Donald Trump: the Lord of Misrule for our times
I wrote this for Open Democracy (Yes, I know...) in 2017. It has stood the test of 7 years.
There’s a good chance that Trump will leave the self-righteous wailers standing in the rain of their own invective.
14 February 2017
Well, what d’you think of it so far?
Considering the unappetising choice foisted on the United States and the world by the Democrats, I think it’s been a marvellous success! Those of us, and there are many, who were convinced that a political revolution was needed to uproot the corruption created by the globalists in the machinery of US government over the last decades, well knew what a Clinton victory would bring, by advancing war as an engine of profit and the control of money as a means to enslave.
By the time of the election, 8 men owned as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (according to Oxfam) and one family owned more than 40% of the US population. That is not remotely capitalism, except in the eyes of the very, very, few. The superior conviction that they knew best had been played out again by the globalists, alongside the very same weakness in liberal intellectuals, to create a diabolical alliance which brought humanity to a dangerous place.
This seismic misjudgement by the establishment allowed Trump to win, and brought about the first and most important benefit of his presidency so far, which in fact has nothing to do with him at all: namely, the exposure of the media as the hired arm of those who sought to control us, an exposure which became crystal clear to even the most uninterested citizens. For years, activists of all colours have been accused of being conspiracy theorists – now that is no longer possible, because as a result of the election events, most of us, having had the veil of illusion about privately-owned and government-sponsored media lifted, are now conspiracy theorists!
A blinding segué employed by such media and by government has been to take the phrase “fake news”, which much earlier had been coined by activists who wished to expose the reality, and use it against them and, in particular, the internet. Too late, the establishment understood the impact of the internet as one key to what happened to foil their plans. So watch out, everybody: the internet is now in the crosshairs of the bad guys, with a new accelerated imperative to emasculate it as a free forum for information and debate. The sententious pronouncement of Tim Cook at Apple and the latest effusion of the ironically named Hope not Hate about right-wing bloggers, both of which ignore the main source of fake news, are among the recent offerings to that effort.
I still wonder how many of those who voted for Clinton have accepted their direct complicity in the present music-hall scenes at the White House. How many have finally twigged from the aggressive political rhetoric framing regime change in Russia as necessary to repel an immediate threat, and from the extensive NATO exercise deployments along Russia’s border that were accelerating in scale up to the election, that had the lady won we would probably be heading for war in Europe at this moment? And how many have abandoned the hypocrisy of their self-righteous wailing at events they themselves did so much to cause?
The new president’s antics so far remind me of nothing so much as a medieval Lord of Misrule. He has zero respect for the people who for so long have lorded it over the American population, and he is clearly enjoying the sensation of throwing things in the air to see where they land. He is viscerally opposed to the globalist agenda, and is unlikely to be bought or manipulated by them, however else they decide to proceed.
Those who oppose him have consistently underestimated him and will, I suspect, continue to do so, because they equate his self-importance with lack of intelligence. It is nothing of the sort. One or two of his key appointments suggest that whatever the rhetoric, shrewd political analysis will not be lacking. If he makes good on his often repeated promise to provide a good alternative to Obamacare, as I suspect he may, he will leave the wailers standing in the rain of their own invective. Bread to the Coliseum crowd.
The idea that people need to like a leader or even think them honest is nonsense. It is performance against popular expectation that counts.
Americans on the whole, it would seem, like the fact that he is taking a fresh look at immigration and terrorism and ignore the irrationality of its basis. They, and perhaps Trump himself, believe the Islamic terrorism threat is great, and that is a measure of the success of media propaganda from previous presidential incumbents – a situation where there have been, on average, 9 deaths annually caused by Islamic terrorists (including US citizens) against 11,700 Americans slain annually by Americans. Small wonder Homeland Security threatens the homeland peace of the American nation, and thus the rest of us, so profoundly.
Is Trump a fascist? In my book the fascists just lost an election, and if the first 22 days are anything to go by, the Lord of Misrule will make us all gloriously uncomfortable, until the pieces falling everywhere coalesce into something, let us fervently hope, that better reflects the personal responsibility of each and every one of us to create the world as it should be. I have little doubt that the president and his hard-faced helpers will enact, among other things, some shockingly ignorant pieces of legislation as the term develops, but on each occasion they do so, we should reflect on the fact that, in comparison to the continuation of what went before, this counts as little more than dark comedy.
Mankind has entered a period of Manichean confrontation, and the new president and the rest of us have narrowly, perhaps only temporarily, escaped from the trap set for it by dark forces. Weirdly, we have much to be thankful for in president Trump.
