The blame game for such doomsday fears ranges far and wide. Many pinpoint the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to grant immunity to presidents for their core official acts, essentially removing any restraints on Trump’s agenda of retribution and revenge. Some, like Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, see loopholes in the law as the basis for their concern about the future and are urging Congress to pass legislation that will place additional constraints on the deployment of the military on American soil. Others argue that the Constitution itself is the problem. In his new book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky even suggests that it may be time for a new constitution.

But those involved in the fear and blame game might do well to take a step back and reflect for a moment on how we got here. Today’s crisis has been evolving for so many years now. In fact, much (though admittedly, not all) of what we’re witnessing today might simply be considered an escalation of the dire turn that this country took after the attacks of September 11, 2001, nearly a quarter of a century ago. 

“Quaint” and “Obsolete”

It was January 2002 when White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales used the two words “quaint and obsolete,” whose echoes remain eerily with us to this very day (and seemingly beyond). The occasion was a debate taking place at the highest levels of the administration of President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. By then, this country had invaded Afghanistan and authorized the opening of a new detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, ominously offshore of American justice, for captives of what already was being called the Global War on Terror. Two weeks after the first prisoners arrived at that prison camp on January 11th, administration officials were already wondering which, if any, laws should apply when it came to the treatment of such prisoners.

Gonzales, who was to become the attorney general in Bush’s second term, laid out the options for the president. At issue was whether the Geneva Conventions — a set of treaties established in the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War — applied to the United States in its treatment of any prisoners from its war on terror.

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In a memo to President Bush, Gonzales noted that Department of Justice lawyers had already concluded, when it came to al-Qaeda and Taliban (Afghan insurgents in 2001, now in charge of the country) captives, the answer was no. Gonzales agreed, stating that “the war against terrorism is a new kind of war.” The laws of war, he told the president, were “obsolete” in the current context and the laws and norms requiring humane treatment for enemy prisoners had been “render[ed] quaint,” given this new kind of war.  Accordingly, the Bush administration took the position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the prisoners they had already captured. As a result, in the years to come, the indefinite and arbitrary detention of about 780 men would be institutionalized and disregard for the law would become a regular, if secret, part of the war on terror — an approach that would lead to the practice of torture at what came to be known as CIA “black sites” globally.

Nor would that be the only situation in which old laws were deemed outdated on national security grounds. 

The Wider Framework

At the heart of such a rejection of the law was the determination that the president had primary, if not ultimate, authority when it came to national security. As Princeton historian Julian Zelizer has put it, top Bush administration officials “claimed that executive power was essential to fighting the war.” Members of Congress generally agreed and facilitated the shift to ever more solitary executive power in the name of war, setting a template for yielding some of its constitutional and statutory powers in matters of war to the president. One week after 9/11, Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that granted the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”  

Subsequently, other laws were bent, bypassed, or even broken in the name of keeping the nation safe. Congress also further enhanced the powers of the executive by passing the USA Patriot Act which, among other things, weakened the Fourth Amendment’s protections against the surveillance of American citizens. Prior to 9/11, such protections had remained strong. After 9/11, as Brown’s Costs of War Project reports, “These mass surveillance programs allow[ed] the U.S. government to warrantlessly and ‘incidentally’ vacuum up Americans’ communications, metadata and content, and store their information in data centers and repositories,” sacrificing standing protections in the name of greater security.

Nor would that be the end of the matter. In the name of national security, the country’s law enforcement entities would also turn their backs on prohibitions against discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin as laid out, for example, in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a Costs of War Project report summed it up, the “Special Registration” requirement “announced in 2002 required all males from a list of Arab and Muslim countries [to] report to the government to register and be fingerprinted.” According to the ACLU, that program (known as NSEERS) would end up affecting foreign nationals from 25 countries.

Worse yet, such deviations from constitutional protections and the law did not come to an end with the Bush administration. Although President Barack Obama would issue an executive order restoring adherence to the laws banning torture and end the NSEERS program (which, the ACLU noted, “did not achieve a single terrorism-related conviction” despite “tens of thousands of people having been forced to register”), there were other key areas in which his administration did not reverse past policy — anything but, in fact. “Early in [President Obama’s] administration,” as historian Kathryn Olmstead notes, “the new president signaled his intention to continue Bush’s surveillance policies.” Though “surprised by the extent of the spying” in the domestic intelligence program, Obama’s team nonetheless “quickly agreed to continue Bush’s mass surveillance program.”

In addition, by escalating a global drone program of “targeted killings,” the Obama administration would forge its own path toward weakening legal protections in the name of national security. During the Obama years, on what came to be known as “Terror Tuesdays,” national security officials presented the president with a list of names, all potential targets to be captured or killed. (It would come to be known in the media as “the kill list.”) As NPR summed it up, Obama, “wishing to be seen as a restraining influence,” would weigh in on the final list of names. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush.”

Leaving those programs on the table for the next president would be — and remains — a prescription for disaster.

Trump and the Tactics of the War on Terror

Trump’s first presidency combined the strategies of Bush and Obama when it came to the war on terror. Though it was little noted then, he launched an unprecedented number of drone strikes, tripling Obama’s numbers by 2022, including the targeted assassination of a high-ranking Iranian official, Revolutionary Guard leader Qassim Soleimani. Political scientist Micah Zenko noted that, despite his claims of being non-interventionist, Trump proved to be “more interventionist than Obama: in authorizing drone strikes and special operations raids in non-battlefield settings (namely, in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia).” 

The 45th president’s disregard for legal restraints took other war-on-terror policies to a new level. Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump had issued an executive order that came to be known as “the Muslim Ban,” forbidding citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries entry to the United States. And like his predecessor, he showed little interest in sunsetting the expansive surveillance authority he had inherited.

In fact, Trump brought the tools and tactics designed for the war on terror to the “home front,” notably in his approach to dissent. He attacked Black Lives Matter protesters as enemies, labeling them “terrorists.” He made discrimination against foreigners a national policy at the onset of his first presidency, announcing his plans to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants and promising to institute policies that intentionally separated migrant children from their families. He even threatened to widen the uses of Guantánamo: “…[W]e are keeping [Guantanamo] open … and we’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.” Wondering who those “bad dudes” would be, NPR noted that captives in the war on terror were mostly a thing of the past and reminded listeners of an interview in which Trump had said such suspects should be tried by military commissions, the fraught trial system already in place there.

When Joe Biden became president, he curtailed a number of the excesses of the war on terror from the Trump years, even issuing a proclamation revoking the Muslim ban. When it came to drone strikes, he lessened them substantially, leaving them “far from their peaks under the Obama and Trump administrations.”  In addition, he put new limits on their use going forward. In a striking gesture, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines pledged to “promote transparency” in place of the excessive secrecy that had underpinned the torture program, surveillance abuses, and the targeted-killing program. Still, all too much remained ongoing or fully capable of being revived in the new Trump years.

Bringing It All Back Home

Which brings us to expectations — or fears — of what will happen in a second Trump presidency. When it comes to the use of force, detention, discrimination, and the erasure of constitutional protections, Trump has already promised to bring the broad counterterrorism authority of earlier in this century to bear on the home front.

Let’s begin with his promises to institute discriminatory policies based on race and national origin. As of today, the incoming administration has pledged to round up, put in camps, and oversee the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants from Latin America in particular, potentially combining a detention nightmare (lacking due process and underpinned by massive discrimination) with suspicion often based on national origin rather than specific evidence of criminal behavior — an echo of the war on terror’s early years.

In place of national security, Trump has promised to substitute, in the words of the 2024 Republican platform, the “threat to our very way of life,” a term that expands the vagueness encapsulated in “terror” and “terrorism” to a new level. Notably, in the run-up to the 2024 election he had already made it crystal clear that the path from the war on terror abroad to his internal policy plans would be important to his administration. When candidate Trump promised to use the military to counter “the enemy from within,” a spokesperson clarified the meaning for the press. As the Washington Post reported at the time, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung acknowledged the way the candidate was linking his political enemies to terrorists. Trump, he explained, was “equat[ing] the prospect of unspecified efforts by the left during the elections with the recent arrest of an Afghan man in Oklahoma, who is accused of plotting an Election Day attack in the United States in the name of the Islamic State group.” Cheung then furthered the analogy by adding, “President Trump is 100% correct — those who seek to undermine democracy by sowing chaos in our elections are a direct threat, just like the terrorist from Afghanistan that was arrested for plotting multiple attacks on Election Day within the United States.”

