Worst Case Scenario

I’ve been mulling over this month’s historic US presidential election for the past few days since its stunning result, and no matter how positive I try to be, I can only conclude that the United States and, by extension, the world are at the starting point of what can only be described as a “worst case scenario” for world peace, cooperation and understanding.

To start with, President-elect Donald Trump is, arguably, the least prepared US president in history. His net training has been focused entirely on business—with only the slightest of pure economic studies—nor is he, like most politicians who eventually hold that country’s highest political posts, an attorney. That in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a fatally limiting factor. Former US President Jimmy Carter, for instance, was a proud honors graduate of the Annapolis Naval Academy and a farmer-businessman before launching his political career. But he was, arguably, one of the most committed of US presidents to human and civil rights and remains, both as president and in his later life, one of that country’s greatest statesmen, itinerant ambassadors and peace negotiators. Trump, on the other hand, has shown manifest contempt for the law in general and for the tenets of constitutional law in particular.

Even in his chosen field, Trump has proven to follow a less than convincing business model, running numerous companies that he has owned into bankruptcy, losing class actions over a university that he founded and that was described by the plaintiffs as an unmitigated scam, manipulating fiscal laws to avoid paying taxes for years on end, failing to pay multiple contractors who provided his business group with services and accumulating a reputation as a CEO who, if you did business with him once, you were unlikely to do it again. More recently, there have been well-founded reports that he has formally admitted to US tax authorities having transferred funds from his supposed philanthropic foundation to persons of interest—which could be himself, his family or foundation authorities—who are prohibited by law from receiving such funds.

Throughout his ugly, divisive campaign for the presidency, Trump has demonstrated himself to be a racist, sexist demagogue, with a nihilist bent for vowing that, in his first 100 days as president, he will undo everything that current President Barack Obama has done, particularly as regards social policy. He has promised to be more warlike, has claimed he knows more about military strategy than all of the country’s generals combined and, in terms of the US war on Islamist terrorism, has said that his simple-minded solution will be to close the doors of the country to any and all Muslims, to surveille the ones already in the country, whether they are foreigners or American citizens, to “bomb the shit out of ISIS” and to “take the oil.” It should be noted that violation of both US and international law is implicit in nearly all of these “foreign policy/national security” plans. And his promised actions against Muslims are a direct challenge to constitutional guarantees of equal protection, religious freedom and due process under the law.

This last is not unusual in Trump. In fact, it is the norm. The president-elect seldom provides concrete data regarding his potential moves and/or policies, presumably because such ambiguity allows him wiggle-room to revamp his stance in tune with his own future convenience. This may be a wily approach to business negotiations, but in politics, and especially in international politics, it reads like inconsistency and like untrustworthiness. Regarding stances he has expressed over the years on issues of perhaps only minor importance to a businessman, but of major importance to a country and its people, he has shown no compunction about taking an opposite stance during the election campaign that won him the presidency. Back when Trump leaned toward the Democratic Party, for instance, he declared himself to be “pro-choice” on the issue of abortion. Now, having gone over to the Republican Party to seek the presidential nomination, he took up a “pro-life” stance more in tune with his potential ultra-conservative voter base.Trump has also indicated that he is favorable to the policies upheld by his vice-president-elect, Mike Pence, when Pence was governor of Indiana. Pence’s administration there was socially and morally invasive and misogynist, denying women’s right to make decisions affecting their own bodies and lives, and even jailing some women for terminating their pregnancies, considering such medical interventions to be “homicide”. Most pundits saw the vice-presidency as a career move for Pence since, even in the undeniably conservative territory of Indiana, the governor had become so unpopular that he was unlikely to survive another gubernatorial race.  Both men have vowed to defund Planned Parenthood and to seek to overturn the historic Supreme Court decision known as Rowe v Wade on women’s right to control their own bodies and destinies. The president-elect has further promised to undermine programs long in place to provide assistance to the poorest segments of the US population. In many cases, he has claimed he will replace what he slashes and burns with better programs and projects, but has so far provided not the slightest concrete indication of what the replacement policies will involve, other than promising that they will be “great”, “tremendous”, and “so much better” than those put in place by the current administration.

Uncomfortable with being reminded of his inconsistencies, the US president-elect has railed against the press for what he calls its “unfair treatment” of him. He has vowed that, as president, he will “loosen libel laws” to make it easier to sue the media and has threatened to temper the zeal of his critics by making them the subjects of probes by federal regulators—all of which will sound chillingly familiar to anyone who has ever lived under autocratic or dictatorial regimes elsewhere in the world, where libel laws are regularly manipulated to muzzle the press and where tax boards and other regulatory bodies are pressed into service to trump up charges against anyone who challenges the regime.

Surprisingly enough, however, saying that he believed one thing before and now believes another seems to have served Trump well in the elections since his constituency appears to have taken this as a sign of “honesty”, of being “a straight-shooter”, of being unafraid to change. But it’s the kind of behavior that independent political analysts tend to see as inconsistency and as a worrisome lack of political compass readings, the kind of seat-of-the-pants positions that can come off as mixed signals and fatal inconsistency. Indeed, his bent for changing stances—in effect, going back on his word—is the sort of thing that can wreak havoc in international relations and cause rifts that may prove hard to heal.

