One
thing that bothers me most as a political scientist is politicians’ frequent
use of terrorism. Not in the sense of former New York City Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani’s self-parody-like campaign for the 2008 Republican Party Presidential
nomination, once famously and memorably described in a Democratic candidates
debate by then-Delaware Senator and later Vice President Joe Biden as
consisting solely of “a noun, a verb and 9/11”[1].
I mean politicians’ actual utilization of terrorist tactics: instilling fear
for political purposes.
This
strategy was best exemplified most recently by the Presidential campaign of
failed casino real estate mogul and network celebrity reality television game
show host Donald Trump. In every speech at every event, Trump portrayed the
United States of America as something resembling a post-apocalyptic dystopia;
beginning in the address in which he announced his candidacy, in which he
described the eleven million Mexican immigrants living in the United States as
“rapists”
sent by Mexico to bring crime and drugs. It continued throughout Trump’s
campaign, with the candidate claiming in the same speech that the Gross
Domestic Product of the United States was “below zero”[2]
and in a September press conference that the United States unemployment rate
was “Forty-two
percent”[3].
These claims culminated in his acceptance address at the Republican nomination
convention, which concluded with what are perhaps, at least to me, quite
possibly the five most objectively terrifying words ever spoken by any American
politician, at least in my lifetime:
“I alone can fix it.”[4]
The
reason why these words were so frightening coming from a candidate for the
Presidency is because, of all of the achievements that Presidents of the United
States have ever accomplished, one thing remains consistently true throughout:
None of them were ever done alone.
However,
that having been said, as a student of both history and philosophy, it is
incumbent upon me to concede the fact that Donald Trump‘s ideology of a
singular strong leader arriving to return a chaotic world to order is not
nearly an unprecedented one in either.
Perhaps
not exactly the earliest, but to me certainly one of the most well known
example of this idea preceded Donald Trump’s birth by three hundred years. In
the mid-seventeenth century, an English philosopher named Thomas Hobbes of
Malmesbury wrote a book he entitled “Leviathan: The Matter, Form and Power of a
Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil”. The eponymous “Leviathan”
in the title was what Hobbes termed the state. Hobbes wrote that, in order to
have a civilized society, the state had to impose its order on the chaos that
he called the “state of nature”, which he described in his “Leviathan”
as a state of “war of all against all”[5].
This
every-man-for-himself hell on Earth, as Hobbes described it, is in many ways
eerily reminiscent of the dystopian American hellscape repeatedly described by
Donald Trump.
Donald
Trump’s absurdist, almost avant-garde and bizarrely counterfactual
conceptualization of the state of the United States of America mattered
substantially less as a Republican candidate in the campaign than it did after,
on my 28th birthday: December 19, 2016, 304 unelected oligarchs
of the electoral college, most if not all of whom had never even met him,
singlehandedly appointed Donald Trump; the losing candidate of the Tuesday
November 8, 2016 nationwide Presidential election more than a month earlier as
the next acting interim occupant of the Oval Office until another democratic
election is organized in November 2020.
In my “Philosophies
of Politics” course here at the University of Wisconsin College of
Letters and Sciences, we read Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan” within the
same month as “The Prince” by Italian Renaissance political philosopher
Niccolo Machiavelli. Whilst Hobbes writes that, in order to have a
civilization, the state must impose an authoritarian regime on the people or
risk slipping backward into a return to the state of nature, Machiavelli
elaborates in impressively relatively easy to understand terms the strategies
and tactics that such a regime must employ in order to remain in a position of
power over the people. Chief of these is the easiest to grasp the importance
of: the suppression of dissent.
Waging
open rebellion against the government had been a crime punishable by execution
in ever empire in history and was ever what Jesus himself was crucified for:
having declared himself to be the “King of Judea”[6]a
province of the Rome under Second Roman Emperor Tiberius [14 CE-37 CE] adoptive
son of his predecessor: First Emperor Octavius Augustus, nephew of founder of
Imperial Rome itself Julius Caesar.
