Donald Trump and the United Failed States of America
Donald Trump, the
outsider candidate with no governmental experience, seems to have captured the
Republican nomination for one reason and one reason only. For the past seven years, the Republican
Party, even when in control of both houses of Congress, has done nothing but
take cheap shots at Obama and do everything possible to thwart his agenda. The
Republicans have not presented any programmatic alternatives. Under Ted Cruz’s leadership, it tried to shut
down the government unless his religious views were reflected in the laws. So
when Donald Trump started to surge in the primaries, the established office
holders had no positive program or accomplishments to point to in order to
persuade voters to give him or her their support.
However,
Trump does not have the nomination yet.
His very inexperience may yet be his undoing. The closer he gets to the nomination and the
more he is forced to deal with the governmental, as opposed to the political,
aspects of running for president, the more inept he will appear. Furthermore, his refusal to release his tax
returns may have a simple explanation.
He didn’t pay any and that would seriously damage his chances in
November.
It reminded me of one of the
little mentioned aspects of the Watergate scandal. While Nixon was being battered and hung on
through all the allegations, what ultimate did him in was the fact that he paid
virtually no federal income taxes while he was president due to the high
valuations he gave to his Vice-presidential papers that he donated to the
government. When Trump applied to the
New Jersey Gaming Commission for a license to operate a casino he would open in
Atlantic City in 1984, his 1978 and 1979 returns showed that Trump claimed a
negative income of $3.8 million, meaning he paid no taxes. A few years earlier,
Trump told the New York Times that he
was worth $200 million.
As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.” Trump himself may even come to understand
that either he can not win, or he can not do the job, or both, and let someone
else be the Repblican nominee for the good of the
country or because he doesn’t want to be held responsible for Hillary’s
victory. Donald Trump is essentially a
fringe candidate who has captured a major party nomination. This situation is
not unprecedented. In 1986, two
supporters of conservative Democrat Lyndon Larouche
defeated the regular Democratic candidates for Lieutenant Governor and
Secretary of State who had been chosen by gubernatorial candidate Adlai E.
Stevenson, III. This created a conundrum
for the scion of the famous political family, who was reluctant to mount a
campaign in concert with Larouche’s followers.
In a closer analogy to the current situation with Trump, the
2002 French presidential election was upended when a splintered left opposition
enabled Jean Marie Le Pen, the far right nationalist candidate, to squeak into
second place past prime minister Lionel Jospin, the Socialist favorite, and win the right to face President
Jacques Chirac in the run-off. In the
event, Chirac refused to participate in the debate to which he had agreed when
it appeared that Jospin would be his opponent and the
entire French establishment supported him.
The rise of Trump and the failure of the Republican
establishment to have an alternative program to stop him points to a more
serious problem. I have been reading Pakistan
and Bangladesh, Flirting with Failure in South Asia by William B. Milam who
has been ambassador to both countries.
He says that failed states arise when the politicians who win elections,
once in power, fail to govern the country but devote all their energies to
remaining in power, regardless of the consequences for the country. This is why a Trump victory would be a
disaster for the nation. As is already
evident, the Republican congress has been willing to shut down the government
to thwart Obama. It is now crippling the
Supreme Court by refusing to hold hearings on Obama’s nominee to fill the
vacancy created by Anthony Scalia’s death. That’s two of the three branches of
the federal government that are AWOL.
Only the President now stands against complete paralysis and collapse.
Where Republicans have come to power in the states, they are
rolling back the civil rights gains by instituting voter ID requirements and
reducing voting opportunities designed to depress turnout among the young,
minorities and the poor. And the deafening silence of every Republican toward
the selection of George W. Bush after he lost the election in 2000 raises the
question of whether the Republicans believe in democracy at all. Allowing the
loser to take the office is the ultimate power grab at the expense of the national
interest. Trump’s surge is the ultimate test, the revote of the 2000
election. Does the Republican
establishment believe in democracy?
Every Republican candidate is caught in an unhappy conundrum. To support
Trump means supporting an outright racist and the consequences that would have
for their future political ambitions. To not support Trump means disrespecting
a plurality of her or his own party. It
is a lose-lose situation politically.
All the country needs is a loudmouthed, draft dodging, deadbeat
president with no program or governmental experience and the country could
easily be at war or in a state of economic collapse and domestic disorder even before
he takes the oath of office. If Obama
and Clinton seem unappealing, at least they believe in government. If you think government is expensive, take a
little trip to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malyasia, Egypt,
Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or anyplace where
civil rights and rule of law barely exist and you can be arrested and thrown
into snake pit prisons for nothing. Hostage taking has always been an economic
enterprise for desperately poor people. Now the Republicans are using hostage
taking as a political tool in domestic American politics.
Too many people in the United
States really believe in American exceptionalism,
that the rules that apply to others just do not apply to them. I hope they’re right.
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