And rightly so. Bannon’s appointment has drawn strong repudiation from such organizations as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Senate Democrats point out that the Breitbart website run by Bannon is a platform for racist and anti-Semitic views and the best that Ben Shapiro of the Republican Jewish Coalition could say in seeking to defend the appointment was that he had seen no sign of Bannon’s personally being an anti-Semite, without explicitly denying that he was. He added, however, that Bannon was indeed “happy to pander to (such) people and make common cause with them,” in seeking to further his personal goal of transforming conservatism into full-blown extreme-right nationalist populism. Civil rights defender and Jewish advocate Alan Dershowitz said, meanwhile, that, while there may be “no compelling evidence” that Bannon is, himself, an anti-Semite, “under his stewardship, Breitbart has emerged as the leading source for the extreme views of a vocal minority who peddle bigotry and promote hate.”Worse still, Trump doesn’t appear as ready to back himself with the best of aides, as Republican folk hero Ronald Reagan did in his day. Back then, President Reagan, who—as a former minor movie star, ex-president of the Screen Actors Guild, and leading witness during the anti-communist witch-hunt engineered by Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1940s—was seen as ill-prepared to be president of the United States (although certainly better-prepared than Trump, having served two terms as governor of California), but was applauded for surrounding himself with knowledgeable collaborators and for heeding their advice. Trump, on the other hand, appears to be forming an administration made up largely—though not entirely—of backers in the GOP, regardless of their capability, who stood with him when other Republicans opposed his candidacy, as well as with campaign shock-force leaders. For instance, Trump’s appointment of alt-right apologist and political propagandist Steve Bannon as “chief strategist and senior counselor” to the future presidency has set off alarm bells throughout the human and civil rights community.

Many considered that half-hearted response too little too late. Oren Segal, director of the US Anti-Defamation League made this clear when he said, “There seems to be a pattern in the Trump administration (sic) of waiting until the last moment. And we just don’t have the luxury for that. When there are Nazi salutes in (Washington) D.C., it’s important to condemn it at the moment.”Add to this Trump’s own ambiguity regarding issues of bigotry and racism and it is hard not to be concerned. The weekend prior to the US Thanksgiving holiday, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer held a rally at a National Policy Institute convention that took place less than a mile from the White House and chillingly mimicked the Nazi rallies of pre-World War II Germany. From the podium, in a speech whose content alternated between English and German, the alt-right founder shouted, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” He was cheered by members of the audience who answered him with stiff-arm Nazi salutes. Spencer launched into a half-hour speech that was clearly designed to equate neo-Nazi and Trumpian nationalist values. Obviously, Trump has no control over who invokes his name or to what end, but it took him not several hours but several days to respond to Spencer’s recognition of him as the great white hope of neo-Nazi populist nationalism. On Tuesday, he finally came out in response to media shock at both the rally and his lack of reaction to it saying simply, “Of course I condemn them.”

Nor is this the first time that Trump has drawn criticism for being too slow to denounce the white-supremacist extreme right. At the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, Trump hesitated spectacularly before disavowing support from David Duke, a leader in the violent racial/ethnic hate group known as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). At the time, on the CNN cable news network show, The Lead, with Jake Tapper, Trump at first sidestepped the issue by saying, “I know nothing about David Duke, I know nothing about white supremacy” (an admission that, in itself, is worthy of concern, coming from a presidential candidate). And it was only days later that he finally, under pressure from the press and his own campaign, said that he was against Duke and his organization.Segal went on to compare Trump’s lack of reaction to Spencer’s rally with the president-elect’s lightning-swift criticism earlier of the cast of the Broadway show, Hamilton, when, from the stage, they lectured his vice-president-to-be Mike Pence, who was in the audience. Said Segal, “If you have the time to tweet about the theater, you should have the time to tweet about a spate of hate crimes and Neo-Nazis in Washington D.C.”

On the other hand, Trump has already started to back away from some of the more extreme of his promises, bantered about during the campaign. He vowed throughout the run-up to the election, for example, that he would “investigate and jail” Hillary Clinton if he became president. The battle cry of his white, working-class constituency at rallies across the nation became “Jail her! Jail her! Jail her!” And there were Facebook posts and banners displayed in Trump-supporters’ yards showing Clinton behind bars and reading “Trump in the White House, Hillary in jail.” Once he’d sewn up the election, however, he swiftly reneged on this promise, announcing publicly that his administration would not be going after Clinton. It is not unlikely that the same will happen with his pharaonic project to build an unconquerable wall along the US border with Mexico, with his vow to deport eleven million illegal aliens, and with his threat to “go after terrorists’ families”. Although a tempering of Trump’s radical rightwing electioneering stances might be seen as a plus for his presidency and democracy, the question I keep asking myself is, what will happen when all of the angry, far-right “Second-Amendment people” (as Trump refers to his gun-toting supporters) find out that they’ve been duped by yet another lying politician who would say or do anything to be elected…and then immediately come down with total amnesia?

It is, then, hard to see how the next four years could possibly bode well for the future of American democracy and civil rights, for world peace, or for any lull in the continuing rise of populist nationalism in the US and around the world, given this extraordinary victory for the extreme right that Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency implies.