As I have so many times in my life, I give thanks that I wasn’t born in the USA. If I cared a great deal about the fate of that country, I’d be more than despondent right now.
In some ways though, not a lot will change for the rest of us as a result of this election. The US will continue to behave like a ravenous beast, insatiable and devouring. It will continue funding and arming tyrants and despots as it always has. Whether Trump or Harris occupies the Whitehouse, the genocidal fury of Israel will continue to commit atrocities against Palestinians with US protection and material support. Whoever is in power in Washington, the primary driver of US foreign policy is always to shore up access to energy and other earth resources, and preserve its economic and political pre-eminence. Famously, the American way of life is not negotiable – aka FTW.
The election of Trump does mean even more weakening of global and regional institutions, but that has been going on for some time now. As a Rastafarian I am strongly committed to international forums where conflicts can be mediated without violence and where regional and global priorities (eg the SDGs) can be negotiated, but the gerrymandering of the United Nations by the Security Council and the impotence of things like the International Criminal Court to prosecute the more connected war criminals mean those organisations are losing relevance and legitimacy in many people’s eyes. Similarly, the inability for international forums to come of any meaningful agreements on climate change, commensurate with the urgency and enormity of the crisis facing humanity, makes it hard to muster real anger over his climate change denialism. Maybe if the world just sidelines the USA more progress is possible. Let them catch up when they waken from their coma.
Trump will no doubt throw a few buckets of chaos into the global mix, but it’s not like times are not chaotic as it is. Secretly many around the world will be hoping this spells the end of the USA as the dominant global superpower – ironic given that his slogan was MAGA.
So yes, having a degenerate idiot in the Whitehouse will have ripple effects for us all, but it won’t be the worst thing to happen this century. We have messed up in all kinds of ways and the chickens are rapidly coming home to roost.
What really concerns me is much more small scale and local. Of all the things that Trump did during his last tenure, probably the thing that horrified me the most was seeing those children being separated from the parents at the border. Locked in cages, sleeping on tiled floors with space blankets, and then hearing that the record keeping was so chaotic that many of those children would never be reunited with their families again. There was no way of knowing who they belonged to, and many of them were too young to be able to say. The question of where those children are now, the horrific possibilities, still haunts me. So now, I fear that the suffering of ordinary people in the USA and neighbouring countries will become much worse.
Trump, Vance and their handlers – the vampire Peter Thiel, the fascist Elon Musk, and all those other billionaires backing them and whispering ideas into their ears, will be seeking to remake America in their own image. The US is barely a democracy as it is, but I’m sure they have ideas about how to concentrate even more power in their own hands. The end of the republic was the beginning of the end of ancient Rome. I can’t help feeling that Trump’s election is similarly a sign that the US is in a downward spiral from which it will not recover. It’s not that Trump will be the cause. He is a symptom. That a man like that could be elected President just says so much about the state of that nation.
Monkey Business 