Where Are We Today?

While the war on terror has receded into the background of our lives, its premises and tactics remain all too readily available. Its expansion of presidential powers, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision when it comes to more or less anything a president does in office, leaves the country in a state of imminent peril. Surveillance powers remain remarkably broad. Drone-strike authorities remain in place, even if, in the wake of the Biden years, curtailed for now. And the prospect of indefinite detention as a codified element of American policy remains possible not only at Guantanamo but for migrants across the United States. And to top it all off, Congress continues to be unwilling to restrict a president’s war powers in any significant way, having repeatedly refused to repeal or replace that original 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in which neither time, nor geographical limits, nor even precise limits on the definition of the enemy exist. 

If only, as a nation, we could look beyond the tumultuous context of the current moment and imagine how to make our way to a safer, more sustainable future. Sadly, despite the dangers that may lie ahead, it’s not just partisan politics, or economic disarray, or the fragile state of the world that has brought us to this point. It’s our own negligence in accepting the dismantling of the laws and norms that had guided us prior to 9/11 and refusing ever since to restore our once-upon-a-time respect for the rule of law and for one another.

Copyright 2024 Karen J. Greenberg

Via Tomdispatch.com

Make no mistake: China truly is considered The Big One by those in Trump’s entourage responsible for devising foreign policy. While they imagine many international challenges to their “America First” strategy, only China, they believe, poses a true threat to the continued global dominance of this country.

“I feel strongly that the Chinese Communist Party has entered into a Cold War with the United States and is explicit in its aim to replace the liberal, Western-led world order that has been in place since World War II,” Representative Michael Waltz, Trump’s choice as national security adviser, declared at a 2023 event hosted by the Atlantic Council. “We’re in a global arms race with an adversary that, unlike any in American history, has the economic and the military capability to truly supplant and replace us.”

As Waltz and others around Trump see it, China poses a multi-dimensional threat to this country’s global supremacy. In the military domain, by building up its air force and navy, installing military bases on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea, and challenging Taiwan through increasingly aggressive air and naval maneuvers, it is challenging continued American dominance of the Western Pacific. Diplomatically, it’s now bolstering or repairing ties with key U.S. allies, including India, Indonesia, Japan, and the members of NATO. Meanwhile, it’s already close to replicating this country’s most advanced technologies, especially its ability to produce advanced microchips. And despite Washington’s efforts to diminish a U.S. reliance on vital Chinese goods, including critical minerals and pharmaceuticals, it remains a primary supplier of just such products to this country.

Fight or Strike Bargains?

For many in the Trumpian inner circle, the only correct, patriotic response to the China challenge is to fight back hard. Both Representative Waltz, Trump’s pick as national security adviser, and Senator Marco Rubio, his choice as secretary of state, have sponsored or supported legislation to curb what they view as “malign” Chinese endeavors in the United States and abroad.

Waltz, for example, introduced the American Critical Mineral Exploration and Innovation Act of 2020, which was intended, as he explained, “to reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of critical minerals and bring the U.S. supply chain from China back to America.” Senator Rubio has been equally combative in the legislative arena. In 2021, he authored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which banned goods produced in forced labor encampments in Xinjiang Province from entering the United States. He also sponsored several pieces of legislation aimed at curbing Chinese access to U.S. technology. Although these, as well as similar measures introduced by Waltz, haven’t always obtained the necessary congressional approval, they have sometimes been successfully bundled into other legislation.

In short, Trump will enter office in January with a toolkit of punitive measures for fighting China ready to roll along with strong support among his appointees for making them the law of the land. But of course, we’re talking about Donald Trump, so nothing is a given. Some analysts believe that his penchant for deal-making and his professed admiration for Chinese strongman President Xi Jinping may lead him to pursue a far more transactional approach, increasing economic and military pressure on Beijing to produce concessions on, for example, curbing the export of fentanyl precursors to Mexico, but when he gets what he wants letting them lapse. Howard Lutnick, the billionaire investor from Cantor Fitzgerald whom he chose as Commerce secretary, claims that Trump actually “wants to make a deal with China,” and will use the imposition of tariffs selectively as a bargaining tool to do so.

What such a deal might look like is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to see how Trump could win significant concessions from Beijing without abandoning some of the punitive measures advocated by the China hawks in his entourage. Count on one thing: this complicated and confusing dynamic will play out in each of the major problem areas in U.S.-China relations, forcing Trump to make critical choices between his transactional instincts and the harsh ideological bent of his advisers.

Trump, China, and Taiwan

Of all the China-related issues in his second term in office, none is likely to prove more challenging or consequential than the future status of the island of Taiwan. At issue are Taiwan’s gradual moves toward full independence and the risk that China will invade the island to prevent such an outcome, possibly triggering U.S. military intervention as well. Of all the potential crises facing Trump, this is the one that could most easily lead to a great-power conflict with nuclear undertones.

When Washington granted diplomatic recognition to China in 1979, it “acknowledged” that Taiwan and the mainland were both part of “one China” and that the two parts could eventually choose to reunite. The U.S. also agreed to cease diplomatic relations with Taiwan and terminate its military presence there. However, under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, Washington was also empowered to cooperate with a quasi-governmental Taiwanese diplomatic agency, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, and provide Taiwan with the weapons needed for its defense. Moreover, in what came to be known as “strategic ambiguity,” U.S. officials insisted that any effort by China to alter Taiwan’s status by force would constitute “a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area” and would be viewed as a matter “of grave concern to the United States,” although not necessarily one requiring a military response.

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For decades, one president after another reaffirmed the “one China” policy while also providing Taiwan with increasingly powerful weaponry. For their part, Chinese officials repeatedly declared that Taiwan was a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, preferably by peaceful means. The Taiwanese, however, have never expressed a desire for reunification and instead have moved steadily towards a declaration of independence, which Beijing has insisted would justify armed intervention.

As such threats became more frequent and menacing, leaders in Washington continued to debate the validity of “strategic ambiguity,” with some insisting it should be replaced by a policy of “strategic clarity” involving an ironclad commitment to assist Taiwan should it be invaded by China. President Biden seemed to embrace this view, repeatedly affirming that the U.S. was obligated to defend Taiwan under such circumstances. However, each time he said so, his aides walked back his words, insisting the U.S. was under no legal obligation to do so.

The Biden administration also boosted its military support for the island while increasing American air and naval patrols in the area, which only heightened the possibility of a future U.S. intervention should China invade. Some of these moves, including expedited arms transfers to Taiwan, were adopted in response to prodding from China hawks in Congress. All, however, fit with an overarching administration strategy of encircling China with a constellation of American military installations and U.S.-armed allies and partners.

From Beijing’s perspective, then, Washington is already putting extreme military and geopolitical pressure on China. The question is: Will the Trump administration increase or decrease those pressures, especially when it comes to Taiwan?

That Trump will approve increased arms sales to and military cooperation with Taiwan essentially goes without saying (as much, at least, as anything involving him does). The Chinese have experienced upticks in U.S. aid to Taiwan before and can probably live through another round of the same. But that leaves far more volatile issues up for grabs: Will he embrace “strategic clarity,” guaranteeing Washington’s automatic intervention should China invade Taiwan, and will he approve a substantial expansion of the American military presence in the region? Both moves have been advocated by some of the China hawks in Trump’s entourage, and both are certain to provoke fierce, hard-to-predict responses from Beijing.

Many of Trump’s closest advisers have, in fact, insisted on “strategic clarity” and increased military cooperation with Taiwan. Michael Waltz, for example, has asserted that the U.S. must “be clear we’ll defend Taiwan as a deterrent measure.” He has also called for an increased military presence in the Western Pacific. Similarly, last June, Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, wrote that the U.S. “should make clear” its “commitment” to “help defend” Taiwan, while expanding military cooperation with the island.

Trump himself has made no such commitments, suggesting instead a more ambivalent stance. In his typical fashion, in fact, he’s called on Taiwan to spend more on its own defense and expressed anger at the concentration of advanced chip-making on the island, claiming that the Taiwanese “did take about 100% of our chip business.” But he’s also warned of harsh economic measures were China to impose a blockade of the island, telling the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, “I would say [to President Xi]: if you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%.” He wouldn’t need to threaten the use of force to prevent a blockade, he added, because President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m [expletive] crazy.”

