By Donald Earl Collins
The horrible truth is, Donald J Trump is back.
After winning against his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, he is once again the president-elect of the United States. He will return to the White House this coming January, exactly four years after he incited an insurrection to remain there after losing the 2020 election.
This will make him only the second man in history to serve nonconsecutive terms as US president (the other one was 19th-century Democrat Grover Cleveland). He is also on track to become the first Republican to win the popular vote in a presidential election in 20 years.
Trump has been impeached, faced multiple criminal trials and received felony convictions, but, in the end, none of this mattered to his supporters.
- Advertisement -
He has made one of the most stunning political comebacks in American history.
All this means that the world will not only witness a repeat of his first term in power. There is also every reason to believe, once back in office, he will build an administration much more oppressive, racist and consequential than the one he led in 2017-2021.
Trump’s second inauguration on January 20 will unleash a far-right, semi-autocratic regime, and an assault on what remains of representative democracy in the US on a federal level.
A few weeks before the election, Trump provided his fact-free version of an American past as his vision for the nation’s future.
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -
“You know, our country in the 1890s was … probably the wealthiest it ever was, because it was a system of tariffs,” he said. “And we had a president – you know McKinley, right? He was really a very good businessman, and he took in billions of dollars at the time.”
Forget the fact that William McKinley didn’t become president until 1897. And never mind that then-US Representative McKinley helped lead the US into the Panic of 1893–one of the most severe financial crises in US history–as his tariffs bill hurt the economy in the middle of a 20-year period of economic stagnation for most Americans.
What is important here is that Trump seems to view this period in American history–marked by extreme poverty, unchecked racist violence and widespread suffering at home and abroad–as a prime example of lost American greatness.
Trump’s plan for the US centres around old-style laissez-faire economics, isolationism, and white male supremacy – a real attempt at bringing the US back to the 1890s.
On the foreign policy front, Trump 2.0 will see an exacerbation of existing policies that already proved destructive and costly.
The first presidential term of Trump, and that of Joe Biden after him, were marked by an insistent refusal by Washington to engage in any effort to uphold international law and defend the rules-based order the US helped build after World War II.
Under Trump 2.0, this purposeful disengagement, which had horrific consequences across the world, will intensify into a new era of American isolationism, and likely pave the way for new conflicts and power struggles.
Trump has hinted that, as president, he would not support Ukraine in its ongoing war effort against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to help him because I feel very badly for those people. But he should never have let that war start.
The war’s a loser,” Trump recently said in reference to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s war-time president. There are widespread fears that Trump’s reluctance to back Ukraine in this war could lead to losses on the battlefield and on the diplomatic front that could prove devastating not only for Ukraine, but the security and stability of all its European neighbours.
And when it comes to Palestine, Trump appears in favour of giving Israel even more freedom to continue with its genocide than Biden, who did next to nothing to try and stop the carnage.
“I’m glad that Bibi decided to do what he had to do” despite Biden’s attempts to restrain him, Trump said last month in reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, supposedly to defeat Hamas in Gaza.
