Donald Trump won the election…so what now?
by Kit
In the wake of the shocking result of the US Presidential election, we take a look at some of the key questions left up in the air. How did things go so wrong for Hillary Clinton? How will the world look when the dust has settled? Is this really a sign of any kind of change?
Question 1: What the hell just happened?
Most people, most pundits most media outlets were predicting a Clinton victory. The pundits and reporters, because Hillary was “qualified” and “competent”. Everyone else…because she could follow Obama’s example and mobilise the virtue-signalling vote, and even if she didn’t it would just be rigged. As the primaries evidently were.
The vast majority of the media were behind Clinton. The banks were too. As was Wall Street, big pharma, arms manufacturers, senior figures from both major political parties and (seemingly, anyway) the military and intelligence services. How could that much collective clout possibly fail to pull out the W? How did they let this happen?
You are left with three possibilities.
1, elections aren’t rigged. Simply put, all the weight behind Clinton could only exercise legitimate and transparent power. They could give interviews, write opinion pieces and campaign…and that’s all. They fought hard, and they lost. Fair and square. Given what we know about 2000, 2004 and the democratic primaries this seems unlikely.
2, elections can be controlled, but only in a limited fashion. This was talked about at length following the Brexit vote (which many people have suggested was nothing like as close as the “official figures” made it look). This idea posits that numbers can be manipulated, but not controlled. You can fudge them up and down, but full-on fakery leaves too much evidence, or is simply too difficult. It’s possible that Clinton was just SO mistrusted, SO hated, SO incredibly unpopular, that even with the collective might of 90% of the political and media establishment behind her…they just couldn’t swing the vote. This is plausible, especially if you paid attention to the crowd sizes at their respective rallies.
[Note: These situations both come with the rider that, much like sports, it may only be possible to rig an election if both sides are willing to cooperate. Maybe Trump wouldn’t let it slide the way Al Gore or Bernie Sanders were happy to do.]
3, somebody changed sides. Maybe the election was rigged, but in the other direction. Maybe the sudden, unexpected reopening of the e-mail investigation was a deliberate ploy by the FBI (and others, behind the scenes) to swing public opinion against Hillary. Maybe the rumors of immediate impeachment should Hillary win, and of possible ties to paedophiles and human trafficking, were the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s possible that an establishment already creaking alarmingly under the weight of Clinton’s baggage, decided Clinton was now simply too much trouble. And that it might be easier to chance their arm on a man who might be willing to play ball, and was less likely to throw up a constitutional crisis and/or suddenly drop dead.
It’s recently become obvious, given the flip-flopping over Ukraine and Syria, that the American political establishment is far from a monolith of drive and purpose. There are internal divisions. There are factions. Trying to distill any kind of rational plan from their resulting actions is like trying to follow the score in a game of Rugby where four teams are playing at once, and they’re all wearing the same uniform.
Question 2: Will Trump Be Allowed to take office?
Just as happened following the Brexit vote (and to a lesser extent Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader), already this result has sprouted protest movements, petitions and articles either directly challenging its legitimacy, or simply questioning the “democratic value” of the American electoral system.
As the results were coming in last night, I personally witnessed tweets suggesting Obama should refuse to relinquish his office to Trump. Protest marches have already been held in many cities across America. If these protests escalate to riots, or street battles, Obama could declare a state of emergency which “delays” the swearing-in of the new president, Trump supporters would see this (rightly) as a possible coup attempt, leading to further violent unrest and the declaration of martial law. Extreme, but not impossible. Any move to replace Trump before he’s even in office would be totally unprecedented and grossly unconstitutional. But so was Gitmo.
Before the vote was held, the democrats were fervently and hysterically blaming the Russians for “interfering” with the election, baseless rumors which the media eagerly and unquestioningly repeated. You could argue this was done to preemptively defend themselves in the event of a Trump win. Undermining the result before there even was one. The Russian “hacks” are cited as the main cause behind this petition, calling for an overthrow of a Trump government, on the grounds he stole the election. This issue could be picked up more widely in the media in the coming days.
The long, long, long delay before Hillary finally appeared to make her concession speech makes one wonder if, behind the scenes, there may have been wheels turning. Think tanks furiously going over the options and outcomes should Clinton simply refuse to concede the election and publicly call into question the fairness of the vote. In the end, what would have finally sunk that possibility is the pompous way Clinton’s team responded to Trump’s own suggestion there may be vote rigging. To turn around and “disrespect our democracy” after she lost would have laid Clinton open to justified claims of hypocrisy.