Such comments reveal the bind Trump will inevitably find himself in when it comes to Taiwan this time around. He could, of course, try to persuade Beijing to throttle back its military pressure on the island in return for a reduction in U.S. tariffs — a move that would reduce the risk of war in the Pacific but leave China in a stronger economic position and disappoint many of his top advisers. If, however, he chooses to act “crazy” by embracing “strategic clarity” and stepping up military pressure on China, he would likely receive accolades from many of his supporters, while provoking a (potentially nuclear) war with China.

Trade War or Economic Coexistence?

The question of tariffs represents another way in which Trump will face a crucial choice between punitive action and transactional options in his second term — or, to be more precise, in deciding how severe to make those tariffs and other economic hardships he will try to impose on China.

In January 2018, the first Trump administration imposed tariffs of 30% on imported solar panels and 20%-50% on imported washing machines, many sourced from China. Two months later, the administration added tariffs on imported steel (25%) and aluminum (10%), again aimed above all at China. And despite his many criticisms of Trump’s foreign and economic policies, President Biden chose to retain those tariffs, even adding new ones, notably on electric cars and other high-tech products. The Biden administration has also banned the export of advanced computer chips and chip-making technology to China in a bid to slow that country’s technological progress.

Accordingly, when Trump reassumes office on January 20th, China will already be under stringent economic pressures from Washington. But he and his associates insist that those won’t be faintly enough to constrain China’s rise. The president-elect has said that, on day one of his new term, he will impose a 10% tariff on all Chinese imports and follow that with other harsh measures. Among such moves, the Trump team has announced plans to raise tariffs on Chinese imports to 60%, revoke China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (also known as “most favored nation”) status, and ban the transshipment of Chinese imports through third countries.

Most of Trump’s advisers have espoused such measures strongly. “Trump Is Right: We Should Raise Tariffs on China,” Marco Rubio wrote last May. “China’s anticompetitive tactics,” he argued, “give Chinese companies an unfair cost advantage over American companies… Tariffs that respond to these tactics prevent or reverse offshoring, preserving America’s economic might and promoting domestic investment.”

But Trump will also face possible pushback from other advisers who are warning of severe economic perturbations if such measures were to be enacted. China, they suggest, has tools of its own to use in any trade war with the U.S., including tariffs on American imports and restrictions on American firms doing business in China, including Elon Musk’s Tesla, which produces half of its cars there. For these and other reasons, the U.S.-China Business Council has warned that additional tariffs and other trade restrictions could prove disastrous, inviting “retaliatory measures from China, causing additional U.S. jobs and output losses.”

As in the case of Taiwan, Trump will face some genuinely daunting decisions when it comes to economic relations with China. If, in fact, he follows the advice of the ideologues in his circle and pursues a strategy of maximum pressure on Beijing, specifically designed to hobble China’s growth and curb its geopolitical ambitions, he could precipitate nothing short of a global economic meltdown that would negatively affect the lives of so many of his supporters, while significantly diminishing America’s own geopolitical clout. He might therefore follow the inclinations of certain of his key economic advisers like transition leader Howard Lutnick, who favor a more pragmatic, businesslike relationship with China. How Trump chooses to address this issue will likely determine whether the future involves increasing economic tumult and uncertainty or relative stability. And it’s always important to remember that a decision to play hardball with China on the economic front could also increase the risk of a military confrontation leading to full-scale war, even to World War III.

And while Taiwan and trade are undoubtedly the most obvious and challenging issues Trump will face in managing (mismanaging?) U.S.-China relations in the years ahead, they are by no means the only ones. He will also have to decide how to deal with increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, continued Chinese economic and military-technological support for Russia in its war against Ukraine, and growing Chinese investments in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.

In these, and other aspects of the U.S.-China rivalry, Trump will be pulled toward both increased militancy and combativeness and a more pragmatic, transactional approach. During the campaign, he backed each approach, sometimes in the very same verbal outburst. Once in power, however, he will have to choose between them — and his decisions will have a profound impact on this country, China, and everyone living on this planet.

Copyright 2024 Michael Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

I will present a commentary on his observations about Syria:

Mr. President. . . With 900 troops in Syria, are you planning to withdraw when you leave office?

Trump: “We had 5,000 troops along the border, and I asked a couple of generals: So, we have an army of 250,000 in Syria, and you had an army of 400,000 — they have many more people than that. Turkey is a major force, by the way. And Erdogan — he’s somebody I got along with great — has a major military force. His military has not been worn out with war. It hasn’t been exhausted like others. He’s built a very strong and powerful army.

I am not sure, but I think Mr. Trump is saying that the former government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria had had 400,000 men in the Syrian Arab Army before the Arab Spring revolts of 2011, but that the numbers declined to 250,000 with desertions thereafter. My own guess is that when Trump was in office the numbers of Syrian troops had declined to more like 100,000.

I think he is recalling that he thought the 5,000 U.S. troops, which were there to coordinate the Kurdish and Arab militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces in fighting ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), were not necessary because Syria’s own 250,000 troops should have been able to handle ISIL.

If that is what he thought, it is incorrect. The Baath government of al-Assad relinquished the eastern Raqqa Province to ISIL and used its remaining troops to dominate the west of the country, what the French colonialists had called “Useful Syria” (la Syrie utile ). It had been the 5,000 US troops and the fighters of the SDF, mainly drawn from the leftist Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in the northeast, who took Raqqa and defeated ISIL on October 17, 2017. That was on Trump’s watch. Perhaps he meant to say that by October, 2019, two years later, he felt that the US troop presence was no longer necessary to ensure that there wasn’t a resurgence of ISIL.

He is right about the Turkish army. which Global Fire Power ranks as eighth in the world. Turkey, a country a little more populous than Germany, has some 355,000 active duty military personnel and a similar number of reservists. It has 205 fighter jets and 111 attack helicopters. It has over 2,000 tanks and 1,700 or so big pulled artillery pieces. It is ranked above both Italy and France.

Trump: “So, we had 5,000 soldiers between a 5-million-person army and a 250,000-person army. I asked the general, ‘What do you think of that situation?’ He said, ‘They’ll be wiped out immediately.’ And I moved them out because I took a lot of heat. And you know what happened? Nothing. I saved a lot of lives. Now, we have 900 troops. They put some back in, but it’s still only 900.

My guess is that Trump’s mention of a 5 million-person army is a reference to the military of the Russian Federation, which actually has 3.7 million military personnel including reservists. The 250,000-man army is likely that of Syria, though I believe it is an over-estimate for 2019. Most authorities had the Syrian Arab Army at 141,400 at that time.

However, the size of the Russian and Syrian armies was a little irrelevant, since the US special operations forces supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces were fighting the remnants of ISIL and were not in active combat against the Syrian or Russian armies. Moscow and Damascus had left Syria’s far east and its ISIL problem to the US and the Kurds. The US and Russia seem to have had excellent deconfliction mechanisms in Syria.

The major battle between US forces and Russian ones was not with the regular Russian military but with Wagner group mercenaries. It took place in February 2018, when Wagner irregulars attempted to seize oil fields that the US was using to fund the Kurds.

So there wasn’t really in my view much chance that the 5,000 US troops in Syria in October 2019 would have to take on either the Russians or the Syrian Arab Army, or that they would be crushed, since they had excellent air cover.

I’m sure, on the other hand, that Russian President Vladimir Putin very much wanted the US troop presence in Syria to end.

Trump (Flash-forwards to the present:) “At this point, one of the sides has essentially been wiped out. Nobody knows who the other side is, but I do. You know who it is? Turkey. Turkey is the one behind it. He’s a very smart guy. They’ve wanted that territory for thousands of years, and he got it. Those people that went in are controlled by Turkey, and that’s okay — it’s another way to fight.

“No, I don’t think I want our soldiers killed. I don’t think that will happen now, because one side has been decimated.”

Trump’s estimation that the HTS sweep across Syria was made possible by Turkish backing is correct. The “smart guy” here is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is probably true that Turkiye exercises a certain amount of control over the new government. Using such proxies to dominate Syria and unseat the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party is indeed “another way to fight.”

