroke: other news is suspect, only Trump knows what’s going on, tweeting without a care and unconcerned about consistency or truth because ‘in the now’ such criteria are irrelevant. Contradictory positions are good; one will turn out to be right! Be in the limelight, push anyone else into the shadows, Trump loved his Covid-19 briefings (until they revealed his stupidity!).
However, rather than repeating what we all know, I have been trying to stand back, and look at Trump from a broader perspective. As I have tried to make sense of events, I was helped by listening to a podcast series, (for the first time ever!). It was on The History of Rome. The underlying story was quite gripping, as in the early years Rome slowly put in place a complex, clever and effective democratic system. Let me rephrase that: Rome was a republic rather than a true democracy, an oligarchy, and for many years only land-owning patricians were able to elect representatives to various offices. What made it ingenious was the requirement that most offices had strict terms; once elected, you could not be elected again. For the time, it was brilliant; but then things began to change. First the plebeians (male non-landowning Romans) were allowed to vote and to stand for office. Candidates began to rely on offering a populist platform. This change took place as Rome’s empire grew rapidly, increasing the wealth of the already rich. Inevitably, many of these affluent people also wanted power. Some gained prestige through military conquests, others were engaged in political maneuvering. Step by step, the structures of the republic were disassembled. Rome became a kingdom, then an empire. Eventually, emperors were chosen from family members, god-like dictators chosen on their bloodlines.
The podcast tells the story well, and it has had a rather salutary effect. Is this the end of every republic, every democracy? Is the desire for power inevitable, destroying more representative systems, leading to power grabs by the few, or even one person? In Rome’s story, Julius Caesar was the individual who crossed the crucial watershed. Before Caesar, the republic lingered on. After Caesar, the dictatorships took over. The more I heard, the more I understood Caesar as a complex man: a brilliant administrator; an outstanding tactician in war (with some luck to help him), fiercely loyal to his troops and to the general population; magnanimous in victory, even to those he defeated. A rule breaker who did seek respect, position, and power, but it was as much the machinations of the Roman Senate as his own desires that led him to grab absolute rule.
Hearing about the slow collapse of the Roman republic provides a good backdrop against which to examine events in the US over the last three years. As in Julius Caesar’s time, are we at a crossing point? The system of checks and balances that has sustained America’s democracy is falling apart, some elements deliberately smashed, and others eroding, step by step. However, as in Rome, there’s been a long period of change culminating in the current massively restructured political system. This process began long before Trump: he’s a Nero, certainly not a Caesar.
Looking back over the last few decades, one early step in the US decline took place with Richard Nixon. Although conservative, Nixon was in office at the end of the 1960s, a time of student sit-ins and revolutionary thinking. A wily man, taking credit for initiatives like the Environmental Protection Agency while reassuring the Republicans that, without this step, the Democratic Congress would have forced an even more liberal environmental legislation on him. Sneaky!
In six years in the White House, however, his real impact was external, reshaping the US international role, fundamentally changing military, diplomatic, and political activities. Before his presidency, American foreign policy had been marked by large-scale military interventions; in the two decades after, direct military intervention was by and large replaced with aid (sometimes covert, sometimes not) and military support. His diplomatic triumphs were the nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and the diplomatic opening to China, setting the stage for the arms reduction pacts and careful diplomacy that would bring an end to the Cold War. A slow withdrawal from Vietnam appeared to be a practical application of this ‘Nixon Doctrine’, but his secretly recorded White House tapes reveal he expected South Vietnam to collapse after the American troops came home. He prolonged the war to help his reelection in 1972. Like the bold generals of the Roman era, he saw winning major battles as consolidating his power. It was those same tapes that ended Nixon’s presidency, revealing the lies and cynical political calculations hidden behind public decisions. Nixon’s presidency was an object lesson in the difference between image and reality, a lesson we apparently need to learn and learn again.
As with Rome, once the decline began, it’s continuation appeared inevitable. The next and most consequential steps came with Ronald Reagan, implementing the conservative playbook from 1980 to 1988. He promoted the importance of “trickle-down economics”, supported the private sector through tax reform, and shifted responsibility from government services to a user-pays approach, based on selling America as the embodiment of self-reliance, patriotism and family values. He packed the judiciary with conservative judges to further this agenda. If this sounds familiar, it is Trump’s agenda, too, with the added twist of racism, sexism, and a pathetic longing to be admitted to the ‘really rich’ club – the people who don’t gather at Mar-a-Lago!
Does Rome’s decline give a perspective on where are we now? Then and now, communication is critical; appealing to the ‘masses’ is a potent way to advance your agenda. You need the support of the ignorant, uninformed and badly educated. In that regard, Trump has shown his mastery. It is the medium that matters, not the message (or, as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the massage [iii]). Probably intuitively, Trump has grasped that in the 21st Century what matters is immediacy and personalization: with Twitter, his views appear on your smartphone instantly, and so does the next and the next. The content is secondary. What counts is the fact of the tweet, then the use of capitals and exclamation marks, and only as a last resort the actual content. Worried about covid-19? Don’t be, it will be over soon, it’s no big deal, let’s get back to work. What really matters is the never-ending stream of messages: the president is constantly in touch. Trump ensures he drowns out any others; from your point of view, you are getting stuff ‘from the top’. He isn’t speaking to the masses; he is in personal contact, from him to you.
