“WITH malice towards none” and “justice for all” are justly among the best remembered phrases of the second inaugural address by America’s first Republican president, just weeks before he was assassinated. Abraham Lincoln also wanted “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and to “achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and between all nations.”
The inclinations of the latest Republican president — I’m probably being too optimistic there, but one lives in hope — could broadly be summed up as the opposite. But even “malice towards all” is not a consistent objective. The vaunted 25pc tariffs against imports from Mexico and Canada were paused this week after minor concessions from their heads of government, while Xi Jinping was reportedly next on the calling list, and a tête-à-tête with proclaimed war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu also pending at the time of writing.
The leading Israeli genocidal maniac was the first head of government to receive an invitation to the White House, which just might help to remind bodies such as Arabs for Trump of their idiocy. Their favoured candidate continues to insist on the ethnic cleansing of Gazans — possibly followed in his imagination by the rebuilding of the occupied territory as a tourist zone by the Saudis and Emiratis, in collusion with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The first Trump term’s ruling method was spelt out by Steve Bannon: “All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them we three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all our stuff done … But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.” The strategy hasn’t changed much, but this time there is a co-president Bannon despises. Elon Musk’s tentacles are all over government departments, and his initial target appears to be USAID — which may not be quite as benign as its liberal defenders pretend, but has occasionally pursued commendable goals.
Trump’s tariffs on hold as tantrums carry on.
Perhaps because of that, Musk — reared in apartheid South Africa — sees it as “viper’s nest of radical left Marxists who hate America”, while his putative boss says “it’s run by radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”.
Radical lunatics have indeed been unleashed in the US, but don’t count on the Democrats to get them out. The supposed opposition’s tendency to kowtow to the slightly new order is not a surprise. Since at least the 1990s, Democrats have deemed it opportune to abide by the neoliberal Thatcher-Reagan consensus of the preceding decade, with neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama striving for any policies that might convince the electorate that their lives would substantially improve under a Democratic administration. Their successor Joe Biden perished by failing to recognise that he was a creature of the past.
So is Trump in many ways, but it’s harder for the average American to acknowledge the continuity, and appreciation of the assumed difference lapses into ‘he does what he says’. He doesn’t, but that’s a fair enough criticism of his predecessors and adversaries, who either evade their stated agenda or ignore it once in power. Kamala Harris gave no indication that she would be any different, which helps to explain last year’s outcome.
Some greeted Trump’s triumph in the vain hope that his governing impulses would differ from his vile campaign rhetoric. It hasn’t exactly turned out that way. Nor is there any solace to be found for those who assumed that the chaos of his first administration would not be replicated in 2025. The main difference is that this time there is hardly any visible congressional or extra-parliamentary opposition.
Sure, a sensible judge has halted the president’s unconstitutional attempt to rescind birthright citizenship, and the clampdown on federal funding has been lifted in some quarters. But will anyone notice, amid the deportations of immigrants and asylum-seekers and the rest of the unfolding neo-fascist agenda, some of it straight out of the wretched Heritage Foundation’s Project 25, which Trump claimed to know nothing about?
More than 100 years ago, Rosa Luxemburg cited fellow German communist Friedrich Engels as pointing out that bourgeois society faced “either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism”. The latter has been evident for a while. A decade or so later, the imprisoned Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci pronounced his verdict, declaring that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. The Slovenian public intellectual has appropriately interpreted the latter segment as: “Now is the time of monsters.”
Trump isn’t the only one. They stretch across the globe, from Meloni and Orbán to Milei and Modi, among others. But perhaps we should focus our attention on those who facilitate them, which would leave out very few countries in the world.
Published in Dawn, February 5th, 2025
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