Trump’s isolationist instincts are sometimes salutary. I can’t imagine what good it would be for the US to get involved militarily in the new Syria, and I hope he pulls out the remaining US troops at Tanf.

The only statement here with which I would quibble is the assertion that Turkiye has wanted Syria for thousands of years.

Turkiye only came into being on October 29, 1923. It was preceded by the Ottoman Empire, which defeated the Mamluks in 1516 at Marj Dabiq and conquered Syria that year. It ruled Syria until World War I, when the Arabic-speaking population allied with Britain during the war and expelled Turkish troops from Aleppo on October 25, 1918.

The Turkic Seljuks, who ruled part of what is now Turkiye along with Iran and Iraq, held part of Syria in the eleventh through thirteenth century. The Turkic peoples only came into the Middle East from East Asia in a big way with the Seljuks in the 1000s, the same period when the Norman French conquered England.

Before that, what is now Turkiye was inhabited by Armenians, peoples who spoke Iranian languages, and Greek speakers. So “Turkey” hasn’t existed for thousands of years, to want Syria all that time.

The rulers of Asia Minor, what is now Turkiye, included the Roman Empire. Augustus took Ankara in 25 BC. The Romans had already annexed Syria in 64 BC. So in that case, it was Italians based in Syria who took what is now Turkiye rather than the other way around.

The eastern Roman Empire lost Syria to Muslim forces in the 630s. The Muslim Umayyad caliphate based in Damascus attempted on several occasions to take Asia Minor away from the Byzantines or Eastern Rome, but failed. So too did the Abbasid caliphate after it.

I mean, if you want to consider “Turkey” anyone who lived in Anatolia, then I suppose there were ancient kingdoms based there that wanted Syria. The ancient Hittite kingdom in what is now Turkiye, which spoke an Indo-European language, conquered Syria on more than one occasion in the 1600s through 1400s BC. But before the Hittites, in the 2000s BC, the Hattians ruled Anatolia and they don’t seem to have been interested in Syria.

Saying that a “people” has wanted to do anything for thousands of years is essentialist and we historians don’t approve of that sort of language. Things change. “Peoples” go in and out of existence. State ambitions change.

A reporter asked Are you concerned about more unrest in that region, or do you think it will stabilize?

Trump: “Nobody knows what the final outcome will be in the region. Nobody knows who the final victor is going to be. I believe it’s Turkey. Erdogan is very smart, and he’s very tough. Turkey did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost. I can’t say that Assad wasn’t a butcher — what he did to children. You remember, I attacked him with 58 missiles. Unbelievable missiles coming from ships 700 miles away, and every one of them hit their target.

Mr. Trump is correct that Turkiye’s Erdogan is likely the final victor by virtue of his allies now controlling Damascus. However, the likelihood that Syria will stabilize seems to me low, given the regional rivalries, internal divisions, poverty and displacement. Also, Israel has destroyed the Syrian government weapons stock with hundreds of bombing raids in the past week, which leaves the new government with no means of fighting challengers such as a resurgent ISIL.

Mr. Trump is also correct that Bashar al-Assad was a butcher responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, for thousands of prisoners tortured to death, for striking children’s playgrounds with barrel bombs. He also did use chemical weqpons, to which Trump responded with a missile barrage in 2017.

Trump: “Obama had drawn the red line in the sand, but then he refused to honor it. Assad killed many more children after that, and Obama did nothing. But I did. I hit him with a lot of missiles. I remember the night President Xi was here; we were having chocolate cake at dinner when I explained what we were doing. Those missiles were shot, and it was amazing how precise they were —- every one hit its target.

“Had Obama enforced his red line, you wouldn’t have even had Russia there. But they are there now, and I never understood why. Russia isn’t getting much out of it. Now, their time is taken up with Ukraine, and we want that to stop too. It’s Carnage.”

I do not believe that Mr. Obama’s having declined to bomb Syria over chemical weapons use in 2013 had anything to do with the continuation of the war. Mr. Obama was refused support for this move both by the British Parliament and by the Republican-controlled Congress, and was politically forestalled from launching missiles. Those missiles would not have had any affect on the civil war. Nor did Mr. Trump’s 2017 missile barrage have any material impact on the course of the last stages of the Syrian Civil War.

Jeff: You mentioned the wars. Can you tell us what you said to Prime Minister Netanyahu in your call on Saturday? And have you spoken to President Putin since your election?

Trump: “I’m not going to comment on the Putin question, but I will comment on Netanyahu. We had a very good conversation. We discussed what’s going to happen moving forward, and I made it clear that I’ll be very available starting January 20th.

“Beyond that, it was mostly a recap call. I asked him about the current situation and where things stand. Mike Waltz, by the way, is doing a fantastic job. Everyone is very happy with him, and he was very involved in the call as well. . . “

Let’s hope the remaining Israeli hostages are indeed returned within a month. However, all hell broke loose in Gaza a year ago and has been ongoing and it is difficult to see what more Trump could do to Gaza short of killing off the remaining 2 million people entirely.

====

Video:

PBS NewsHour: “WATCH LIVE: Trump speaks to reporters at Mar-a-Lago”

Even the venerable US Jewish daily, The Forward argues that Huckabee’s appointment spells doom for any chance of peace. Ironically, his supposed “love” for Israel is based on a belief that Israeli colonization of historic Palestine will bring about the Second Coming of Christ, at which point the world’s Jews (all of us) will either have to convert to Christianity or be consigned to eternal damnation.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) characterizes the prospect of Huckabee taking this post as “a disaster of Biblical proportions.” As a governor prosecuting an Evangelical agenda, he had public conflicts with various progressive advocacy groups including the FFRF itself. He once used them as fundraising fodder, arguing, that he was fearful of organization because of its numerous court victories in First Amendment cases. At the time, his campaign appeal said, “In just the last few years, they’ve won terrible victories that strike at the heart of our values.” FFRF summarized his record saying, “Huckabee has explicitly refused to acknowledge Palestinians’ right to exist. Huckabee is a staunch supporter of Israel because of the Old Testament’s assurance that the Hebrews are God’s chosen people and, therefore, Israel is their rightful homeland.”

When he governed Arkansas, Huckabee’s tenure was characterized by ethics complaints, regressive taxes, squishy approaches to immigration, and habitually playing fast and loose with facts. The State Ethics Commission “held proceedings 20 times on the former governor and lieutenant governor.” In accordance with the Trump playbook, Huckabee dismissed the Commission as “a political tool of Democrats.” He shares the MAGA mindset that the law does not apply to them, and any effort to hold them accountable is to be ridiculed as deep state political persecution. The Commission found five major violations within their 16 investigations. One was that he used campaign funds to pay for a “gospel fest” in 2002, in effort to wrap his campaign in phony spirituality. He also accepted 187 gifts valued at $150,000 or more, but didn’t have to report their value. In retaliation for the Ethics Commission, Huckabee created his own “truth squad” to spin the issues in his favor with fictions.

Other choice events from Huckabee’s tenure as governor include calling former Senator Dale Bumpers a “pornographer” for supporting the National Endowment for the Arts, and responding to the Sandy Hook shooting by saying the same day, “we have systematically removed God from our schools” and shouldn’t be surprised they’ve become a place of carnage.” Resistance to thoughtful gun control or background checks is part of the Republican Party orthodoxy.

“Apocalypse,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

An eloquent assessment was offered by a Palestinian-American student leader at one of Arkansas’ state universities, who is familiar with Huckabee’s record as Arkansas Governor, and the dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian history. This individual requested anonymity to protect her family in Palestine, and academic career in the US. She told this reporter, “It’s very important to remember Trump won about 80 percent of white Evangelical Christian vote this year, so it’s not surprising that he would choose Mike Huckabee . . . Huckabee would be the first Evangelical Christian to be US ambassador to Israel.” 

The student activist added, “He is an unreformed, unapologetic Evangelical Zionist who refuses to acknowledge Palestinians, and believes there is no such thing as occupation, no such thing as the West Bank, and no such thing as settlements.” She questioned whether he was capable of promoting U.S. interests or commitments to international law.”  She saw the appointment as a signal of Trump’s own position on the Mideast and maintained that persons with Huckabee’s extreme views – regardless of their religious heritage — “will continue to dehumanize Palestinians and try to justify it through religion; while simultaneously contradicting some of their most fundamental ideologies and domestic policies, such as every life having worth and value.”.