Machiavelli,
however, went an extra step few if any had dared tread before. In addition to
killing those who commit acts of insurgency and insurrection and those who
publicly declare themselves to be in open rebellion, a truly successful
authoritarian ruler must likewise deal at least equally severely with those who
are merely even quietly or discretely disloyal. In “The Prince”,
Machiavelli, holds up as an example to follow that of the Borgia family of
Italy.
From
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 “The Godfather” to HBO’s 1999 “The Sopranos”,
every Italian organized criminal enterprise is merely attempting in vain to
emulate the underground empires ruled over by the Borgia’s of Spain and the
House of Medici of fifteenth century Renaissance Florence.
The
member of Borgia family that the lifelong Florentine philosopher Machiavelli
specifically cites by name, as an exemplar for any and all aspiring
authoritarians was Cesare Borgia[7],
son of Rodrigo Borgia, who in August 1492 became Pope Alexander VI, the 214th Pope
of the Roman Catholic Church: nothing if not a testament to the enormous
influence and power wielded by the Borgia’s in Renaissance Italy.
In our
own time, numerous lifelong lawyers with years and careers of dealing with
mafia families like those portrayed in “The Sopranos” and “The Godfather”
have stated on national television that the way in which the Trump family, the
Trump Organization and the Trump White House are organized is strikingly
reminiscent of organized criminal syndicates[8].
With
this in mind, the photographs taken of Donald Trump during his meetings with
incumbent sitting President Barack Obama and the Democratic and Republican
Majority and Minority Leaderships in the United States Senate and House of
Representatives after Trump’s appointment by the unelected oligarchs of the
electoral college to succeed President Obama as the acting interim occupant of
the Oval Office are, at least to me, extremely telling in examining Donald
Trump’s facial expression.
Trump’s
entire life, since being born the son of a multibillionaire New York real
estate developer, had been spent being able to easily and simply get anything
he wanted anytime he wanted from anyone he wanted using only his checkbook; by,
as former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann put it for GQ Magazine, “hitting people
with his wallet”[9].
However,
an examination of his expressions during and after his meetings with the
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Congressman Paul Ryan [R-WI]; the
House Minority Leader, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi [D-CA]; Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell [R-KY] and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer
[D-NY], reveal Trump to be perhaps arriving gradually at the realization that
in Washington Trump would no longer be surrounded by, as Olbermann put it: “men and women
who could be bought or sold with money, or the promise of money, or the threat
of less money”—At least, not by him.
It may
very well have also been during these meetings; especially the one with
President Obama; that Trump began to recognize something already well-known to
those of us who have studied him closely since he first announced a candidacy
for the Presidency in 2011 on the single-issue platform of repeatedly accusing
President Obama of secretly being an African Muslim—and, as Trump reiterated
during his 2016 Presidential campaign, the founder of the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria [ISIS][10]
established in October 2006 after the March 19, 2003 American invasion of Iraq.
Namely:
Donald Trump is not nearly smart enough to run a government.
Nevertheless,
Trump’s ideological ambition to, as Olbermann put it; replace the United States
federal government, the western world’s first and oldest democracy, “with one-man
rule”[11]
continued apparently unabated.
He
accomplished this first by appointing as Cabinet Secretary of the United States
Department of Energy; the agency in charge of the world’s largest arsenal of
thermonuclear warheads; former Governor James Perry [R-TX], who had proposed
eliminating the entire Energy Department altogether when Perry ran for the
Republican Party’s Presidential nomination in 2012 and who before and even
after being appointed to the position still did not understand what the
Secretary of Energy did; believing the position to be a salesperson and
spokesperson for the corporate conglomerates of the American coal, oil and
natural gas fossil fuel industries.
Trump
appointed as Cabinet Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development Benjamin Carson, a former surgeon who stated that he believed the
ancient Egyptian Great Pyramids at Giza had been built as places to store grain[12]
by the Hebrew Biblical character Joseph—Subject of the Andrew Lloyd Webber
musical “The Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat”; starring Utah Mormon
Donny Osmond as the titular protagonist.