There are more old fashioned methods of removing an unwanted president, of course. It’s very telling that “assassination” was shooting up the google search ranks as the results were announced last night. And America has never been short a lone wolf assassin when it really, really needed one.
Question 3: What sort of man is Donald Trump?
It’s tempting, at moments such as this, to blindly and joyfully accept outcome as a win for good guys. I’m not going to deny I was, more than anything, relieved when I saw the result. The possibility of a psychopathic warhawk pushing for a war with Russia, with the full weight of a self-deluded middle-class high on their own moral outrage behind her, was terrifying. But not so long ago Barack Obama was…for want of a better phrase…the great white hope. He was going to change things…but didn’t. In the end he was simply an Orwellian controlled alternative. It’s possible that’s all Trump is, too.
It’s possible Trump is just a pompous windbag who would say or do anything to get into power, simply for the sake of having power. It’s possible he’s an elaborate ploy designed to satiate an angry public thirsty for real change, and buy the oligarch elite more time to milk us dry or blow us all up for some crazy reasons of their own. Both plausible, but let’s put them aside for now.
Let’s say that Trump is sincere in his goals, and let’s say he is allowed to take office and try to introduce his policies – both big ifs, but still. How much institutional and bureaucratic resistance will he encounter? How many threats and extortions will he face? Does he have the strength of character to face down that opposition? Very few people do. Most politicians sell their souls for power, or resign themselves to impotence. It takes an extraordinary person to keep a hold of themselves and their ideals, in a political environment double loaded with both temptation and threat.
All through the election cycle the democrats were far more interested in talking about punch lines, snappy quotes and identity politics than discussing policy. That’s because any real discussion of policies would only push a lot of people into voting for Trump. He want’s to cut-out hostilities with Russia and cooperate in combating terrorism. He wants to slash defense spending and rebuild industry. He wants to pull American bases out of Japan, Germany, South Korea and others, and relinquish America’s self-styled title of “World Policeman”. He wants to stop corporations from employing illegal immigrants to get around paying minimum wage. He has posited leaving NATO.
These are all, on the face of it, reasonable policies that could bring America back from the brink. And they are all, on their own, potentially career ending for any other politician in the Western world.
Will he ever be allowed to enact a single one of them? I guess we’ll see.
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Great Take Kit as usual. The deep state and the corporate state will never let up. They control the game . This time they couldn’t control who would be their front person. History tells us anybody going against the machine will be destroyed. lets c who he appoints in his administration. That will be telling. Flyn is already disqualified from replacing that schill Ashton Carter. Also who will replace the head of the fed. Further more look at the European political establishment trying to shun him. I still think that the fascist state of affairs in the western world has hit a dangerous climax, Trumps election has at least for the time being brought some much needed detente. We in the west r being lead to a disastrous confrontation cause the western Oligarchs want the whole cake and want to eat it leaving us the sheeple to die and waste… Read more »
You people have painted yourself into a corner. By failing to recognize that Putin was a reactionary pig and that Trump was no better despite his “qualifications” of being not Hillary Clinton, you will inevitably be drawn into defending a twosome that no serious leftist would ever do.
https://www.rt.com/usa/366579-soros-orgs-driving-trump-protests/
For voters hoping to ease global tensions and diminish the threat of World War III, Donald Trump seemed to be saying some sensible things on the campaign trail. He questioned the role of NATO, and the use of “regime change” by the U.S. against other nations. He asked why the U.S. and Russia couldn’t be partners rather than belligerents. He even questioned why the U.S. must always play the role of the world’s policeman and suggested that the U.S. should turn its attention to solving its own domestic problems. Such campaign rhetoric was unusual and likely struck a chord with some war-weary listeners. But in early September 2016, in a move that should have received far more attention than it did, Trump appointed former CIA director James Woolsey as his senior advisor on national security issues. Woolsey – a key member of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century… Read more »
I have to admit to my own ignorance and susceptibility to political manipulation when Obama won in 2008. I couldn’t help but think of the history of African Americans and the apparent momentousness of the win. I was, though, an early adopter of the view that ‘Hope and Change’ was, as was soon obvious, hopeless expansion of the evilness. Obama kept the incumbent Republican secretary of Defence (Gates) and employed all the banksters who’d screwed the country over to run the economy – what more did we need to know about his program ? Deja vu 2016. The vote was rigged. Trump has nobody to employ except the crooked swamp monsters who are long established in Washington and Wall Street. He has no way of disassembling the permanent war economy; he cannot make America anything except the empire that it is. He has no political program except a continuation of… Read more »
Not only does he have the PNAC/CIA Woolsey- he also has the other 9/11 war criminal Guiliani on his team. And his right hand man Mike Flynn is yet another war pig.
