NOW AS WELL AS THEN - Trump

Donald J Trump is, according to some analyses, mentally unstable. One psychiatrist described him as suffering from an illness called narcissism. He believes in himself to the point that it clouds what would be a normal judgement. Everything is about what he does or thinks. Thus, after the massacre in Orlando, Florida, while other leaders were extending their condolences, he was boasting that he had predicted this. His solution was that if everyone had had a gun in his or her hip pockets or at their ankles, the slaughter would have been considerably less. While there may have been such a possibility, it is certain that having guns in a nightclub would have created a temptation for someone else to use the strength of the bullet to conclude some argument.

 

Examples of his narcissism are numerous. He always said: “I am a winner”. He also claimed that he knew more about ISIS than the generals. Another facet of this narcissism is the matter of guilt transfer. Trump has given every possible opponent a nickname. He calls Hillary Clinton  ‘Crooked Hillary’, while he has faced some 3 500 cases and is being investigated for fraud in the Trump University affair. He called Ted Cruz ‘Lying Ted’. Trump lies even when he is trying to explain what he said. Yet he continues to boast of being a great winner. He believes that he has become a national hero by his campaign antics and that he must in some way continue this march into the general election.

 

Interestingly, in so far as Trump possesses a national policy, his views are in general Republican views, but on steroids. His anti-immigration stance is Republican, except that no decent Republican would refer to Mexicans as rapists and murderers. He also wants to control Mexican illegal entry into the USA by building a wall, absurdly along a river that winds its way along the border and in terrain that is hilly in some areas and flat in others, and in practice unsuitable to such a continuous protective barrier. He is generally for cutting the taxes of the wealthy, but Republicans are unsure what he would actually do. He is also, now at least what Republicans call pro-life, but no decent Republican would say that a woman who had had an abortion should be punished, as he did. He also talks about making America great again. Since the USA has not stopped being great, as Clinton has pointed out, what Trump is essentially repeating is the old Republican cry that President Obama has made the USA weaker! 

 

However, the Trump cry is also coded messaging for a return to 1890 or thereabouts when white men completely ruled the now diverse US space. Even on trade, where 

he has practised the Republican thing of making products wherever they are cheaper without any regard for the workers who brought their business to the level where they could become “global”, he now preaches restricted trade and, if necessary, a trade war with China, for instance. This is his method of courting the unemployed blue-collar white worker in the so-called swing states. He nonetheless has clothing, furniture, accessories like ties etc. made in Mexico, Peru, China, Vietnam and Slovenia!

 

One wonders if Hillary Clinton were viewed more favourably if Trump would still be a contender in the Presidential race. Hillary is still seen as untrustworthy, somewhat snobbish and of dubious morals. Trump has associated her with her husband’s infidelities of the past and many Americans evidently believe that she was responsible for the death of four US officials in Benghazi. 

 

Interestingly, no one has asked why the US Ambassador to Libya was at the Consulate instead of the Consul General of Benghazi coming to him in Tripoli. He certainly knew how dangerous Benghazi was. Was he perhaps being a cowboy? Clinton is also deemed to be lying about the e-mails she sent from her private server. All of this has allowed Trump to remain an apparently viable candidate in the race.

 

Trump has however been unable to capitalise on this, since he is conducting a war with Republicans who think he has gone too far and refuse to support him. Technically, he cannot now win a war that he is fighting on two fronts. His forces are evidently blind followers. He is preaching a nativist ideology (if one can talk of nativism in a country that is entirely made up – including the Amerindians – of immigrants) that is unquestioningly followed by a bunch of white men and a number of other people who believe in his bluster. He does not have to explain how he will return jobs that are often lost to new technology and not necessarily cheap foreign labour, which he himself uses. But this following is still a minority of the US population and is demographically becoming smaller and smaller. He cannot win as a soft white racist.

 

It is in fact the high level of Hillary Clinton’s unfavourability that has allowed Trump still to exist in the Presidential race.