As
Cabinet Secretary of the Department of Education, Donald Trump appointed
Elisabeth Devos; the daughter-in-law of Dick Devos, the multibillionaire CEO
and founder of the multilevel marketing pyramid scheme “American Way” [AMWAY]
and brother of the founder of American military contractor Blackwater
Worldwide; who had spent the overwhelming majority of her professional career
campaigning relentlessly against the American government-funded public
educational system.
Trump
appointed Edward Pruitt—a former attorney General from Oklahoma who had
likewise spent the overwhelming majority of his professional career fighting
fiercely against the very concept of environmental protections by repeatedly
filing dozens of frivolous lawsuits against the Environmental Protection
Agency—as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
As
Cabinet Secretary of the United States Department, Trump appointed Rex
Tillerson, former Chief Executive Officer of Exxon-Mobil, who received the
Russian “Order of Friendship” from former KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin
for Exxon-Mobile’s joint venture with the state-owned Russian oil corporation
“Rossiyskaya Neft” [ROSNEFT].
More
telling still than any or indeed all of his seemingly incoherent and
nonsensical appointments of individuals almost but nit quite as manifestly
unqualified for their new jobs as he was for his was the fact that Donald Trump
has left many if not a majority of sub-Cabinet-Secretary-level positions in a
majority if not all agencies and departments of the executive branch of the
United States Federal Government unfilled and vacant.
In the
Department of Energy, the department in charge of thermonuclear weapons, there
is no Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy and the National Nuclear Security
Administration has no Deputy Administrator.
The
Department of Education has no Undersecretary and no Assistant Secretary for
Post-Secondary Education.
The
Environmental Protection Agency has no Assistant Administrator for
Administration, no Assistant Administration for Environmental Information and
no Assistant Administrator for Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
The
Department of State, now formerly headed by former CEO Tillerson, has no CFO,
no Director of Human Resources, and no Undersecretary for Civilian Security,
Democracy and Human Rights, no Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, no Director
General for Foreign Service and no Special Representative for Nuclear
Non-Proliferation.
Donald
Trump’s second most obvious and troubling deviation from Presidential
administration norms remains his seemingly inexplicable unwillingness to
appoint Ambassadors even to America’s oldest and closest allies.
In
spite of stating in speeches that he believes himself deserving of the Nobel
Peace Prize because of his all but fruitless and unproductive efforts to
negotiate with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un—something he previously
publicly told Secretary of State Tillerson was “wasting his time trying”—the
State Department has no Special Envoy for North Korea Human Rights issues and,
until today [Saturday July 7, 2018] no United States Ambassador to the American
Embassy in Seoul, capitol city of South Korea.
In
spite of proudly having his photograph taken holding a glowing globe together
with King Salman Abdul-Aziz Al Saud of the Saudi Royal Family, Trump has
refused the State Department’s American Embassy in the Saudi Arabian capitol
city of Riyadh an Ambassador of it own either.
Along
with his aforementioned insulting of the citizens of Mexico as drug-dealing
criminals and rapists, Donald Trump has also refuse to appoint a State
Department Ambassador to the United States Embassy in Mexico City.
In
spite of having vocally supported the United Kingdom of Great Britain’s
economically disastrous June 23, 2016 vote to exit the European Union, Donald
Trump has refused to appoint State Department Ambassadors to the American
Embassies in Tallinn, Estonian; Belfast, Ireland, Luxembourg City and
Stockholm, Sweden; all members states of the European Union.
Along
with his Housing and Urban Development Secretary’s counterfactual beliefs about
the Pyramids at Giza, the American Embassy in nearby Cairo, Egypt has no
American Ambassador either.