There’s a striking lack of discussion, among HRC’s tragic supporters, about her public record as a War Criminal. Trump is probably a sexist, racist vulgarian (though far from off the scale for his class: look at Bill Clinton), but is he a War Criminal? Has he presided over, for example, the War Crime of Libya’s invasion, destruction and the rape-murder of its leader (about which HRC has a good laugh on camera)? While I can understand why no Clinton supporter cares to respond to the facts behind the many unprosecuted charges (of bad ethics, amorality and straight out illegality, on a global scale) against her, don’t you also see that the Clintonista silence on these matters is so blatant that it’s laughable? Yes, this election was a choice between having one’s fingers broken or having one’s eyes put out… but there are still people arguing, apparently, that having one’s eyes… Read more »
The best thing about Trump is that he is not an ideologue. That is obvious by looking at how he changes his position on things. At one stage, he was Democrat and supported single payer health insurance, for example. We can also see that he says one thing but then changes his mind, for example modifying his original statement that all Muslims be banned from entering the US to simply stated that America has to be more careful about who is allowed to enter. I think having someone like him who is flexible in their thinking is far better than having someone with fixed ideas who tries to impose those ideas on the world, as Hillary was prone to do, like with her insistence that ‘Assad has to go’, or her unsubstantiated statement about Russia’s aggressiveness, with no evidence to support that assertion. Any idiot can see that it is… Read more »
you could say he is ‘flexible’- or another way of looking at it is that he is a total bullshit artist- who will do and say anything to get what he wants. I would suggest the latter interpretation is likely more accurate.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/donald-trump-after-blasting-iraq-war-picks-top-iraq-hawk-james-woolsey-as-national-security-adviser/5555974
Reports of Jamie Dimon flagged for the head of US Treasury.
‘Draining the swamp’ …..?
It’s way too early to say what, if anything, a Trump presidency will achieve. He’s starting with such low expectations almost anything that isn’t a disaster will be seen as a triumph. His victory speech was short and direct and seemed to indicate he wanted to be another FDR putting America to work again following a massive infrastructure programme repairing the highways, byways and bridges, which really do need attention. So Trump’s a… corporatist of a kind, Mussolini would have approved. I’m convinced he doesn’t see the sense in going to war with Russia over Ukraine or the Crimea. He’d probably prefer to build hotels and casinos there instead of bombing the Crimean coast. There’s a potential fortune to be made in Russia, only it’ll never allow itself to become a western colony or another Libya. It can be a desparately lonely and miserable job being the president, if one… Read more »
Does your popular vote figure include Arizona, Michigan and New Hampshire – or are they still undeclared?
Excellent Kit. If we suspend speculation and disbelief – If you were going to cook an election – what a result! A politically naive, narcisistic and venal client atop the Executive branch – (political infighting aside) both houses of the Legislative branch – and (with a raft of appointments to come) the Judicial branch all in the bag. Where are the “checks and balances?” It is like 1776 never happened. As for real change – the political architecture is in place – how will he use it? On foreign policy – will he reverse Barbarossa 2.0 (the biggest troop deployment on Russia’s border since 1941); stop arming NATO; and de-escalate the situation with Putin over Novorussia / Crimea? Will he reverse the Asia Pivot – repatriate American bases and allow China to open up “Silk routes” to consolidate a trading bloc in the Pacific Rim? Will the Diego Garcians get… Read more »
Well, one good thing has happened already as a result of Trump’s victory, or so it seems. Obama decided just today to begin bombing al-Qaeda “affiliated” al-Nusra for the first time – our own terrorists! Seems like the jig is up, at least the Syrian jig. A sign of good things to come? Lets hope so.
Obama directs Pentagon to target al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, one of the most formidable forces fighting Assad –
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-directs-pentagon-to-target-al-qaeda-affiliate-in-syria-one-of-the-most-formidable-forces-fighting-assad/2016/11/10/cf69839a-a51b-11e6-8042-f4d111c862d1_story.html
8 hours ago –
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead, Schumer tells labor leaders –
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/10/the-trans-pacific-partnership-is-dead-schumer-tells-labor-leaders/
And, a few days later, Ford has told Trump that they won’t move the SUV factory to Mexico…
In answer to my own question – no, the Chagosians will not be getting Diego Garcia back. It would be too expensive to repatriate them. Expect the USAAF to get another 50yr lease on the island later this year.
Kit, I think you mean “lone wolf” assassin, don’t you, since the official killers are usually patsies set up by the factions within the ruling power-mafias, who actually organise the political killings. Obviously true of Oswald, to anyone who looks seriously at the accumulated evidence around the Kennedy killing.
