Donald Trump is an awful person and a terrible president. But he may provide an enduring breath of fresh air when it comes to the black/white posturing about freedom versus authoritarianism.
Let us stipulate at the outset that Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States of America, is a miserable excuse for a person. Even many of his supporters, people who voted for him, agree with that. One of them characterised him — approvingly — as a “junkyard dog”, conjuring up an image of a supremely mean, dirty-fighting canine ruler of a junkyard hell full of viciously brutal dogs. The dog that dominates all of them with his ugly display of fangs.
Nearly every other word Trump utters is a lie. He sponsors scams like Trump University and TrumpCoin. He lies without shame and never takes back his lies. While Barack Obama was president, he repeatedly accused Obama of not having been born in the United States, and therefore not legitimately its president, even though he must have known — any number of people would have told him — that this was patently false. After the US presidential election in November, 2020, in which Trump was running to be re-elected but which Joe Biden won, he repeatedly lied that Biden had in fact lost, even though everybody who knew anything said — and many of them told him directly — that this was false.
So many people in his party, the Republican Party, believed his repeated lies that now a solid majority of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen by Biden, even though more than 50 lawsuits attempting to overturn this result were rejected in court for lack of evidence. In his pursuit of overturning the election, Trump held the most incredible one-hour phone call, which was recorded, that I have ever heard, with the US State of Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger trying to force Raffensberger in the most extreme bullying terms into “finding” an additional 12,000 votes for Trump so that he would not lose the state. And of course, on 6 January 2021 and before that too, Trump did everything he could to try to steal the election, including inciting a violent mob to attack the US Capitol and doing almost nothing to stop them.
Only a few of these transgressions were known before he was elected in 2016 in a surprise victory for his first term as president – the Obama “birther” scam, and other incidents in his past that clearly identified him as an out-and-out racist and liar. And yet, when he shocked everybody, including many of my friends and compatriots, by winning that election, I too was appalled; yet unlike many of them, I viewed it with some equanimity. I thought he was a disrupter and a bull in a China shop, but that might not turn out to be a bad thing. Many things had been normalised in the United States — such as the extraordinarily corrupt financial industry — that could do with disruption.
Nevertheless, after his constant lying about the 2020 election and incitement of an armed mob, I could never forgive his lies and vicious bullying. He even bullied Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a phone call in 2019 to try to get him to manufacture dirt on Trump’s likely opponent in the 2020 election, Joe Biden – an act for which Trump, rightly, was first impeached by the US House of Representatives.
Trump is also a firm backer of Netanyahu and his destruction of Gaza, which has been labelled a genocide by the United Nations. This tends to square with Trump’s history of racism.
In short, though I am not much of a hater, I have always hated liars and bullies, and Trump is about as bad as they come. I hate everything about him. I want to see him fail in everything he does.
Many of those who support Trump, either strongly or reluctantly, would call this “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or TDS. Then what am I to do when I agree with him on an issue, or at least, more than I agree with his opponents?
On the war in Ukraine, I am afraid I am inclined to agree with him. His opposition consists of a huge constituency in the US who see international relations in black and white; free world versus authoritarian world; good guys versus bad guys. This position requires constant posturing about how we, the United States, have to be strong and firmly oppose authoritarians. It requires assuming everything they do has evil, manipulative designs behind it.
Trump, much as I hate him, offers a breath of fresh air on this subject. He appears not to buy into the black/white syndrome. Is it because he simply loves authoritarian leaders like Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping and Viktor Orbán, because he wants to be like them and to be one of them? One of the gods on Mt Olympus? That is what his opponents say. But perhaps it’s barely possible that he actually does have the “common sense” to see through the posturing about democracy versus authoritarianism.
I once commented that “left” and “right” often confront each other as if they were opposing teams in a tug-of-war. In a tug-of-war, in order to win you must never let down your resolve to make the other team lose; one slight relaxation of force can cause your team to fall like a line of dominoes. Even if one is only a spectator to a tug-of-war or a football game, one’s internal muscles are engaged in a phantom effort to cause the team you disfavour to lose. Like many people in the United States, my internal muscles are engaged to see Trump lose in spectacular fashion in everything he does.
But I’ll have to admit that in this case, I think he may be onto something. Perhaps, as with Nixon, we can congratulate him on one splendid call, then impeach him for something else later, and make it stick this time.
Michael Edesess is an accomplished mathematician and economist with a PhD in pure mathematics in stochastic processes and expertise in the finance, energy, and sustainable development fields. He is chief Investment Strategist of Compendium Finance.