The End Of The Great Orange Grift And The Return To Normalcy

What have the last four years really been about and why is "getting back to normal" in a system that was clearly broken before Trump so good?

In just a few days the US election will take place and the polling data suggests they are going to elect the DNC’s preferred candidate, Joe Biden. That moment will put an end to a four year tantrum thrown by America’s ruling class because the citizenry had the temerity to not vote the way they wanted. It should also serve as the final chapter in the greatest fabrication ever committed to the record by contemporary journalists. As a wise man once said, you know… The thing.

Here’s the outline of what you are supposed to believe. America, the most virtuous nation on Earth, has found itself subject to fascist takeover from an elected candidate. A narcissistic billionaire has seized the reins of the Republican party and with the help of Russian agents has subverted the will of the American people. Now, with no-one to challenge him, he has poisoned the sanctity of the office of President and used it for nothing more than personal gain and to push an ideology of white supremacy that is so well cloaked the media have to keep lying about the evidence that proves its existence.

The only way to stop the fall of the republic, restore racial equality and, if you believe Elizabeth Warren, save all life on planet Earth is to elect the Democrat candidate. He just so happens to be a career politician of almost five decades, with a history of implementing policy that even with the most charitable reading would be considered bigoted. But ignore that and any emerging scandals because this isn’t even about policy. It’s about decency and saving democracy. Anything other than a vote for this man is an act of treachery against your own country and one that will see the emergence of an American Reich with a dictator in place of a president. 

If you’ve ever doubted how much nonsense the average person is willing to swallow simply in order to convince themselves they are on the right side of history, the current landscape of US politics should be your go to case study. This narrative is one that cannot hold up even to the most basic scrutiny and yet it is one propped up and peddled by the very apparatus that should be scrutinizing; the mainstream media. The one time fourth estate has been reduced to a collection of cheerleaders.

Now, while it is true Trump is a narcissistic billionaire (you won’t meet any other kind) the rest of the hokum is easily shown to be as such. Russian collusion with Trump couldn’t be found despite the fact they were spied upon for almost the entirety of their campaign nor after a retroactively ordered investigation that cost $32 million of taxpayer money. The best they could do was serve up a few Facebook pages that ran ads to the turn of tens of thousands of dollars. These ads were supposedly so effective they hypnotized the American swingvoter into casting their ballot for Trump. The failed Clinton campaign spent $768 million. More recently Michael Bloomberg spent in excess of $500 million to earn 31 delegates in the DNC primary. The Democrats should hire them.

Any talk about the sanctity of the office of president surely cannot be uttered while keeping a straight face. Bill Clinton lied under oath to congress about using a cigar as a sex toy then to distract from the scandal bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. An employee died in the impact with potentially tens of thousands of deaths resulting from the lack of medicines the factory produced for its neighbouring population. The same media calling Trump a fascist now opine about how they’d love a Republican leader like George W. Bush, a war criminal that dropped 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq and Kuwait leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. He codified torture into the list of approved interrogation techniques for suspected terrorists. Domestically he signed in the Patriot Act and used engaged his intelligence agencies in wholesale surveillance of US citizens. Barack Obama, despite being from the other side of the aisle, continued much of this, utilizing drone strikes 563 times, reportedly killing 160 children in Pakistan alone. He expanded deportations and achieved 2.5 million in his time in office increasing the border patrols that we are now told are symbol of Trump’s white nationalism. If there ever was a sanctity to the presidential office then it was eroded a long time ago.

On the matter of white supremacy perhaps it’d be easier to believe in its sinister manifestation were there any compelling evidence. So much of the case against Trump relies on things he supposedly said but often didn’t, such as the regurgitated lie about “very fine people.” Meanwhile his actions strike me as the work of a very strange breed of white supremacist. His first use of executive powers were to erect a national monument to honour fallen African-American soldiers in the US Civil War. His signature on the 2018 First Step Act replaced the “three strike” rule that saw many low income African Americans mandatorily incarcerated for 25-to-life for low level offences. He was the first president to designate that the Ku Klux Klan is a terrorist organisation (incredible it took this long isn’t it?) and used federal powers to execute a convicted white supremacist activist, the first time such an intervention had been made in 17 years.

By the same token if we agree that white supremacy is the creation of apparatus and infrastructure that maintains a disparity between White and Black America that is favourable towards white people, Biden’s record must surely meet that standard. In the 70s Biden didn’t just work with segregationists, he actively furthered their agenda for years. In 1977 he co-authored a bill that barred federal courts from ordering busing. In 1994 he introduced a bill he had worked incredibly hard on, The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, that expanded the police force, prisons and tougher sentencing that would go on to disproportionately affect low income black people. That shouldn’t come as a surprise since as Biden’s reaction to the shocking beating of Rodney King was to propose a bill of rights for police officers. Kind of frames his quote about Obama as being “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” in a different light doesn’t it? These were all points the media themselves made in 2019 but that was before Biden was the candidate, so now he’s the darndest bestest kindest most decent man who ever lived.

