HER refined and measured responses didn’t immediately conform to the image we like to construct of Donald Trump’s supporters. She was under interrogation by a BBC Home Counties radio presenter on Wednesday morning who was struggling to conceal her disdainful exasperation. “But he lies,” she declared of the American president, as though this were the unforgivable sin of global politics. “Of course he lies,” said the Republican, “but we like what he stands for.”
Her brief reply encapsulated all that the pollsters and the analysts had missed: Trump’s working class supporters know his flaws but find them preferable to being patronised by professional liberals.
The day before, an aide to Joe Biden was asked what America would look like under the Democratic challenger. “He’ll look after the middle classes,” declared the lackey. This is about as radical as it ever gets in the US where anything that threatens the rule of money and corporations is deemed to be a form of devil-worship.
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In the UK, meanwhile, a steady slew of fake virtue and sanctimony seeped from assorted social media platforms as dismal voices from the 'progressive' elites vied with each other to exult in Mr Trump’s expected defeat and exchange witty apercus. What do they all think is going to happen now that the beast is gone? How will they get their jollies now? For four years they used Mr Trump’s bizarre performance art presidency to reaffirm their sense of themselves as right-thinking people on the right side of history.
Trump’s mad, White House Monsters Ball left us a valuable bequest: he showed us what America was really like underneath the painted veneer of rectitude and decency. This nation is a playground bully given to sporadic bursts of extreme violence to ensure its writ runs in the civilised world. Mr Trump is the first President who was honest about this.
In an interview with Fox News reporter, Bill O’Reilly, in February, 2017 he was quizzed about his admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin. “He's a killer,” said O'Reilly. “There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?” Trump replied.
This President might have Made America Hate Again but when your country’s foreign policy is to sow tribal and sectarian hatred across the world as a means of protecting its interests his position can hardly be considered extreme.
Joe Biden, like all the other millionaire Democrats who have occupied the White House, will talk the talk. But, like them, he will preside over a society which deports families en masse, permits its police to kill black men with impunity: a nation where a high school student spends six years playing Russian roulette with the National Rifle Association.
Biden will pretend to get tough with the gun lobby but, as with everything else in this deeply uncivilised country, money will triumph over decency.
Latin American nations striving for fairness will be undermined by the CIA. A small war will begin somewhere: it usually does. The Middle East will remain unstable under its influence and the US will continue to construct its axis of evil to provide the usual suspects to blame for global instability.
This nation isn’t the land of opportunity but rather of missed opportunity. It’s great only in numbers and resources and thus able to produce more of those whom we consider to be geniuses. Blessed with possessing English as its mother tongue, its cultural dominance reigns supreme; its music, film, TV and literature exerting global influence. But it’s a nation great in delinquency too: persistently paranoid about socialism and any idea that workers might aspire to a fair share of its resources and profits.
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Like many bullies America is vain to a bizarre and outlandish level, spending untold billions on space exploration for little more reason than it can. It’s a gangster state that sponsors terrorism against the wrong sort of leader, democratically-elected or not. It made of Cuba a mafia jurisdiction for the whims of America’s monied classes and the thugs they loved to indulge and then blockaded it for three generations: the classic act of a bully who can’t get his own way.
It helped remove Salvador Allende in Chile to be replaced with a genocidal psychopath; it funded and led death squads in Nicaragua. At home it waged war against those of its own people who were suspected of being sympathetic to communism.
It’s since lowered the bar on that one to mere socialism. You might not now go to jail or have your career ruined for being a socialist but you can forget about running for office in any jurisdiction. It’s rendering of torture as a commodity in statecraft which it used as a bribe to corrupt those Western democracies – Britain among them – as they turned a blind eye to those unmarked planes landing under cover of night in far corners of their airports.
Nothing much of this will change under President Biden. He will be expected merely to look presidential. The corporate elites turned on Trump before this campaign only because he was giving capitalism a bad name. Joe Biden in the White House will restore the good PR for capitalism.
His voting record reveals him to be nothing more than the property of corporate America as he persistently favoured financial deregulation. He sided with the credit card companies in their fight to avoid being compelled to warn customers about hidden costs and rewarded Coca-Cola for their financial support by helping the soft drinks giant evade anti-trust legislation. His endorsement of legislation permitting investment and commercial banking to merge helped produce the toxic gas which exploded in the banking crisis of 2008.
He was backed by Michael Bloomberg, the $60Bn oligarch and the venture capitalist vultures of Silicon Valley. When it was clear that he had ended Bernie Sanders' tilt for the White House there was a sharp spike in health insurers’ stocks. The Democrats ditched Sanders, who wanted to re-calibrate America’s healthcare system in favour if its poorest citizens, for him.
In a Joe Biden presidency it will be big business as usual. The only difference to Trump will be better-fitting suits and obedience to the auto-cue.
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