Donald Trump – the Great Belittler
Donald Trump wants to make
America Great Again. What is
greatness? First of all, it is physical
size: heavily built, stout, corpulent, huge. It can mean pregnant, as in great with
child. It can mean strong, vigorous, powerful and violent, as in a great storm.
It can mean having significant effects; important, weighty, distinguished,
prominent, famous, renowned or impressive.
Of nations, it means important, powerful or famous. Great can signify
anything of considerable degree, intensity or extent; or the most important
kind or pre-eminent. Of times of days,
it means critical. It can mean outstanding exceptional ability, or high birth
of wealth and power.
Greatness is a morally and ethically neutral term. One can
speak of a great good, or a great evil; both are great. The United States is
already a big country, with a huge GNP; it is powerful and famous and in many
ways exceptional. So, what does Donald Trump mean when he says he wants to make
America Great Again?
For the answer we have to
examine Mr. Trump’s behavior. Trump sees
greatness as a zero sum game. For the United States to be great, other nations
and people need to suck. Number one on Trump’s suckshit
nations list is Mexico. We’re going to
build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it. Trump not only likes to insult people, he
wants to humiliate them. One of the
truisms of American history is that one reason America is great is that it has
had two centuries of peace, with no wars fought on its soil, because it has
been protected by two great oceans and two friendly neighbors: Canada and
Mexico, with demilitarized borders. Just
think how much poorer the United States would be if it had had to station
troops all along both borders for the past two centuries.
Trump’s campaign style
similarly seeks to belittle and humiliate his opponents. He was a drum major
for the birther movement, belittling Obama’s birth
and casting doubt on his bona fides to be a citizen and president. One need not
be a literary critic with an advanced degree from an Ivy League English
Department to recognize the racist implications of challenging the first
sitting black president to prove that he is really an American.
But Trump is an equal opportunity insulter; “Lying” Ted
Cruz, “Crooked” Hillary Clinton, and belittler, “Little Marco” Rubio, insulting
the looks of Carly Fiorina
“Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”, and mocking a
physically handicapped newspaper reporter. Meanwhile, the Donald is 100% great,
his hands and penis are big, his book (ghost written) is a best seller, he is a successful businessman in spite of multiple
bankruptcies and, to top it all off, he’s not even going to release his tax
return. He forced Obama to release his
birth certificate, but Trump isn’t going to release his tax return. Isn’t that
great? Rules that apply to others do not apply to the Donald. He thinks he’s an
Israeli.
Trump is a great fighter. He fights with everyone. If he is
already fighting with Mexico, one of the United State’s greatest friends, he
will be fighting with everyone as president. His comment is telling on the
Chinese insult to Obama on his arrival at the Hangzhou G20 Summit where the
Chinese “forgot” to roll out the red carpet and forced Obama to disembark by
the back stairs of his plane. Trump said, “You know what, I would just say,
that’s it, let’s get out of here.”
Trump’s idea of greatness is
bullying and an immodest egocentrism.
The Chinese are miffed at the push back against their expansion in the
South China Sea. Trump would rather go
right to a shooting match than to eat a little crow to preserve the Chinese
face, so they might be persuaded to peacefully accept the International Court’s
decision against their claim. Of course,
it’s not Trump’s children or grandchildren who would be at risk in this ego
inflating grandstanding; its’ the Mexicans, blacks, poor and the other untermenschen who aren’t real Americans. Draft dodgers like
Trump, people who inherit millions, they’re the great,
real Americans. The Mexicans who helped the US win World War II and fought and
died in Vietnam are scum.
Insulting other people may make one feel good, but
eventually the belittled and humiliated victims are going to get angry and
strike back, because self-respect is the only thing most dirt poor people have,
and they’ll defend it with their lives. Where do you think the suicide bombers
come from, Trump Tower?