None of this is to say that Trump is a great president or a even a great human being. Trump is a symptom of the disease that plagues American politics rather than the disease itself and there will be future candidates of his ilk to prove this point whatever happens this election. Is he a liar? Yes, absolutely. They all are. A criminal? I’d be amazed if he hasn’t broken the law repeatedly but that statement applies to most of the political class. Acting almost exclusively on self interest? For sure. He is a boorish oaf, a linguistic bull in a china shop who doesn’t understand nuance or tact. His narcissism won’t let him ever step out of the spotlight and it is under those bright lights where he consistently flops and flounders, giving his opponents every bit of ammunition they need. But Trump is no more fascistic than any other American president and certainly less than some in my life time. Perhaps that it is the most telling of all that for all his clear flaws, for all the alleged wrongdoing, it is this hysterical, provably false narrative that they have decided to go with, one that lacks factual substance but certainly a great work of emotive fiction.

It is a fiction that the Democrats don’t believe of course. Their actions prove this. If there was a need for radical change, a necessary push back against an emergent evil, then why did they scupper every progressive candidate across two primaries in order to serve up terrible establishment selections? How does a 78 year old man with a lifetime of voting in line with equally Trumpian policies and a running mate who gleefully locked up low level drug offenders represent a light in the darkness? Nothing truly good can be said about Biden, a creepy, career politician whose extolling virtue seems to be that he loves his family enough to use his position to help enrich them, which, if you recall, is yet another criticism that has been leveled at Trump repeatedly.

The Democrat party know for sure that their candidate is awful. This is why this narrative has become so important. There aren’t many Biden supporters out there and why would there be? But there are plenty of people who after years of oversaturation of anti-Trump stories have come to hate the current president most likely for reasons they don’t understand. There will also be a sizeable portion that know it’s all lies and spin but are so sick and tired of hearing it that they would happily vote Trump out just to end the screeching hysteria. That notion has been peddled a lot of late… “If you vote him out we can get back to normal” they swear and it is a promise that is revealing of two things. First they put forward the idea that “normal” is good. Second is the acknowledgement that Trump isn’t “normal” and anyone who that doesn’t fit that label, that understands how things are supposed to be done, must be removed from the system they don’t conform to.

And make no mistake about it this is very much what the past four years have been about. Before Trump there was a balanced political ecosystem, mostly made up of pond scum and jellyfish, that enabled everyone involved in politics to flourish financially and retain status. Politicians that couldn’t move upward got plum media analyst roles and book deals. Long time journalists and anchors become spokespeople or sell their insight to tech companies exchanging access for disinformation. Tech companies serve the political parties moving their staff across to both in order to advise on strategy using the data they gathered through their platforms in exchange for favours via policy, protections and tax breaks. Each part of this alliance is capable of ruining the other one but it holds together because it is good for business.

Whatever you think of Trump you can easily see how he doesn’t fit into that system. Being ahead of the curve on social media means he already had a following of millions prior to running for office. No reliance on the usual channels to get his message out made the media uneasy. Likewise this was true for the cult of personality around him… They shudder to think of a world where people who haven’t been groomed to have the correct political sensibilities could be elected simply because they are popular with the proles. When you start to think about some of the policies he implemented, like introducing some limitations on when government workers can go and become lobbyists, or how the lack of new wars have starved the military industrial complex, the picture becomes clearer. It’s not the American people he really poses a danger to.

The media never viewed him as dangerous when he was playing the role of reality TV clown. The president of the news network that now almost exclusively reports on the imagined evils of Trump not only offered him advice on how to win the Republican nomination debate but also a weekly TV show. During his presidential campaign MSNBC, who recently compared him to Mussolini, regularly aired the convivial conversations as he caught up with the anchors who were regular guests at the holiday resort he owned. Mostly the tone of the media was ridicule and it’s easy to understand why. A typical boorish New Yorker with a bad perma-tan and comb-over swaggering across the country thinking he can play at politics. The jokes write themselves.

What the political class and their media and tech cronies hadn’t bargained with was just how sick and tired many Americans were of the establishment status quo. Trump was different at least and increasingly, by either fluke or design, was speaking the language of the electorate. Despite being a billionaire with friends in high places he was somehow the non-establishment choice. Think about that. Only in a political landscape so decadent and depraved could Trump frame himself as an underdog man of the people.

This revelation should have probably prompted some form of self reflection. Alas, those that make up the Washington machine are all as egotistical and arrogant as the man they claim to despise. When it became increasingly apparent he might win, rather than simply serve as some light relief until America crowned queen Hillary, they cranked the propaganda into overdrive. When he won despite that they couldn’t even pretend to hold back their anger and tears. That moment of humiliation has spurred on the ever increasingly fantastical coverage of the Trump era, going from tentative lies to full blown hysteria in a way that has never been done before. Post 9 / 11 coverage was more rational and balanced. Right now ISIS gets better press than Donald Trump.

In what I am sure will be the final days of his presidency the high profile grifters are making sure to get out of it what they can. Book deals, TV shows, comedy specials. Even the most mediocre of talents can have it all as long as you denounce Cheeto Hitler but get it before he’s gone. We return to normal soon and that means that the people who have little more to them than the anti-Trump gimmick will be frozen out once more. Friends in red and blue will wink at each other from across the aisle, cocktails and secret handshakes after dark while the public theatrics play out.

You’ll cheer for it all thinking you won some great victory. You’ll be celebrating so much you probably won’t notice the same network that spent four years telling you Trump was a dictator in waiting are the ones doing his first interview after leaving office. You’ll be too busy to wonder why he too gets a million dollar book deal to promote his views that only a few months prior were called hate speech. You’ll probably even point and laugh when he’s back on that reality TV you like so much. “Wasn’t he the most evil man in the world once” your kids will ask and you’ll pretend you didn’t hear them. Congratulations rube. We’re back to normal.