The first 100 days of any administration tend to be viewed with considerable interest, not least in the US, for an indication of its inclinations. In the case of Donald Trump, the first 100 hours have been fascinating enough.
Trump’s very election as President fell into the stranger-than-fiction category. But Sinclair Lewis’ dystopian fantasy about a presidential candidate with a proto-fascist agenda, It Can’t Happen Here, was published way back in 1935.
Back then, there was a far-right tendency in American politics that hero-worshipped Adolf Hitler and adopted the slogan “America First” — effectively a translation of “Deutschland uber alles” — which was subsequently appropriated by white supremacist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan.
It would be safe to presume that many Trump supporters are ignorant of the historical resonance. It’s unlikely, though, that the new President or his speechwriters could have been unaware of its origins before they injected it into his inaugural address.
It hardly needs saying, though, that America has always put itself first. This is neither unnatural nor surprising. Every nation puts itself first, unless coercively obliged to do otherwise (as Germany was in the aftermath of the First World War). Trump is under the impression, however, that “for many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry” and “the wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and redistributed across the world”.
“Carnage” may be too strong a word — specially in view of what has been wrought in recent decades, with direct or indirect US involvement, in territories such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen — to characterise economic suffering across America, but the devastation is real, and undoubtedly fed into the enthusiasm engendered by the Trump campaign, particularly once it became clear that the only alternative was a committed adherent of the neoliberal status quo in the shape of Hillary Clinton.
But Trump’s diagnosis of the malaise dangerously falters when he seeks to blame American woes on faceless foreigners, be they Chinese industries or Mexican migrant workers. The actual culprit is unrestrained capitalism, which began sharpening the tools of its trade in the 1980s. It inevitably went too far, crashed spectacularly in 2007-08, yet it was the chief culprit rather than the victims who were rewarded in the aftermath.
Trump epitomises the worst excesses of capitalism, not least in terms of a reluctance to pay taxes. No one would expect him to even mention the recently highlighted fact that the world’s eight richest people control as much wealth as 3.6 billion global citizens, roughly half the world’s population. Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns may well be intended to cover up the possibility that he is officially neither as rich nor as successful a celebrity-tycoon as he likes to pretend.
It is his spat with the media, though, over the size of the crowd at his inauguration that has grabbed the most attention recently, not least because of the gobsmacking audacity of the verifiably false claims coming out of the White House. A fresh euphemism for blatant lies may not augur well for a presidency. Trump’s initial acts as President have been predictably reprehensible, with moves against the Affordable Care Act without a replacement in place, talks on moving the US embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and cutting off funding for international agencies that facilitate women’s health if that includes abortion. He also signed an executive order dissociating his nation from the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal.
Overall, though, Trump’s vow that his rule “will determine the course of America, and the world, for many, many years to come” comes across as a dire threat, calling for sustained resistance within and outside the US.
By arrangement with Dawn
