JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: WE DON’T HAVE TO WAIT FOR HISTORY’S VERDICT ON TRUMP – HISTORY CANNOT ADD A LOT – WE HAVE SEEN AND HEARD HIM IN THE RAW – HE ISN’T COMPLEX – HE IS OBVIOUS AND BRUTAL AND HE HAS FAILED AT NEARLY EVERYTHING HE HAS TRIED – HIS FOCUS THROUGH IT ALL HAS BEEN HIS OWN RE-ELECTION – BUT NOW IT SEEMS HE MAY EVEN FAIL AT THAT - CHANGES IN AMERICA’S STATURE IN THE WORLD

John Chuckman


EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS


We don't need to wait for history's verdict on Trump.

Time I think cannot add much of importance to our knowledge of Trump, nor can it cast a mellowing light of complexities on him. We’ve seen and heard him in the raw, and he is not complex or subtle. He is obvious. And brutal.

He has failed at every important task. Virtually all of his energies have been focused on the narcissistic task of being re-elected, rather than on improving his country or the world, and it is beginning to appear, he will fail even at that.

The entire foreign policy of the United States in the Middle East has been bent and manipulated by his chasing after the support of some very wealthy and influential Americans. It is the kind of activity which has long plagued the country’s foreign policy, but Trump has taken the effort to grotesque new heights. He has destroyed peaceful, working arrangements and generated conflict where there needn’t have been any. He has shown contempt for the rule of law, again and again, and nowhere has he expanded peace and good order.

Traditional allies in Europe - Germany and France especially - are actually talking about a future without America. Unprecedented words. He has insulted them many times, actually calling some of them names in abusive phone calls, and he insists on telling them where they are allowed to buy their resources, their military gear, and how much more they should be contributing to support the United States.

His idea of America’s relationship with its allies resembles that of the legendary coal-mining town’s “company store” with its captive market of poor workers.

His efforts with China are almost pure destructiveness. You cannot make yourself richer by trying to impoverish others. And with the world on the edge of economic collapse, it is madness to assault its second-largest economy.

His illegal sanctions against many countries help choke-off still more of the world’s economic activity.

Sanctions also work towards the day when the dollar loses its privileged place, a day that will be very costly to America’s power and influence. Using the dollar as a weapon, as Trump has done, is destructive. You force your politics and ideology onto people only wanting a dependable medium of exchange and store of value. Resentments now are added to other existing incentives to replace the dollar.

A number of countries have developed new ways to carry on business without the dollar. They are of course less efficient, but people learn by doing. And now we have technology, that changer of all things, entering the picture. There are experiments in a number of countries around digital currency, including the concept of a gold-backed digital currency.

The United States has lost a great deal of its moral authority through efforts at coercion rather than leadership, through efforts at telling rather than showing, and through revelations of the many dark corners in its own society. Hypocrisy does not sit well with moral authority or respect. I’m not sure moral authority, much as with virginity, can ever be restored, but it is a certainty that it cannot by restored through the activities America pursues full-tilt.

Trump is one of those people who mistake fear for respect, and he works very hard at being feared. But people get tired of living in fear. It is not a creative force. I can only remember my favorite line from Franklin Roosevelt, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

No one with any decency insults people, as Trump has the Chinese, who were the first victims of a disease, calling them its cause. Trump not only displays sociopathic lack of empathy here, but genuine ignorance. Already in a couple of European countries and in Brazil, scientists studying drainage water have proved the coronavirus was present in November of 2019. Again, he does this for votes, not for any benefit to the United States or the world. Votes from some of the ugliest segments of American society.

His treatment of the world's great international organizations – WTO, UNESCO, ICC, WHO, UN, and others – promotes anarchy. But I suppose he sees that as a way to make room for the United States to step in to take their places. So, we are really talking about tyranny. The attacks also elevate hate, hate coming right from the lips of a President. And their purpose is to motivate the votes of those same ugly segments of American society, ones which have always resented the influence, or even the presence, of foreigners.

He has torn-up sound, working treaty after sound, working treaty, making the world a far more dangerous place. These destructive acts are accompanied by record expenditures for the military, a military, remember, which has fought only wars of imperial aggression since WWII. The blessings for humanity include a new family of nuclear weapons, some designed to be more “usable,” and a new Space Force to militarize one of the few areas of humanity’s international efforts not militarized.

Again, returning to the perilous state of the world’s economy, nothing is more wasteful and non-productive than huge military expenditures. You might as well shovel resources into a furnace or bury them in a pit. And, given all the stresses to be experienced yet through the weakened world economy, such weapons significantly increase the risk of war.

Trump’s record on COVID-19 is simply chaos. He’s actually hiding from the pandemic now, not talking about what is happening in the country. The world’s greatest number of deaths, 133,000 at this writing, exceeding past expectations, and the growth of the infection is now increasing as a result of careless re-openings encouraged by Trump. An earlier study by Columbia University had said about 54,000 more Americans will have died than if the President had acted earlier when he was given good information, but it may well prove more than that. He continues with the deadly example of never wearing a mask when sound research has proved it to be the single most effective preventative measure anyone can take. And he insists on holding political rallies with no social-distancing or masks, indulging childish fantasies about there being no threat.

Feel-good politics in the midst of a disease and economic crisis. But that is the nature of his constituency, shown also by their embrace of his nonsense about making a country in relative decline great again, doing so with no investment and no discipline and no hard work. Doing it just by attacking other countries and demanding they give back what they’ve “taken” with their competitiveness. America just needed to find the inspired leader to take on the job, and they have him now in Preacher Trump. It is religion, dangerous cultish religion, but America has a big population to which that appeals, perhaps something the world hasn’t understood until now.

So, re-election is valued even over people’s health, Trump believing that only his “game-show host” or “televangelist” style of campaigning can arouse his political base sufficiently.

Tell-all books by insiders abound with juicy details of his truly bizarre private behavior, with perhaps the best one coming along shortly from his niece, Mary Trump, a psychologist.