Thought provoking as ever.
If you are going to list Trump’s policy promises then you should include the environmental, the women’s rights and the racial – for balance.
I remember Obama’s promises and the reality- as explored in Scott Noble’s film ‘Lifting The Veil’ here:
The demonstrations against Trump represent a similar reaction to that seen here in the UK following the Leave result of the EU referendum. Now in the US – as then in the UK – the losers cannot contain their angst at the result. Clinton was – eventually – gracious in conceding defeat – but what else could she do? Trump learned from Brexit and had Nigel Farage, Leader of UKIP, on hand to assist and advise him. What they both realised was that there was a significant constituency of largely un-polled people, whose ideas, opinions and values were largely ignored by the liberal and conservative media. They were the “left-behinders”, people for whom a globalised world of international trade deals had meant only that the quality of their lives has been going downhill for at least the last two decades. They were an untapped source of political power, which existed… Read more »
In both cases the young metropolitan “haves” appear the most brainwashed.
Trump is a capitalist, fantastically wealthy and a maverick. He is no representative of the Blue Collar vote he was able to mobilise after Sander’s capitulation to Clinton’s game rigging. His promises were/are nothing more than simple rhetorical devices to take people along for the ride. If there is any ideological aspect to him it will be cut throat capitalism dressed up as “I’ve got just what you need now dear punters to weather the storm”. Ponchos, any colour you like, but they will be black. Maybe he’s a patsy or maybe those Neocon Republicans who changed horses got the kicking, along with the M$M, they all deserved. They certainly had it coming. But it was a kicking they helped organise. But I can’t help thinking that though it appeared horses were changed during the race, the riders and their promoters organising the games are still the same. You might… Read more »
As far as it goes, this piece is very good indeed. It brings welcome nuance after 24 hours simplistic indulgence, both from those who welcome the result and those who do not. Nicely penned too. I especially like “… a psychopathic warhawk pushing for a war with Russia, with the full weight of a self-deluded middle-class high on their own moral outrage behind her…” What the piece fails to address, however, are the many nasty aspects to Trump’s appeal: his climate denialism for one, the fact life looks set to get a good deal scarier for millions of Americans with the wrong skin colour for another. In particular – and without for a moment denying the global evils wrought by HRC and what she represents – I fear the liberation within America of deeply unpleasant forces, and the emboldening of very nasty people. I’ve recently commented on an editorial in… Read more »
“Let’s say that Trump is sincere in his goals, and let’s say he is allowed to take office and try to introduce his policies – both big ifs, but still.” Introduce his policies? Um, he could try- but no won’t happen- actually cannot happen. Firstly most of Trump’s major promises are impossible and therefore undeliverable. He will not create a tsunami of jobs, the Mexicans will not pay for the wall that won’t be built, he cannot deport all of the ‘illegals’ in a few months, nor can he ‘extreme vet’ muslims. If he imposes a Muslim travel ban- that single action would likely cause the world economy to immediately go into 2008 style freefall… He cannot cut the corporate tax rate in half: and pay for all the new infrastructure he promises. Many of his major promises- would actually be highly detrimental to his own business interests and empire.… Read more »
In regards to the last paragraph of this contribution the clear suggestion is that the US elite/shadow Government (s) are preparing the US at least, if not as much of the world as possible, for an intense dose of shock doctrine. Trump won the Presidency, in the usual nominal terms, back in the summer when the Democratic Convention and the DNC hierarchy deliberately scuppered the candidacy of the only candidate capable of harnessing the discontent with the economic neo liberal, political neo conservative and social neo feudalism of the end of history exceptionalism of the Washington Consensus for progressive ends in favour of one of their own with a proven track record as a sociopath. Even if Clinton failed to win there were and are sufficient fail safes within the system to deal with any potential lone mavericks like Trump who will find it next to impossible to deliver on… Read more »
“If I was paranoid I would say he has been put into power as a Patsy- to act as a catalyst for social disintegration, bring about chaos, martial law, instability leading to war and ultimately global depopulation – taking us directly to a new ‘managed’ phase of humanity, the post-apocalyptic ‘Hunger games’ type dystopian world that Hollywood et al seems so keen on predicting these days”…
The fact you can express this idiocy, even online, tells me, yes you are FUCKING MENTALLY PARANOID. But don’t worry ur purdy lil ‘ead too much. If there ever is a ‘managed phase of humanity’ you will have been weeded out well before anything of interest ever occurs.
cheers- and- fuck you too. 🙂