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But undeniably and justifiably, vast
majorities feel America is going in the wrong direction and that there are
serious economic problems. So what’s the cause and the
solution? I have just finished reading Arsenals of Folly: The
Making of the Nuclear Arms Race by Richard Rhodes. At the end, the late
Richard J. Barnet, a co-founder of the Institute for Policy studies and a
Russian scholar, notes: “Although the United States came out of World War II
the most powerful nation on earth – perhaps, briefly, the paramount nation of
all time – it has not won a decisive military victory since 1945 despite the
trillions spent on the military and the frequent engagement of its military forces.
What the United States got instead of victory was a national security state
with a permanent war economy maintained by a military-industrial complex – much
like the Soviet Union in those departments, but with a far greater reserve of
resources to squander. The national security state structures could not
accomplish their task unless the American people were socialized to accept the
idea that the only peace possible is a form of permanent war…A threat of one
sort or another to justify the continuous flow of resources to the military was
now a fixture of American life. It is one of history’s great ironies that at
the very moment when the United States had a monopoly of nuclear weapons,
possessed most of the world’s gold, produced half the world’s goods on its own
territory, and laid down the rules for allies and adversaries alike, it was
afraid.”
Donald Trump is calling for
even more military spending, when the infrastructure of the United States is
collapsing, when young people, crushed by student debt and unable to find
secure, high paying jobs, can not buy houses or start families, when the
central cities look like war zones with comparable fatalities from gun shot
wounds. Donald Trump wants to pursue
policies that double down, not on what made America great, but on what brought
it to this unconscionable point of collapse.
Anyone interested in the source and solution to this huge
conundrum should read former Defense Secretary William J. Perry’s My Journey on the Nuclear Brink or visit
his website at http://www.wjperryproject.org His goal is to educate Americans about the
real perils and possibilities of nuclear arms and their control. The United States and Russia, because of the
arms control and reduction agreements of the 1980’s and 1990’s,
have 6,970 and 7,300 nuclear weapons respectively. Britain, France, China,
India, Pakistan, Israel
and North Korea combined have another 1,065. Iran has no nuclear
weapons and is a signer of the Non Proliferation Treaty, while Israel has 80
nuclear weapons and is not a signer of the Non Proliferation Treaty. Yet, the presidential candidates act like
Iran is a great threat requiring hundreds of billions in arms.
Bruce Russett, the Yale scholar,
says the following about the economic consequences of investing in military
power rather than civilian needs:
Since
future production is dependent upon current investment, the economy’s future resources and power base are thus
much more severely damaged
by the decision to build or employ current military power
than is current indulgence. According to some rough estimates…an additional
dollar of investment in
any single year will produce 20-25% of annual additional
production in perpetuity. Hence, if an extra billion dollars of defense in one
year reduced investment
by $292 million, thenceforth the level of output in the
economy would be permanently diminished
by a figure on the order of $65 million per year.
As Columbia University economist Seymour Melman says, “The dollars that pay for the operation of the
military system finally represent something forgone from other aspects of life,
especially those parts that are also dependent on financing from the
community’s public budgets.” This is indisputable, since civil destitution is
exactly what happened to the Soviet Union and now it is happening to the United
States. So, the only way to fix the economic and social problems that everyone
agrees need fixing, is to reduce the amount of money
spent on the military.
One final note on Hillary Clinton. One reason the
race is so close is because there does not seem to be a real difference between
the foreign policies of Clinton and Trump. They seem to be in a race to see who
can get the United States into a war in the Middle East fastest. Neither seem to be
committed to making Israel obey the UN resolutions in which it has been in
violation for six decades and is one of the major causes of what the
Republicans like to call radical Islamic terrorism. Radical Israeli terrorism and ethnic
cleansing, which should equally appall believers in civil society, gets a free
pass from a significant minority of American and western legislators. What the
west is facing is not religious war, but race war, because the United States
has different standards of behavior depending on whether the person is light
skinned and speaks English, or is dark skinned and speaks a language they do
not understand. One thing the election of Barack Obama has proved beyond a
doubt is that the white United States population is still overwhelmingly
racist. No president has ever been
treated with such disrespect by the Congress.
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