Little Rock Peace for Palestine issued a news release saying, “We know personally as Arkansans that Huckabee’s appointment will further fuel divisive policies that harm both Palestinians and Israelis, self-determination, right to return, or any equality under the law.”  They added, “Any effort towards a peace process between the Israeli and Palestinian people will be nearly impossible under a Trump presidency and Huckabee appointment.”  They also condemned his unstinting support of the expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank, in violation of international law under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

This End of Times zealot is poised to bring the end of times to both Palestine and Israel. But was anything else expected from Trump, whose every nomination for cabinet posts and agency directors is positioned to destroy rather than steward the effectiveness and functions of those offices? Huckabee has voiced opposition to the idea of a negotiated ceasefire between the Israeli military and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, even as the conflict has expanded into a regional war. We can only hope the Senate committee will recognize how deeply unqualified and potentially destructive his appointment would be, and reject the nomination.

More recently, Israeli doctors in Tel Aviv noted a spike in the condition after the October 7, 2023, attack by the militant group Hamas and Israel’s subsequent incursion into (and devastation of) Gaza in response. The mothers of Israeli soldiers in particular have been affected, as have many who didn’t directly experience or witness the ravages of October 7th against that country’s civilians. (Undoubtedly, something similar has been happening in Gaza, too, but given the disastrous situation of the medical profession there, we have no way of knowing.)

Examples like these remind me of one of the most valuable things I’ve learned from studying my country’s endless foreign wars as both an anthropologist and a military spouse: armed conflict transforms the bodies and minds of people far beyond its battlefields, including in the country that launched such wars in often distant lands.

As Americans await the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, I find myself thinking that it couldn’t be more important to understand the culturally transformative impact of war. My vantage point is a strange but (I think) salient one. I’m the wife of a U.S. military veteran and the mother of children who have been encouraged by those in our family and community to become fighters “like Daddy.” Yet I’m also someone who, through my involvement in Brown University’s Costs of War Project, has long critiqued this country’s warfighting efforts and the culture that sustains them.

In short, I find myself in an awkward position in this fragile democracy of ours. After all, I’m someone who has devoted unpaid labor to our military-industrial complex, yet can’t resist the impulse to critique it for its impact. How’s that for a conflict of interest?

Having risked plenty in this position, I might as well keep at it. One thing I can say is that all too many Americans, whatever their political leanings, agree on the benefits of funding our military with ever more hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that disproportionately benefit weapons contractors rather than us or our social safety network.

In fact, decades of federal budgets have favored war fighting with all too lax human-rights standards in dozens of foreign countries, hostility and violence against vulnerable people within the ranks of our own troops, antiterrorism policies that have encroached on domestic civil liberties, and the flow via police departments of military assault rifles and armored vehicles onto America’s city streets. And don’t forget the Veterans Day celebrations that propagandize military service to young children or the military recruiters in public schools. All of that is yet more evidence of what Americans value most. Yes, many of us have balked at school shootings and spiking child death rates, or at the servicemen and veterans who helped lead the rampage to overturn the 2020 election certification, but it’s clear that ever more of us, in or out of uniform, agree, in some fashion, on the sanctity of armed violence.

In a sense, the fact that we just voted back into the presidency someone who embodies a lack of restraint might be considered the climax of America’s decades-long War on Terror that began in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Twenty-odd years later, we have a president-(re)elect who doesn’t believe in the peaceful transfer of power. He’s already used the bully pulpit of his presidency and then his candidacies to demonize federal workers and journalists. He’s called his political opponents “vermin” and “the enemy within,” while conjuring up specific images of violence against them. And he’s accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of our country — language that, in other settings like Hitler’s Germany or early 1990s Rwanda, led to upsurges in extralegal violence even before the first official orders to kill were given.

Trump has used his public statements to direct his anger — and so that of his most ardent supporters — not toward China and Russia whose militaries threaten the sovereignty of our allies, but toward our own unarmed civilian workers who feed, educate, nourish, and pay Americans. Under such conditions, it’s hard to know which came first: our President-elect, or Americans who distrust each other as much as they do outsiders, the federal government, and factual reporting. And talking about wars of terror, if ever conditions were ripe for civilian bloodshed at home, it’s now — a time when there exists no shared sense of what it means to be an American or even any way to talk about it together.

Start ‘Em Early.

Perhaps the truest reflection of our faith in warfighting as problem-solving is the emphasis still given to telling kids that it’s a good idea to join the military. Within military communities, it remains an unspoken rule that kids ought to be raised to be like their parents in uniform. As an example, consider the Pentagon’s take-your-child-to-work-day, attended by over 8,000 children this year and replete with athletic events, refreshments, and paraphernalia for those kids to take home. My own children experience a version of that: toy battleships and fighter jets, as well as coffee-table books displaying every class of armored vehicle ever made and old uniforms and memorabilia from various military bases.

Teachers at local elementary schools ask younger grades to draw pictures of those they know who serve in the military and write essays about why they’re proud of them. A local gathering in honor of loved ones in the military, during which community leaders extol the bravery and resolve of those who serve, is among the best-attended events in my small rural town. If only that many people attended PTA meetings to discuss the curriculum and school safety, among other things!

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In our kids’ local Cub Scouts troop during Veterans Day week, parents who served in the military were invited to talk to the scouts about what they did while in uniform. Adults and children peppered them with questions about the weaponry they used and who they fought. And mind you, in such settings, when was the last time you heard of doctors, election workers, teachers, or federal employees being asked to describe their work, no less what they use to do it?

A Mandate to Kill

The way we spend money, go to war, vote, and raise our children suggests that, on some level, we’ve already given our military and law enforcement our implicit trust. How else to interpret the results of the 2024 election? By a significant margin, voters decided that leadership means not standing up to autocratic leaders abroad, but promising to hurt those who would speak out against you at home.

In June 2020, as protests and riots against the police murder of George Floyd swelled in Washington, President Trump told military leaders that he wanted to augment police units already in the capitol with armed military personnel. Hundreds of soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division traveled from North Carolina to Fort Belvoir just south of Washington, theoretically to help units already posted around the capitol. Those troops were issued bayonets, though they didn’t display them.

Apparently betting on the prospect that Trump would not want to own the decision to deploy troops against unarmed civilians, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper attempted to appease him and buy time without acting on his suggestion. However we judge the minimalist those officials put in place, it’s no longer clear that anyone in Trump’s second term will be there to restrain him from moving forward with his worst intentions against civilians, including undocumented immigrants (against whom the president-to-be is already threatening to call in the military). “The next time, I’m not waiting,” Trump said of such a future possibility at a 2023 rally.

Trolling by Nomination

Next to the man himself, nothing telegraphs Trump’s willingness to use force against unarmed American civilians more vividly than his nomination of former Army National Guard officer Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense. A Fox News host with no administrative experience in the Pentagon, he sports tattoos indicating his allegiance to Christian nationalist and white supremacist causes. It’s hard to imagine a more partisan pick for a military that is supposed to be none of the above. Hegseth also (you won’t be surprised to learn) settled a sexual assault allegation in 2017 by a woman who attended one of his speaking engagements. In three separate instances as a Fox News host, he advocated on behalf of three service members being investigated by military tribunals for killing unarmed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequently, President Trump pardoned two of those convicted men and reversed the demotion of the third, who had posed with the dead body of a teenage prisoner after allegedly murdering him with a knife.

Not just Hegseth’s actions but his stated goals speak to his disdain for restraint. He’s already made explicit his intention to fire any of the military’s top brass who have participated in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which, among other things, involve badly needed education to prevent sexual assault and hate speech demonizing religious and racial minorities or LGBTQ+ service members.

Hegseth’s appointment dovetails with the incoming administration’s revulsion against law and order within its own ranks, effectively ensuring, in the years to come, that the military will rot from the inside. Trump’s governance blueprint, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is direct in stating that weeding out “manufactured extremism” will be nonnegotiable this time around. The authors of that plan have urged the incoming administration to place national law enforcement agencies like Homeland Security and the federal police directly under the leadership of the secretary of defense and the president.

