US and Trump phenomenon

S P SETH

Considering Donald’s Trump’s impromptu twitter pronouncements during and after presidential election in the US, it is not surprising that many in and outside the United States are in a state of shock. And among most shocked probably are the country’s intelligence agencies he has been openly contemptuous of, notwithstanding the fact that he is now changing his tune after his inauguration as the US President. At one time he reportedly said that, “I won’t use them, because they’ve made such bad decisions.” And their conclusion that Russian hacking might have helped Trump get elected is casting his election as unsavory, if not downright illegitimate. And this is going to haunt Trump all through his time as President and he is going to cast doubt on their competence. Even without the findings of the intelligence community about Russia’s cyber hacking role to help Trump’s election, he hasn’t been comfortable that his rival, Hillary Clinton, got nearly 3 million more votes than him.

Though his election as President through the country’s Electoral College system, which finally decides the winner, is legal, but to have lost by way of popular votes does diminish his standing. And on top of it to be told that he won due to Putin’s involvement on his behalf makes Trump look like Putin’s American agent. Trump’s response to this has been two fold. First, as earlier pointed out, he sought to rubbish the country’s intelligence agencies. And the most telling argument he has used to highlight this was their comprehensive failure on Saddam Hussein’s supposed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD), which formed the basis for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. As we know that Saddam didn’t have any such arsenal, but the US invasion of Iraq is now regarded by many as one of the worse foreign policy disasters in the country’s history.

Secondly, he is seeking to change the perception that Putin and Russia are somehow the US’ natural enemy, even after reluctantly conceding that Russia did interfere in the electoral process through hacking of Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) emails as based on intelligence presented to him. But he blamed the DNC for failing to protect their system. In any case, according to Trump’s interpretation, it was not a bad thing that Putin and the new US President would able to chart a new course for US-Russia relations. At the same time, he viciously criticized US intelligence agencies for ‘leaking’ unverified intelligence, likening it to Nazi Germany, suggesting that Trump might be prone to Russian blackmail as they have salacious material on him during his romp in a Moscow hotel in 2013. The US intelligence agencies have denied the leak but not certified that it is fake and/or planted. Therefore, there is going to be a stand off, of sorts, between Trump and much of the intelligence community, requiring his administration to overhaul the system or to subvert it. Hence, his initial overtures to CIA reportedly saying that, “I love you, I respect you, and there’s nobody I respect more.”

The argument that Russia could even be a natural ally in some ways will be difficult to sell when many people in the US grew up believing the worst about it during the long Cold War period. And this has since been reinforced with the crisis in Ukraine, where Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine is seen as a serious threat. Indeed, the Obama administration, just before the transition to power with Trump as new President, saw fit to send troops and heavy armor to Poland as deterrence to a perceived Russian threat to that country. But Trump is keen to change that perception and not dwell on the negative. His advise to reporters at one point was that, “I think we ought to get on with our lives.”

He also approvingly quoted Julian Assange’s denial that the material WikiLeaks put up on the Internet was sourced from Russian sources. It might be worth noting that Julian Assange has been regarded by the US establishment as one of their most hated foreign traitor from an allied country, being an Australian citizen now sheltering in Ecuador embassy in London. In seeking to fend off charges of Russian involvement to facilitate his election victory, Trump, at times, finds himself in circular arguments. For instance, he praised Putin for not reacting to the US expulsion of Russian intelligence operatives following the accusation of cyber hacking. He tweeted, “Great move on delay [by Putin]. I always knew he was very smart!”

He was thus suggesting that Putin cleverly helped Trump administration from having to react to any Russian expulsion, if carried out, of US operatives from that country. In this way he further reinforced his favorable view of Putin, having told reporters in December 2015 that, “He [Putin] is a really brilliant and talented person.” He has said that the US and Russia do not need to be on opposite sides as they have common interests, like defeating IS.

While Trump has been rubbishing US intelligence, highlighting its classical failure about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, some Russian commentators mocked the findings of the US intelligence community accusing their country of hacking its computer systems. One commentator, pointing to the lack of any concrete evidence, compared it with the intelligence about Iraq, which set out the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Alexey Pushkov, a member of the defence and security of the Russian parliament’s upper house, tweeted that, “Mountain gave birth to a mouse: all accusations against Russia are based on ‘confidence’ and assumptions. US was [also] sure about Hussein possessing WMD in the same way.”

The amazing thing is that at the public level, despite Trump’s open embrace of Putin and reports of Russian interference in the US presidential election, he doesn’t seem to be suffering any serious popular backlash. Which brings us again to the factors that contributed to the Trump phenomenon. Interestingly, such upheaval was foreseen by Richard Rorty, a left-leaning American philosopher, as far back as 1998 in his book, “Achieving Our Country”. He predicted that the neglected working class would not tolerate its marginalization for long and that: “Something will crack.” He wrote (as quoted in The New Yorker), “The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for---someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…”

And he added that, “One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.” Rorty might not have Trump in mind, but his prescient analysis of a storm brewing couldn’t have been more right as seen now. What remains to be seen now is how this wrecking ball, called Trump, will go about doing the demolition job.  

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au