ILLUSTRATION BY JEFFREY SMITH (New Republic)
Contempt is one of the nasty, self-fooling emotions, a mix of self-love and aggression. It is a feeling to reject, or at least suspect, in yourself. Few human beings are really contemptible.
But Donald Trump, former president of the USA is one of them.
We knew that this very rich man, who inherited his wealth, did not win the popular vote in 2016. Hillary Clinton, his opponent, won by three million votes. Trump became president because he won the Electoral College majority.
Now we have learned, in Trump’s criminal case in New York, that to attain even that victory he cheated, using his advantage in money. He was, so to speak, doubly not elected president in 2016.
After a recording got out which showed Trump boasting of and seemingly advocating sexual assault on women, his campaign might have been wrecked entirely by the revelation of his brief affair with a porn actress, Stephanie Clifford [better known as Stormy Daniels – JD], at a time when his wife Melania had recently had their son.
So Trump paid Clifford $130,000 and became a minority-vote president, thanks to the Electoral College.
What has been revealed by his trials — or rather, emphasised and proved, for it was not unknown to those paying attention — is that Trump has always been a rich confidence trickster, a creation of the media and his father’s money.
In 2023 alone his legal bills came to $51 million. Every year they are enormous.
A combination of money, lawyers, and aggression has allowed Trump to do as he likes, whether legal or illegal, most of his life. He has lawyers working for him full-time. Virtually anything can be delayed and delayed and delayed, if you are rich enough. It is a rich (very rich!) man’s strategy, but it works. 90% of the cases never come to court. The US legal system is doing for Trump what bribery did in the Stephanie Clifford case in 2016.
That single NY case is likely to be the only one of the many criminal trials the facts where the results will be known before the presidential election of 2024, in which he will stand as the candidate of the Republican party.
In 2016 Trump conspired to withhold relevant information from the electorate. Trump lost the democratic election; the Electoral College gave him the presidency.
In 2020, when he lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College, Trump tried to do “illegally”what was done automatically for him in 2016, culminating in what his enemies (and rightly) called an insurrection at the centre of US official politics, the Capitol in Washington DC.
In office and afterwards,Trump acted like a petulant and wilful delinquent determined to have his own way. Some of the things he did made no other sense. Unless he was planning to sell them, taking away secret official documents simply made no sense other than a wayward desire to hang on to the empty symbols of the power he had lost in the election.
He was compelled to call a new presidential election in 2020, and he had lost the popular vote in 2016, but he seems to have thought of himself in power as entitled to be absolute monarch or an absolute dictator. He could not lose the election, and if he did it was proof positive that the election had been rigged.
What he did to the structure and credibility of America’s institutions and way of doing things has been clichéd as the bull in the china shop, but it was the fascist (or would-be absolute monarch) who had been accidentally elected to office trying to break everything and anything that stood in his way.
He was motivated, it seems, by sheer egotism, the egotism of the man born to riches who had become accustomed to doing what he liked and had the money for lawyers to keep him from consequences and legal retaliation. Some have given this the psychiatric name of “malignant narcissism”.
In office as president, Trump declared the institutions of the USA fraudulent and “fake”. The 2020 election was fake unless he won.
Some 50 local court cases established that there was no electoral fraud in 2020. Trump and his political friends insisted, and still assert, that the courts were dishonest and have been “weaponised”.
All news inimical to Trump is “fake news”. Honest journalists are “the enemies of the people”. The federal government? The FBI? Instruments of the elite against the always hard-done-by poor Donald Trump.
Is Trump guilty of raping — that’s what it was — E Jean Carroll, as the hearing in civil court established? Lies! Is he fined in court for illegal business practices? Weaponisation of the law!
The entire Establishment is mobilised against the poor victim, Donald J Trump.
There is a devastating combination of lies and candour. Trump lies all the time, in everything and anything. Always. His lawyers dare not let him give evidence in court because he would lie, as he always does, and thereby make himself liable to charges of perjury. But he lies freely out of court. Lies and lies.