Disdain for Restraint

Americans have a certain reverence for those who act on impulse without considering the consequences. I doubt Donald Trump would have such a reputation for being a “strong leader” without having egged on his most ardent followers with intimations of violence. Think about his claim that white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville who, in 2017, ranted about Jews replacing them included “very fine people”; or his boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”; or his urging the crew who were to become the January 6th rioters to “fight like hell”; or his suggestion that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley ought to have been executed for attempting to directly reassure a Chinese general about this country’s stability while the president was trying to remain in office after his election loss in 2020. That last example should be a reminder that instability and violence within our government present an existential safety risk not just to ordinary Americans but to the entire world, as foreign governments worry about what an unhinged Trump administration might mean for them.

For me, the greatest elephant in the room is our government’s possession of a vast supply of nuclear weaponry capable of causing exponentially more destruction than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Just the non-nuclear explosives that the Biden administration has provided to Israel to drop on Gaza have, cumulatively, had a power far greater than the Hiroshima bomb — a preview of the human destruction our elected leaders are willing to allow even without giving direct orders to do so. Since the only enemies Donald Trump now refers to live in this country, it falls within the realm of possibility that, in his hands, our arsenal of weaponry could place American cities in danger.

A New Kind of War

I like to remind myself that things have been bad in the past: police wielding fire hoses, clubs, and dogs on unarmed Black children protesting for their civil rights; troops blocking Black teenagers from attending school; and of course, border patrol agents separating children from their parents and locking them in cages. To a large extent, we rebounded from such horrors, even though hundreds of those immigrant children have yet to find their parents. Still, we can only imagine what will happen in the Trumpian immigration crackdown that awaits us.

As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg emphasized to a group of activists and supporters the day after the election, we need to “make a lot of noise” about whatever the incoming Trump administration does, and what it means for our democracy. And independent journalism and truth-telling will make this possible, not cynical mistrust of the news or of Americans who try to call out what is likely to be Trump’s violent abuse of power. Keeping our republic will be harder than ever this time around, but Americans who care about their fellow citizens need to prepare themselves to bear witness to the human costs of what could be a new kind of war right here on our own soil. Otherwise, we’ll find all too many hearts broken, including mine.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Otherwords.org ) – During his campaign, Donald Trump publicly promised to reward oil and gas executives handsomely in exchange for funding his campaign.

Within weeks of winning the election, he’s making good on his promise by tapping oil and gas executive Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy. Wright has zero experience in running a federal agency. And as the Associated Press reports, he’s “been one of the industry’s loudest voices against efforts to fight climate change.”

To lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump has picked another crusader against the climate: former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, who voted in lockstep with fossil fuel interests during his time in Congress.

Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans believe climate change is real, human-caused, and needs to be urgently addressed. Trump’s billionaire oil buddies — who will shape national energy policy for the next four years — offer precisely the opposite.

Trump has promised to make fuel and energy more affordable for consumers by steering massive profits to energy producers — but those profits will come at our expense. He’s pledged to end federal subsidies for electric vehicles, even though many Americans want zero-emission vehicles but can’t afford them yet. And he’s vowed to bring gas prices under $2 a gallon — a wild claim that economists don’t buy.

Oil profits and production are already sky-high under President Biden and haven’t led to lower gas prices.

Indeed, Biden has been more of a friend to oil and gas than to climate justice groups. In spite of the White House’s boasts about historic climate policies, Biden’s actions have been relatively toothless. Among them are setting goals posts to reduce emissions years from now — anywhere between 2030 and 2050 — well after he leaves office.

He’s touted his signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, as a historic victory for the climate. The law did make significant climate investments, but the majority of it tinkered around the edges of what’s truly needed. And it ended up giving away billions to the fossil fuel industry for unproven technologies such as “carbon capture.”

Indeed, if Trump wants to “drill baby, drill,” he could thank Biden for paving the way.

Biden has overseen the transformation of the U.S. into one of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers, both during his presidency and during the Obama years, when he was vice president. According to the Energy Department, the U.S. has “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time… for the past six years in a row.”

So the last thing the fossil fuel industry needs is more favors.

Consumers will pay the price if Trump makes EVs and renewable energy more expensive, lets oil companies dismantle regulations, and accelerates the climate crisis. But he’s relying on ordinary Americans not noticing he’s throwing them and their planet under the bus because of the chaos he’ll bring with mass deportations, anti-LGBT bigotry, and other madness.

“Drilling,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

With the time he has left, Biden could still declare climate change a national emergency — a step many environmental groups are begging him to take, but which he’s resisted throughout his presidency. They’re also calling on him to stop the expansion of export infrastructure for liquefied natural gas.

If Biden wants to make any sort of claim to be a climate champion, he’ll take those steps. But ultimately, it will be up to the rest of us to watch what Trump is doing and fight for better climate policies in our own states and communities.

Otherwords.org

In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Ben-Gvir confirmed that the plan includes two main elements, claiming that it is an ethical and logical proposal that benefits both Palestinians and Israelis.

The Hebrew newspaper noted that Ben-Gvir’s remarks came in response to Trump’s statement about his intention to broker a ceasefire in Gaza and secure the release of prisoners before his inauguration on 20 January.

In related news, US media reported yesterday that Qatar has resumed its role as a key mediator in Gaza. It is anticipated that Hamas’ negotiating team will return to Doha soon.

Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Bin Jassim Al Thani stated on Wednesday that Hamas’ office in Doha was established for negotiations at the request of the US and Israel. He added that this office has facilitated ceasefire agreements since 2014.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

DawnNews English: “‘Settlement In Gaza Should Be Encouraged’, Says Israeli Minister | Dawn News English”

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Count on one thing: the next four years are going to be tough. If you can muster the energy for political action while Donald Trump and his minions rule Washington, it will have to be channeled in two ways: first, resisting the worst excesses of him (and his party of billionaires); and second, keeping up the effort to make life truly better for everyone, especially the most vulnerable among us.

Or wait. Should it be the other way around? Could a good offense be the best defense?

At the moment, it’s a question that’s not getting much attention. It may seem all too obvious right now that resistance has to be the top priority. Who could have been surprised by the impassioned pleas to resist when Trump won?

That reflex couldn’t be more natural. No matter how old you are, for as long as you can remember, every president’s critics have focused on resisting the dangers they saw in him, while his supporters hailed him as strong enough to resist the dangers they saw threatening the nation.

Such strength was apparently just what voters wanted in 2024, too. As a New York Times headline summed up the outcome right after Election Day: “America Hires a Strongman.”

Why?

As former President Bill Clinton once explained, “When people are feeling insecure, they’d rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made the point in a more colorful fashion: “When Americans are scared,” she wrote, they want their president to be “the strong father who protects the home from invaders.”

What dangers? What invaders? Every winning candidate for president gets to fill in those blanks in whatever way he (and yes, it always has been a he) thinks will get him the most votes, any connection with reality being purely optional. So, while Kamala Harris offered quite realistic warnings about threats to democracy, Trump traded on fictional images of “illegal” immigrant murderers and rapists, “big bad” transgender girls threatening oh-so-pure “real” girls, and the “Marxists” heading up the Democratic Party. And, of course, we know who won.

Many voters were clearly scared and insecure. In a recent survey, roughly 80% of Harris’s supporters chose “we must find a way to embrace each other” as their highest priority, while about 70% of Trump’s chose “to protect ourselves.” As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom put it, Trump voters have “a deep wellspring of anxiety about their ability to predict their security into the near and distant future. Trump has given [them] a way to direct that anger and that anxiety… in a toxic direction.”

As political scientist Bruce Cain noted, “In the choice between safety and every other policy goal, safety usually wins. In the choice between hope and fear, fear has proven to be more powerful even when the basis for it is grossly exaggerated.” Many reports showed that Trump voters were indeed angry, but after talking to hundreds of people in focus groups, the New York Times’s Patrick Healy concluded that anger and anxiety “were one and the same” emotion.

So, as usual, many fearful voters chose the candidate they saw as strong enough to protect them. Reporter David Corn heard one message over and over from crowds at Trump rallies: “The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.” And Corn sensed what increasingly fearful Americans want: a version of “strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior.” Trump typically claimed that “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” When he listed the ways he would change America in his speeches, making it “strong” and/or “safe” usually came before “great again.”