After
his criticisms of President Obama for opening up diplomatic and trade relations
with Cuba for the first time since the embargo began prior to the Cuban missile
Crisis under President Kennedy more than half a century ago; Donald Trump has
refused to appoint an American Ambassador to the newly-reopened American
Embassy in Havana, Cuba.
In
spite of his Presidential campaign having propagated disproved conspiracy
theories about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton having been somehow
singlehandedly responsible for the death of American Ambassador John Stevens in
the terrorist attack on the American Embassy in Benghazi, Libya on September
11, 2012, Donald Trump has refused to appoint an American Ambassador to Libya.
When
asked about this bizarre policy of refusing to appoint Ambassadors to American
Embassies even in allied countries, Trump responded by stating that the lack of
American Ambassadors in nations around the globe doesn’t matter, because “The only one
that matters is me. I’m the only one that matters”[13].
However,
as previously speculated, Donald Trump might have begun to recognize that he
himself was nowhere near smart enough to singlehandedly run the federal government
of the world’s sole remaining economic and military superpower. So he began
looking around for someone smarter than himself, who—unlike the Congressional
leadership—he could completely control. Fortunately, Donald Trump found an
individual with both of these qualifications within his very own extended
family, in his son-in-law Jared Kushner; husband of the only woman Donald Trump
has ever lusted after: His daughter Ivanka; the de facto acting First Lady of
the Donald Trump White House.
When
asked by Barbara Walters of ABC what he and Ivanka shared between them, Donald
Trump is on the record as answering “sex” and stating that if he
wasn’t already married to his third wife: an Eastern European illegal immigrant
named Melania, he would be dating his daughter Ivanka[14]—notably
making no mention of the fact that his daughter, too, is married. Because, as
the nightly celebrity gossip program “Access Hollywood” showed, making
sexual advances on married women has never presented any obstacle for Donald
Trump[15].
Indeed,
the only possible contender with Ivanka for her father’s lust would be her
sister Tiffany. In another interview with CBS more than twenty years ago,
Donald Trump went on the record bragging about the then-year-old Tiffany’s legs
and, with genuine glee, giddily speculating about the potential future size of
her breasts[16].
As
Speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of
Wisconsin is third in line of Presidential succession, which would ordinarily
in turn make Ryan at least ostensibly supposed to be the third most powerful
person within the United States government after Vice President Michael Pence.
However, as detailed above, lawyers with experience dealing with organized
crime assess the Trump administration as being organized like a mafia family
for a reason; as the three most important and powerful people in the American
government are all named Trump. The first and foremost is Donald Trump,
appointed by the unelected oligarchs of the Electoral College as the acting
interim occupant of the Oval Office. Second is Ivanka, as the love—or rather
lust—of Donald Trump’s life the de facto acting First Lady of the Trump White
House. The third is Donald Trump’s eldest son, whom, megalomaniacal narcissist
that he is, he naturally named after himself: Donald Trump Junior, whom his
father named as, at least officially on paper, the head of the Trump
Organization.
In
reaction to the shooting of more than fifteen innocent people in San Bernardino
California in December 2015, Donald Trump announced that his foreign policy
would consist of a ban on Muslims entering the United States[17],
in spite of the fact that the shooter was born in Chicago, Illinois. Trump
reiterated his Muslim ban in reaction to the shooting of more than fifty innocent
people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in June 2016, in spite of the
shooter having been born in Queens, the same borough of New York City where
Donald Trump himself was born and raised.
Upon
being appointed by the unelected oligarchs of the Electoral College as the next
acting interim occupant of the Oval Office, Donald Trump’s administration
clarified that, in an unfortunately successful attempt to avoid being struck
down by the United States Supreme Court for its blatant and flagrant violation
of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment to the
Bill of Rights, instead of banning any and all adherents and practitioners of
the Muslim faith, the policy would instead ban any and all immigration from
many majority-Muslim Middle Eastern nations.