Someone kept score, and in office he lied over 30,000 times.
Candour? He has candidly said that he will, if elected, be a dictator. He is campaigning for office as a man who will in office be a dictator. The Republican Party will be fielding a candidate for president who says that if he is elected he will end American bourgeois democracy, and he will not accept defeat.
He has threatened and promised to deport eleven million people. He has promised to model himself on Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban.
It is astonishing that Trump is again standing for president. By law he shouldn’t. A law was passed after the Civil War (1861-5) to stop former rebels standing for election. Plainly it applies to Trump. But when Colorado attempted to use it to disqualify Trump from the Republican primary ballot in the state, the Supreme Court ruled for letting Trump stand.
Even more astonishing, though, is the fact that, apart from the civil action of E Jean Carroll, Trump has so far avoided a hearing and completion of all of the many criminal cases against him, except one.
Delay, delay, delay, that very rich man’s option, has so far worked for the rich ex-president.
Trump has been out of power for three and a half years. But Trumpites across the USA have been in power and active. They have passed state laws aimed to stop Black people voting. They responded to Fani Willis’s “gangster” indictment against Trump in Georgia by a personal attack on Willis that has all but engulfed her and so far stopped the trial. And they control the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court is co-equal with the presidency and Congress. More: it has the last word. Three of its judges for life were appointed by Trump, three by the two Bushes. The court has already abolished Roe v Wade, the federal abortion-rights ruling. It has been responsive to Trump’s wishes and slowed things down.
The court has also been shown to be vastly venal and corrupt. Clarence Thomas has received a great amount of money and equivalents from a multi-millionaire. There is no obligation on him to disclose that publicly, and no obligation on him to cease and desist.
His wife is a militant Trumpite, who was one of those at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Samuel Alito flew flags for the insurgent Trumpites. Neither recused themselves from the court when the insurrection or Trump were being discussed.
The Supreme Court is an element of absolute monarchy in the USA, and maybe it is appropriate that it sides with the monarchy-delusional ex-president Donald Trump.
But the whole thing is a mess, and it is anything but democracy, even on the level of the pluto-democracy that the US claims.
The Trumpite Republicans have been on the offensive for the last four, or eight, years. The Democrats have been, in many areas, in retreat. The prosecutions have been ridiculously late, and almost all of them will not be heard before the election. That is, the electorate will not before the 2024 election be given the information to which they are entitled before they vote.
Donald Trump has been given immense privilege. Astonishing privilege, considering what he tried to do.
Trump takes as his legal model the late Roy Cohn, a lawyer colleague of Joe McCarthy — the Joe McCarthy, anti-red witch-hunter and accomplished liar. Do anything. Say anything. Be as aggressive as money can be.
Nothing that the law can be bent to is ruled out.
The Republicans have shown themselves eager to exercise minority control and to back Trump. Trump’s rule in the Republican party is rule by physical force and the credible threat to use it.
The Republicans are on the offensive. The Democrats at best resort to selective defence, as with Black Lives Matter and abortion rights.
Trump and his friends criticise by their words and antics and attitudes the institutions of the American plutocracy. They criticise American foreign policy.
So does the left. The different is that the left usually offers constructive positive alternatives. What Trump and his friends do, and want to do, is replace what exists with worse.
When people prefer “democracy”, mostly it is in fact liberty that they think of — the absence, much of the time, of tyranny. The Trumpists advocate tyranny — theirs.
When we point out (and use Trump as an example), that in the rules of bourgeois law often money determines what happens, we want the rule of better law and no advantage for money. The Trumpist core want their own arbitrary rule, where money is everything. They want rule that discriminates against Black people and women. They are revolutionaries of the right. They are fascists.
- This article first appeared in Solidarity and on the Workers Liberty website.
Shiraz Socialist (Second Run) 