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But it wasn’t just the policies he proposed like “peace through strength” or even the words he used that his voters cared most about. (Trump consistently outperformed Republicans running for Congress who took similar positions and used similar language.) It was the way he projected a mean and nasty personality. When he first ran for president, Trump said, “Every time things get worse, I do better. Because people want strength. We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty.” And that was indeed the image his campaign projected in its advertising. Since the hunger for a strongman only grows in wartime, the Trump campaign happily made the election look like a war, while he even posted a prayer and picture on social media identifying himself with St. Michael battling the demons.

Pundit William Galston notes that the Trump campaign was “convinced that Trump’s intense personal bond with his supporters would do most of the mobilizing work.” GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini thinks that he forged that bond not with his policies but through “his unique style, his unique aesthetic.” (Yes, ugly can be an aesthetic.)

Of course, gender played a role, too. Every dictionary includes the word strongman, but when was the last time you saw strongwoman? And that tells you so much. One study showed that a belief in “hegemonic masculinity” — the idea that men are stronger than women and so should dominate — was the most accurate predictor of who would vote for Trump.

From FDR to Trump

Trump is perhaps the ultimate American politician who has traded on fear and insecurity to look strong and get votes. But the sad fact is that American presidents have been teaching the public to feel threatened and insecure for a long time — at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933 and made it a command center for resisting catastrophe in the midst of the Great Depression.

FDR admitted privately that his New Deal aimed to protect the capitalist system by resisting the threat of socialism, but he couldn’t say that out loud. He felt he could win the public’s confidence by staving off immediate disaster (as he indeed did). In the 1930s, that meant keeping as many Americans as possible out of dire poverty. Two prominent historians have labeled his approach “crisis management,” though he favored the word “security,” which is why the checks we retired folks now get from the government are called “Social Security.”

Once Hitler’s armies had conquered most of Europe, FDR announced that the great threat to national security was no longer the Depression at home but the enemy abroad, though he faced a public reluctant to get involved in war until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Throughout World War II, he would be seen as the strong father protecting the home from invaders.

Ever since, presidents have tried to take on that role. Lyndon Johnson warned that if we didn’t fight the communists in South Vietnam, we’d end up fighting North Vietnamese invaders in San Francisco. George W. Bush warned that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear arsenal that, if we didn’t take out Iraq first, could someday be used on American homes.

Almost every president since FDR has made the mantra of “national security” the nation’s highest value and insisted that staving off the threat of evildoers was the path to such “security,” no matter the price.

In 2016, Donald Trump paved his way to victory with similar language. His innovation (and it was a big one) was to refocus on the “enemy from within” — the immigrants, the transgendered, and above all, the liberals.

When Kamala Harris began her abbreviated campaign, it looked like she might break out of that mold. Her “politics of joy” seemed like a politics of confidence. She spoke and looked like a woman who was afraid of nothing, certainly not Donald Trump.

Yet in the last weeks of the campaign, as hers seemed to be stalling, she turned to the same old story: there’s a danger out there named Donald Trump and you’d better vote for me to protect yourself. Harris was, of course, correct, but the election results tell us that Trump did a better job of convincing voters that he was the one who could best protect our homes from invaders.

If Harris had focused more on bringing positive improvements to the lives of all Americans… who knows?

The Perils of Resistance

On Election Night, as the depressing results rolled in, the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart cautioned that those of us who see Trump as a great danger should move beyond resistance: “We have to continue to fight and work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible.” That’s good advice for a lot of reasons.

It may be that simply resisting the world of Donald Trump and trying to prevent the very worst will indeed seem like a full-time job over the next four years, but do we really want to exhaust ourselves that way? Worse yet, the message resisters send is ultimately a negative one: Whatever we may be, we are not that. So, in the years to come, a politics of resistance runs the same risk that befell the Harris campaign. As Harvard pollster John Della Volpe put it: “’Not being Trump’ was never going to be enough.”

What’s more, resistance is all about stopping change. Yes, sometimes change is dangerous and needs to be stopped, but that still makes such resistance inherently conservative. A devotion to preventing the worst will allow the other side to look like the force for change and so define the terms of debate.

Yet, by definition, liberals and progressives are supposed to be that force. Do we really want to cede that to — yes! — Donald Trump?

For now, at least, the lesson of Election Day 2024 is that, in a contest over which party can best protect Americans, the current version of the Republican Party is likely the winner. We’ve learned in the hardest way possible that the Democrats can’t “out-Republican the Republicans,” as Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put it.

A politics of resistance could end up merely reinforcing the fear driving MAGA-ism’s longing for a strongman. It’s simply not the right message to send to Trump voters if you wish even a small slice of them to change their minds two to four years from now.

It may feel good to focus on Trump’s evils and exclaim, as poet Walt Whitman did about President Franklin Pierce: “Such a rascal and thief in the presidency. This poor scum — the shit-ass! God damn him! — eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on the states.” But to focus solely, or even primarily, on such anger means making Trump the center of our attention. (Exactly what he wants, of course!) Hasn’t he gotten enough attention already?

And do we want to carry all the anger that full-time resistance is likely to breed? Do we want to let Donald Trump rob us of our capacity for happiness for the next four years? We could at least balance our outrage with the sentiment Whitman expressed about President Benjamin Harrison: “I think him mainly a gas bag, the smallest potato in the heap. As long as he remains in office, the aura of the presidency will give him prominence — but after that — oh! what will be his oblivion — utter!”

As the Italian revolutionary philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously put it, in the years to come we could use more “pessimism of the mind and optimism of the will.”

Alternative Vision and Action

Of course, we need to keep up some significant degree of resistance. (I’m definitely not among the astounding 28% of Democratic voters who claimed, in a post-election poll, that they would “support” Trump’s presidency.) But we should heed the words of Barack Obama’s former speechwriter Ben Rhodes: “Democrats must reject the impulse to simply be a resistance that condemns whatever outrageous thing Mr. Trump says. While confronting Mr. Trump when we must, we must also focus on what we stand for. We need to articulate an alternative vision for what kind of democracy comes next.”

Even the New York Times editorial board, hardly the most progressive group around, got the point: “A threat to democracy does not exempt leaders from giving voters a plan for the future that reflects the America they want to live in.”

And we can do more than envision a better future and plan for it during the next four years. Though things may be dreadful in Washington, state and local governments still have significant power to pursue policies to make life better. In my Colorado town, for example, there’s a strong effort to push the city council to raise the minimum wage, a measure our county commissioners, under public pressure, already endorsed. Denver is not only preparing to resist the deportation of undocumented residents but offering them access to city services, modeling what a humane government, one that cares about all its people, actually looks like. And even when politicians won’t act, many states allow citizen-initiated referenda like the ones that secured abortion rights in my state and many others.

Then there’s an endless list of things we can do as individuals. Think of it as “prefigurative politics.” As Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day put it, the energy we would burn up trying to tear down an oppressive government can be better used by ignoring that government and building “a new civilization within the shell of the old” — new institutions that genuinely serve people.

It also means building new feelings and attitudes. As we face a nightmarish four years of a federal government built on fear and intent on keeping all Americans (other than billionaires) afraid, anything we do to bring more confidence and happiness into our lives is a step in a better direction — for ourselves and the country.

To repeat: Resistance to Trump will certainly be necessary, especially to protect the most vulnerable among us. But any way we can look to a better future and turn that into a present reality is, in a sense, an act of resistance not only to Trump and the Republicans but to the strongman model of politics that led to his recent victory.

Making beautiful art and music, making delicious meals, making friends, making love — those are all ways to preserve the energy we’ll need for political action. They are also ways to show not just the world but ourselves that, whatever the evils from Washington in the next four years, we can continue building the more humane and happier world we want for everyone.

Copyright 2024 Ira Chernus

Tomdispatch.com

No, I didn’t fully get it at the time, but I kind of get it now (since, like the rest of us, I’ve lived through it all, including his close loss in 2020). Still, twice? Him? A convicted felon, no less! And yes, I do think italics are all too appropriate under the circumstances.

Two times as the president of these increasingly disunited states of America? Holy cowpie!

