I’m Very Worried About a Second Trump Administration
Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain
Although some on the left have minimized the potential for mayhem in a second Trump administration, I’m not sanguine at all. Many like to point to his less than vehement pursuit of war compared to Biden during Trump’s first term as president. Perhaps, but if I was a betting person, and I am not, I would put a lot of money on that number, the number being Trump’s readiness to wage war. Trump is the consummate bully, and war in some ways is the ultimate and perhaps the last stand of a bully in a nuclear age. Conventional war also draws bullies. Iran stands out like the proverbial sore thumb in US war planning. Trump’s slavish support for Israel’s aggression in the Middle East could easily allow the US to be drawn into an open military action with Iran at Israel’s behest. Israel could easily lure Trump into a military action against Iran’s nuclear program. This could lead to a larger war with outcomes not possible to predict. War is unpredictable. Iran and its allies are not predictable in terms of kowtowing to Trump and Israel. War among nuclear powers is especially unpredictable. For those who think that nuclear war is off the table of military strategies, look to the symbolic clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. These are people who have carefully reasoned out the chances of nuclear war. “As of January 23, 2024, the Doomsday Clock stands at 90 seconds to midnight.”
The ceasefire between Israel and those fighting Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip is a welcome change, but unless Trump is willing to confront the US masters of war and the humongous war industry, then the ceasefire is subject to all kinds of subterfuge. I would like to be completely wrong about the latter, but the US does not have much industry to fall back on besides weapons manufacturers. Professor Norman Finkelstein is perhaps the most knowledgeable expert on the subject of past ceasefires (January 18, 2025) between Israel and those in power in the Gaza Strip. That history is not promising, and Donald Trump may simply not want his inauguration cluttered by war in the Middle East.
Some may argue that conventional war has become normalized. I cannot attend a sporting event because every event in the US is laced with symbols of militarism and war. In These Times (August 20, 2018) carried a good discussion of how sports events have been militarized since September 11, 2001. As a fan of major league baseball, the last image I ever wished to see was a parachutist with full combat gear landing on a baseball field. As a kid, the Pledge of Allegiance opened our Little League games, but this was before the world became engulfed in endless wars in which the US was often a prime mover. A ballplayer or spectators didn’t have to pledge fealty to militarism and endless wars at sporting events.
This is from Normal Mailer just prior to the Iraq War in 2003 from the In These Times article cited above:
“The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans’ lives… [D]emocracy is the special condition – a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military, and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already.”
Mailer was prescient because the idea of fascism here, or some form of inverted totalitarianism as theorized by Sheldon Wolin, have been steadily growing in the US for decades.
Kirsten Gillibrand said during Pete Hegseth’s nomination hearings as Secretary of Defense: “We have hundreds – HUNDREDS – of women who serve in the infantry, lethal members of our military … But you degrade them,” (Reuters, January 15, 2025).
“Hegseth’s opening remarks, praising Trump, were repeatedly interrupted by protesters. He vowed to restore a “warrior culture” to the U.S. military and said accountability was coming for those who fall short” (Reuters, January 15, 2025).
In regard to writing on the left, the censors have already done their damage. Freedom of speech on college and university campuses has become a joke vis-à-vis Israel/Palestine and the expanded wars in the Middle East. I reread “The Long Silence” (CounterPunch, August 23, 2008), and I cannot believe that the Middle East has degenerated into such a hellhole of war.
What worries me most are some of the people I come in contact with in the area in which I live. Many people I’ve met are multilingual people. Many who work in the surrounding towns and cities are also multilingual. I naively thought that all of these people were immigrants who had nothing to worry about in regard to the federal government. I met people locally as a census enumerator during the census in 2010, and I assumed they and their families had some kind of valid visas. Many of the people I meet may have come here to work and may have had or have valid work visas to fill jobs in the kitchens of local restaurants, or worked at different trades in the community. I have no idea what the status of peoples’ visas may be, but there must be a kind of mass anxiety among people who came here to escape all manner of mayhem in the nations from which they came that often were put into subservience and immiseration by the global economy and militarism that is driven by the US and its allies. Many people are often here as a result of the race to the bottom of the global working class.
“The Senate on Wednesday adopted the first amendment to the Laken Riley Act, as Republicans push for a legislative win to open the new Congress” (The Hill, January 15, 2025).
“The legislation in its current form would mandate federal detention of immigrants without legal status accused of theft, burglary and other related crimes” (The Hill, January 15, 2025).
Trump has hardly left the gate and according to this Guardian article (January 17, 2025) he has an immigration raid scheduled for Chicago the day after his inauguration. Some of his supporters, rattled by the economy and life’s challenges over decades, may rally to his side. These raids will be a kind of right-wing militarism brought to the domestic front. It’s another shiny object with which to distract many from Trump’s larger agenda. Trump did not emerge in a political, economic, or social vacuum. He is a symptom of what the duopoly, militarism, empire, greed, meanness, and predatory capitalism have coughed up.
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