Leaving on one side his claims to extra-ordinary intelligence, Trump is smart, street smart if you like. He is smart at two levels. First, by constantly reiterating that ‘he knows’ about things, you become reassured: yes, he knows. At the same time, he has learnt to sound authoritative, neatly getting in the last word if another person at the podium says something with which he disagrees. He has cottoned on to the power of musing: “well, you know, I think this might turn out to be the thing to do” or, “I sure this will be the answer, I know I’m right”. Combining his clever ‘thoughts’, with which it is hard to disagree or contradict, with assertions of personal brilliance and authoritative sounding statements, he becomes thereliable source. Yes, Trump knows. [iv]
You’ll recall a few weeks ago, Trump was explaining that the problem would be over by Easter of 2020. Was he talking about the coronavirus problem? Of course not. He was explaining that we could all go back to work. In doing so, he was addressing a problem at two levels. First, it was Trump’s own problem, as he wanted to be seen as the architect of America’s economic growth: people had to be back working. But it was also everyone else’s problem: they needed to be working to be paid. If we stop worrying, start back at our jobs, we’ll all be fine. However, it would be misleading to keep focussing on Trump to explain him: he’s a symptom as much as a cause. To see this, we need to assess him in the context of that series of political, economic and social changes unfolding from a conservative agenda which took hold and grew 50 years ago.
The first of these, the economic changes, have two aspects, long-term and short-term. Over the centuries, the capitalist free market system has become fundamentally unstable. It rests on the need for continual growth. Investors put money into a company in order to obtain a return, two returns in fact. First, they want to receive a dividend, the ‘interest’ they are paid as a result of holding equity. Second, they want the value of their ‘stake’ to keep increasing, and to do so at a higher rate than inflation, which otherwise reduces the value of their savings. To meet these expectations and keep their support, businesses have to keep growing, they have to create value.
In this strange world of terms with special meanings, ‘creating value’ means extracting more income from customers, who are attracted by the value proposition the business offers. Whoa, what does that mean? Again, in the simplest terms, it means a customer is encouraged to buy more, or more customers are encouraged to buy, because they believe there is value on offer for their money. We buy a new iPhone because it offers more value than the one you had last year: that added value sits in a brighter screen with better colour reproduction, more ‘apps’ to allow you to carry out tasks, a smarter camera, and so it goes on. In other words, the capitalist system grows because customers are willing to acquire ‘more’, in quantity or quality, or for other reasons like ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ (or the Kardashians!). But unless the capitalist system can continue to develop new kinds of goods, the desire for more is not unlimited.
That would be enough of a problem were it not for another. In recent decades, businesses, shareholders and senior executives have become greedy. They don’t just want more, they want ‘lots’! Sitting on top of an inherently unsustainable capitalist system, income distortions are growing. Like some kind of unstoppable disease, the more the rich have, the more they want. In order to increase their wealth, they have to ensure the system is biased in their favour in relation to taxation, regulation, barriers and subsidies, deals and ‘sweeteners’. Inevitably, that pushes a country towards an oligopoly, and in an oligopoly, you need to ensure the key players have the ‘right’ approach. You bribe elected representatives, or offer them future board directorships. In this, Trump is the perfect patsy, easily led as he longs to be as rich as those he admires today.
These economic challenges are interwoven with political issues. Today, the US is an oligarchy. Free market capitalism requires a ‘well-ordered government’. Trump, often without realising the extent of his actions, is happy to threaten members of Congress failing to follow expectations: a quiet word from an economic adviser, a public criticism from Fox News, and Trump is there to carry out the task. We are encouraged to think he alone decides who is in or out. Sometimes he is threated personally, but more often he is gently led to see where a problem exists.
Both political and economic changes require a complaisant public, the third issue we are facing today. If 21st Century America is characterised by an oligopoly and an oligarchy, then only democratic aspirations stand in the way. Get rid of that, and all will be fine. It isn’t hard to ruin democracy. Make the educational system a training system, fitting people for work, not for exercising their rights. Reduce wages so that most people are on the margin, scared to disagree, worried for their future. Frighten people with the threat of terrorists, rapists and murderers swarming into the US from other countries. Dismantle the checks and balances in the political system. Fill the legal system with ‘friends’ who will support decisions to tear down or eliminate what was in place. Ensure Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen are beholden to business. Elect a President who is driven by envy, and a desire for adulation and wealth.
Just a minute, that’s exactly where we are today. Trump is a bombastic, credulous and self-absorbed man who is the ideal and inevitable outcome of the system has been developing over the past 50 years. Easily led, and unable to understand the consequences of what is happening, he is our Nero, tweeting while America burns. Ideal, because the more he babbles on, so the real work can go on uninterrupted behind the scenes. Offering a flimsy yet successful cover-up, Trump is our symbol for today, the thoughtless harbinger of America’s final decline and fall.
[i] That mission accomplished, we now see his wife is left there as a rather pale, melancholy shadow.
[ii] See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/
[iii] Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, Penguin 1967. The title was a misprint, but McLuhan quickly saw it made his point even more forcefully, the medium was the message because it ‘massaged’ our perception
[iv] E.g. Trump Now Claims He Always Knew the Coronavirus Would be a Pandemic, NYTimes, March 17, 2020