Perspecting (No, That’s Not a Typo) Donald Trump

This country actually did it — elected him (again!) — and so we deserve whatever we get, at least a little less than 50% of us do: Fox News… oops, sorry, Pete Hegseth to run the largest, best-funded, and least adept military on planet Earth? Robert Kennedy, Jr., to keep our health in check(mate?) or do I mean checkerboard red shape? Tulsi Gabbard overseeing what still passes for American “intelligence,” though in some sense it couldn’t have been dumber for endless years? Or Chris Wright, who denies that there’s any kind of a climate crisis on Planet Earth, to lead — yes, of course! — the Department of Energy. And that’s just to start down an endlessly expanding, mind-blowingly unnerving list.

Yikes! You really couldn’t make this stuff up, could you? And I haven’t even mentioned Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security. Nor did I have time to put in Matt Gaetz at the Department of (In)Justice before he went down in an instant cloud of smoke and scandal. (The question is: Before we’re done with the madness of it all, will everything be, in some fashion, enveloped in that same cloudy firmament?)

I suppose there’s no reason to be shocked, not really. After all, it’s a matter of history. Sooner or later, all great imperial powers go down the tubes — or do I mean the drain? — in some fashion, even if Donald Trump, the second time around, gives tubes and drains a new meaning. Just ask any of the emperors of imperial China or Winston Churchill or, for that matter, Mikhail Gorbachev about imperial decline. But to have almost 50% of the population vote to send this country directly (no stops along the way) whooshing down those tubes into the basement of history, well, that’s no small thing, is it? Or maybe, on a planet already going to hell in a climate-changed handbasket, it actually is a small thing. (And, yes, I just can’t seem to help myself when it comes to italics and him, though he’s all too literally not a small thing, not The Donald!)

Who knows anymore? Who can make any real sense out of it when you’re not comfortably outside looking in, or in the present peering into the long-gone past, but right here, right now (and nowhere else), distinctly experiencing everything from the inside out — or do I mean, the outside in or even the inside in? That, in truth, may be the lesson Donald Trump(ed us all) has to offer when it comes to our ever stranger world. And perspective isn’t exactly available to us, is it? After all, when The Donald fills the screen 24/7, how can anyone perspect — if you don’t mind my making up a word to fit our ever-stranger world — anything?

And yet, let’s face it, if you try to take a step or two back, even if it’s into the deep doo-doo of the rest of this planet of ours — check out Benjamin Netanyahu’s nightmarish version of Israel, for instance — Donald Trump isn’t just a strange (all-)American happenstance. Under the circumstances, however happenstantial, of a country in which there was already an increasingly greater (and still growing) space between the wildly wealthy (especially the rising number of all-American billionaires who have more money than half of the rest of the population combined) and the ever more pressed working and middle classes, what populace, already distinctly in trouble (or he never would have made a political appearance in the first place), wouldn’t have elected a “businessman” (and I’m only being socially truthful by putting that word in quotes) who claimed to be all in for them on his third presidential run (though, of course, you won’t actually see 78-year-old Donald Trump, the man who reputedly once urged soldiers on our southern border to shoot migrants in the legs, running anywhere). Whew, that was one long sentence! And no wonder, since he’s distinctly wound us up in an endlessly convoluted world.

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And this time around, the richest man on Planet Earth, Elon Musk, was ready to pay out millions of promotional dollars to potential voters to increase Trump’s vote totals in swing states — and don’t for a second think that was bribery! After all, in a country where keeping yourself afloat amid still rising prices is no small trick, why wouldn’t you find appealing a man who swore he spoke for you and whose claim to fame, in a sense, was his remarkable ability to keep himself (and no one else) on the (more or less) flat and level, or even the uphill incline, as he sent his own businesses distinctly downstream into failed or bankrupt states? Whew, again!

And don’t be surprised, given his record, if, in his second term in office, he sends this country into his own version of, if not bankruptcy, at least ruptcy. After all, Donald Trump is — if you don’t mind my inventing another word — a distinctly remarkable (or do I mean smashing?) rupturist. His story (or do I mean history?) — since Kamala Harris lost, it certainly isn’t herstory — suggests that he’s likely to repeat his business “success” with this whole country the second time around, keeping himself on the flat and level or even the uphill incline as so much around him goes down, down, down. And don’t be surprised if he somehow manages to outlast that disaster, too. (Or do I mean two?) Oh, and since he’s already quipping about a third term in office, however jokingly — no joke there for the rest of us, of course — you should feel distinctly nervous (if, that is, the fate of this country means anything to you).

You can undoubtedly understand his position when it comes to a third possible round in the Oval Office, right? I mean, to hell with that old amendment! (“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”) If it were of any importance, it would obviously be the first, second, or third amendment, not the 22nd one, right?

The Dis-United States of Trumperica

Of course, none of this should truly surprise us. After all, historically speaking — and no, I don’t mean his story here, I mean the long, long story of humanity on this planet — great powers never seem to end up in particularly great shape toward the end of their ride. (And what a ride it’s been lately! Just ask… well, yes, Donald J. Trump!) As I like to remind TomDispatch readers, the country whose officials, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, touted it as the last superpower (or perhaps that should be in caps, The Last Superpower, or maybe even THE LAST SUPERPOWER) on Planet Earth, now seems to be in the process of transforming itself into the last super-basket-case on a planet that itself is becoming a basket case and heading downhill all too rapidly.

And I write that as someone living in a city — New York — that until recently was in the midst of a historic drought, the worst since records began to be kept here in 1869, in a state in drought in a region in drought. My city, in other words, was anything but alone in a country 40% of which recently was considered to be experiencing drought conditions. Even New York City’s parks were burning — more than 230 brushfires in just two recent weeks — and smoke was regularly been in the air here. All of this on a planet where weather extremes — from devastating heat waves to devastating floods to devastating storms — are distinctly on the rise. It’s in that context, of course, that Donald Trump, the proud “drill, baby, drill” guy, who has long insisted that climate change is a “hoax,” plans to do anything he can to promote fossil fuels in the coming years. He’s also intent on reversing the Inflation Reduction Act of the Biden years, which has been “providing hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks for clean energy” in a country that, in 2023, set a global record for the production of oil.

In short, Donald Trump’s second (and third?) term(s) is (are) guaranteed to turn much in this country (though not its wealth disparities) upside down. In fact, as a preview of what’s coming, perhaps it’s time to think of this land as the Dis-United States of Trumperica.

Imagine that, in the years to come, he will once again be inhabiting the place built during George Washington’s presidency and occupied by Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, among so many others. Need I say more when it comes to matters of decline and fall?

In truth, it’s a rather straightforward fact that this country is now visibly going down in a potentially big-time fashion and that, domestically speaking, there’s far worse to come. Of course, sooner or later, great powers do go down in various ways and Donald Trump’s version of that (just like his version of going up) could mean a distinctly failed state for the rest of us, no matter what happens to him.

Gaining Perspective on Donald Trump?

Imagine this: I was born when FDR was still president. (I was eight months old when he died.) And 80 years later, “my” president is Donald Trump (again!). If that doesn’t count as a political lifetime, what does? Whether the 78-year-old Donald or the 80-year-old me will live to see the end of “his” presidency is, of course, beyond my knowing.

But count on one thing: whatever we do see, it’s not likely to be pretty. In some sense, whatever chaotic version of guardrails were imposed on him in his first term will be largely removed this time around. From Pete Hegseth to Robert Kennedy, Jr., he’s already trying to appoint a crew of men (and yes, they are largely men) who would once have seemed inconceivable in this country — and not just because so many of them are rumored to have mistreated women.

Imagine that, starting in January, Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, will be occupying the White House with “cat ladies” Vice-President J.D. Vance waiting in the wings. Fox News will be in the saddle (all too literally, given Trump’s appointments) and, this time around, President Tariff could essentially take the planet down with him. Yes, Matt Gaetz recently came up short (the earliest failed cabinet pick in modern history), but so many other nightmarish Trumpian figures won’t. They’ll be there doing their damnedest as “agents of his contempt, rage, and vengeance.”

Gaining perspective on Donald Trump? In some ways, his greatest skill in life has been in making such perspective inconceivable. No matter what you think, you can never quite fully take him in or know what he’s likely to do.

So, here we are, about to be Trumped once again. In fact, in the years to come, if things go as they now look like they might, with Elon Musk, Fox News, and him inhabiting the White House, it might be possible to think of this country (and even this planet) as Donald Trump’s last bankruptcy.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com