The Full Extent of Trump’s Damage

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ November 29, 2020

The large and lingering question is how much damage has Trump caused and how much more will he cause before he is forced from the White House?

There is a constant din of discussion on the second question, but it never seems to approach an estimate, let alone an answer. We are left with the threat of an immense indeterminate mass of evil added to four years of continuous disaster. The indirectly stated conclusion is that there is nothing to be done, and it will be whatever it will be.

Our only relief is that the election with Biden’s conclusive win was a transitioning to the Trump Party horror show's final act. Unfortunately, that suggests everything up to now was an anticlimax with the climax yet to come. It is hard to imagine what that climax might be in the midst of an out of control pandemic, growing hunger, economic devastation, and the discovery of widespread social insanity in some 20% of our voting population.

That certainly explains the sick fascination and refusal to attempt any estimate as a statement that limits the horror. As superstitious creatures, we fear any such attempt will only make the reality worse. How much more evil can we take?

Some are finding relief in Trump’s well-known ignorance and incompetence with his tendency to surround himself with those even more ignorant and incompetent. Even he is at an all-time low in pretending to know what he is doing, hiding in his living room, and tweeting wildly irrational claims and contradictory statements. But we know the nature of Trump as a narcissistic psychopath with no control and no future. The void that defines him and the sociopaths around him must be filled with outrageous acts that destroy everything that might distract from their glorious embodiment of evil.

It is hard to even talk about this as the indistinct fear gnawing at our stomachs threatens to overwhelm the positivity we have all agreed must be willed into reality. Biden and Harris are good on words but very thin on substance. And we know, deep down, that what little is possible may already be doomed by the impending tide of hatred and bigotry that cannot be stopped.

But we cannot allow ourselves to think that. If short-term hope is all we can get then, we really must nurture that hope and extract all we can from it while it survives. Our future is so tenuous that any failure can cause its loss. The evil we face is dedicated to destroying that future to replace it with an endless past we know far too well. Most of us would not survive nor want to.

Our choices can only get worse at every misstep. America's body politic expelled Trump as evil but could not remove the endemic conditions that gave him birth. The scorched earth that was feared is being enacted with or without Trump as its craven and crude symbol. He is being pushed to seek attention again, his only activity, as noise to cover the mass sabotage of any future for the planet.

We know the script, having watched it for four years. It must be stopped, but there is no will to do more than delay it. We are told to watch and hope for the best by the people who implemented those same solutions for Obama. But those led to Trump the last time they were tried.

The Biden government's official response is that most widespread Trumpist sabotage and destruction can be reversed in January. Executive orders were used to destroy the future and can be used to restore, at least some of it. But how much?

That depends on how much has been destroyed and how much sabotage is irreversible. We already know that the politicization of the judiciary and the Supreme Court will be used to block rights restoration and everything else that can be blocked. This is far worse than is being described. We are still facing weeks of hopeless election lawsuits with no legal goal other than to hit a corrupt, politicized federal judge who will jam the system, destroy confidence, and escalate confusion.

It is a classic example of banana republics and authoritarian governments that judges are owned, and justice is simply the regime's political controls. We are seeing universal human rights denounced, denied, and mocked. Only the ruling elite's arbitrary mythology, forced onto the population as propaganda, is needed to justify any oppression. Rights get in the way of extreme capitalism’s exploitation and control.

Three hundred years of active philosophical development defined and expanded universal drights and raised the ideal of individual freedom against the ancient power to exploit by the right of the gods created by the powerful. This is being destroyed before our eyes with the support of the weakly informed, fearful masses most easily lured by god-kings and warlords.

We know this for the disaster it is but have exhausted ourselves with the opiate of endless production, endless purchasing, endless debt, and the entertainment that fills our days and hides the demands that control us.

But I think the discovery by many of us, with the technology, education, and resources to survive, that life can be very good without the rat race and economic insanity is a profound change agent. For those of us lucky enough to work from home for ten months that has been a tremendous lesson in limiting the capitalist controls that has destroyed our planet and blinded us for decades.

While the media plays the Capitalist Realism game and demands that we forget what we have just learned and return to the past that was killing us, many see a different reality now. It is uncomfortable in ways, and the lockdowns are tiring for social animals like us, but the benefits of time and relief from constant pressure to consume that we were taught was completely incompatible with our modern existence are reachable and better than we thought.

How did we lose that originally? We don’t even need to buy things to achieve it. That, of course, is what must be obliterated by the oligarchs and financial elite. You must want to work and think only of the future as things you don’t yet have. But not needing those things is a revolutionary force and we have been, inadvertently taught, how close that is.

The power we have is to refuse to return to the economy as it was. That is to refuse to work more and to leave home except on our terms. The all-consuming stock market is not ours. It belongs to the tiny elite with scraps for pension plans that are nearly meaningless as security now in the worst states such as the US.

We have been moving to cooperatives and the power of the commons to replace the planet's devastation caused by predatory capitalism. Let’s block those trying to deny our personal rights to universal standards of well-being and happiness. We need to do more than reverse some executive orders, and we must never return to the past. But that is possible what real action that would be supported by the mass of the population.

Our power is to refuse to play the old games except by the rules that guarantee our future. The time to change is now.