The Saturday Read Feature: Trump takes America
A US election special.
Good evening. Welcome to the latest Saturday Read Feature. Finn here.
Donald Trump has been elected as the 47th President of the United States in a remarkable – and to many, unexpected – comeback. We wanted to share our cover with you early, along with some key pieces on how this historic moment came to pass from our writers in the US and London. You can read extracts from Sohrab Ahmari, Jill Filipovic, Andrew Marr and our editor Jason Cowley below. There will be plenty more from us in the days to come. Thanks for reading and we will catch you with the main email on Saturday.
Sohrab explains why Kamala Harris’s gambit failed.
It turns out it’s a bad idea to pitch a Democratic campaign to neoconservatives such as Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol. Especially while a seismic realignment has pushed workers away from centre-left parties across much of the developed world. Yet that’s just the sort of campaign Kamala Harris ran: one premised on the “defend democracy” sentiments of affluent suburbanites, instead of the promise of social and economic democracy.
Like Thatcherism, Jason argues, Donald Trump is here to stay.
Kamala Harris was the ideal candidate for Donald Trump: a West Coast liberal lawyer with a rictus smile, an undistinguished record as vice-president and an opaque policy platform. She smiled and laughed a lot during the campaign, she preached progressive orthodoxies, she rallied with Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, as if the showbiz elite could persuade provincial, working-class America to vote for the Democrats. But you could see the panic in her eyes. The truth is she had nothing to say to Americans disillusioned by economic hardship, alarmed by immigration and the porous southern border, and alienated by identity liberalism.
In America women are disposable, Jill writes.
As the election results trickled in on the night of 5 November and into the next morning, and as Donald Trump gained a larger and larger advantage, a decades-old Germaine Greer quote kept dancing through my head: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”
This is the first US presidential election since the Supreme Court, stacked with conservatives appointed by Trump, ended the era of legal abortion in America. It is the second in which a woman has been at the top of the presidential ticket. It is the third with Trump as the Republican nominee.
Donald Trump’s victory is a cataclysm, says Andrew.
There is no sugar-coating. This is a huge victory for the right which challenges British political security and prosperity. Suddenly, we seem a social-democratic outlier, surrounded by angrier, more confident and more pugnacious neighbours. What will be, will be. The world is as it is. There is no point hand-wringing now about the policy failures and delusion of the Kamala Harris campaign. What matters is to think clearly about the choices Britain makes next.
Nor should we feel sorry for ourselves. Any grief, any empathy should be reserved for our liberal brothers and sisters in the United States, who face a much bleaker future; and of course, for the people of Ukraine, who may be forced into a humiliating and destructive “peace”.
Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday. Thank you.
— Jason, Finn & Nicholas
A Palestinian-American briefly interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's TV news channel about ten days ago said she was actually going to cast her ballot for Trump this election instead of her usual vote for the Democratic candidate. Why exactly, she didn’t specify, other than the obvious Biden/Harris administration’s unconditional arming of Israel’s mind-bogglingly massive starvation, sickening and slaughter of Palestinian non-combatants over the last year.
However, it’s likely also due to the Democrats’ neo or phony liberalism on this great-human-disaster issue: they should be well above Trump's unconditionally pro-Israel foreign policy. Recall, for example, that he even appointed his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to head his administration’s Israel-Palestine portfolio.
But the Democrats are not much or not at all above Trump’s as well as the Republican party’s transparent, very-long-standing thus expected unconditional political and military-arms support of Israel. In their phoniness, at least on this issue, the Democrats want to both have and eat their cake by expecting the political support of pro-Palestinian and anti-war Arab-, Muslim- and Palestinian-Americans.
Incredibly, many faithful followers of Donald [Gimme’a B--- J--] Trump still claim he's a genius robbed of full presidential glory and that he challenges the Deep State. And then there's “the swamp” that Trump still claims he'll drain if re-elected — although he himself was and will again be a part of it.
But since the Trump administration kowtowed to big fossil fuel, mostly via the recklessly significant loosening of environmental protections, he, far from genuinely trying to “drain the swamp”, actually wallowed in it.
A revelatory review (by Geoff Olson, 01/10/2018) of the book The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy notes that the book's author describes big oil CEOs and lobbyists in the U.S. as being a notably large part of the American Deep State. Therefore, it would be a large part of the national Capitol’s swamp that Trump claims has corrupted D.C. and, ergo, was supposedly seeking to destroy him and his presidency.
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“This notion of a supranational deep state does not seem to be far-fetched to me, though I remain agnostic about rumors involving the [Trump administration's] Offal Office. I certainly don’t buy the alt-right notion that Trump is playing 'four-dimensional chess' against the deep state. The six-time bankruptee would probably lose at checkers to a nine-year old and tweet that he whipped Garry Kasparov.” (Geoff Olson, “A Deep State of Confusion”)