This
was to be done in the name of national security, in spite of no terrorist
attack against the United States ever having been carried out by anyone from
any of the countries included in the ban. Interestingly, the majority-Muslim
Middle Eastern nations that have yielded terrorists who have attacked the
United States—Including and especially Saudi Arabia; birthplace of Al-Qaeda
founder and leader Osama Bin Laden—were not included in the administration’s
immigration ban.
It is
also of interest to note the fact that the only Middle Eastern nations not
included in the immigration ban happen to be in business with the Trump
Organization. Since this implies that what is in the for-profit interests of
the Trump Organization is effectively, for all practical intents and purposes,
the foreign policy of the United States of America, that makes the head of the
Trump Organization, Donald Trump Junior, one of the most important, influential
and powerful individuals in American international policymaking.
One of
Donald Trump’s very first actions upon occupying the Oval Office after his
farcical inauguration ceremony in January 2017 was to give his son-in-law Jared
Kushner a portfolio of responsibilities which, in addition to the
insurmountable Sisyphean task of making the Middle East peaceful for the first
time in thousands of years of near-constant sectarian conflict, also included
the duty of “Revamping the entire federal government”[18].
As
Kushner has, in the intervening fifteen months since, shown himself to be
something substantively less than an impressive intellectual heavyweight,
Donald Trump’s plan to replace the world’s first and oldest existing
representative parliamentary Presidential democracy with what Olbermann called
“one-man
rule”—albeit not necessarily his own but his son-in-law’s
–fortunately for everyone, failed. However, one does not need to remove any
money from a bank’s premises in order to be arrested, tried and convicted of
having robbed said bank. You can be arrested for robbing a bank while both you
and all of the money are still very much inside the bank’s vault. Braking into
the bank is more than enough, because what matters is intent. And Donald
Trump’s Machiavellian intent to replace the order established more than two hundred
years ago by America’s Founding Fathers with his own could not be clearer,
because he clarified his ambition toward authoritarian autocratic dictatorship
for all the world to hear with those five frightening words:
“I alone can fix it.”
[1] MSNBC, October 30, 2007
[2] Jacobson, Louis. “Donald Trump
gets claim about U.S. GDP doubly wrong”. Tampa Bay Times. Tuesday June 16, 2015:
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/16/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-us-gdp-never-negative-ter/
[3] Jacobson, Louis. “Donald Trump
says the unemployment rate may be 42 percent”. Tampa Bay Times. Wednesday
September 30, 2015: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/30/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-unemployment-rate-may-be-42-perc/
[4] “Donald Trump 2016 RNC draft
speech”. July 21, 2016: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974
[5] Hobbes, Thomas. ““Leviathan: The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil” (1651). Chapter XIII, Page
70-Chapter XX, Page 109
[6] John 18:37; Luke 23:3
[7] Machiavelli, Niccolo. “The Prince” (1651). Chapter VII, Page 33
[8] i.e. James Comey, “This Week”, ABC News, April 15, 2018
[9] “Trump’s Threats Are Getting Out
of Control”. August 2, 2017: https://video.gq.com/watch/the-closer-with-keith-olbermann-trump-s-threats-are-getting-out-of-control
[10] Jacobson, Louis and Sherman, Amy.
“Donald Trump's Pants on Fire claim that Barack Obama 'founded' ISIS, Hillary
Clinton was 'cofounder'”. Tampa Bay Times. Thursday August 11th, 2016: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/11/donald-trump/donald-trump-pants-fire-claim-obama-founded-isis-c/
[11] "Is The Trump White House
High?". February 16, 2017: https://video.gq.com/watch/the-closer-with-keith-olbermann-is-the-trump-white-house-high
[12] Kaczynski, Andrew and McDermott, Nathan.
“Ben Carson: Egyptian Pyramids Built For Grain Storage”. BuzzFeed. November 4,
2015: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/natemcdermott/ben-carson-egyptian-pyramids-built-for-grain-storage-not-by#.ppQjparmBb
[13] “Trump Accuses Clinton & DNC
of Real "Collusion"; Trump Reacts to Bergdahl Sentence; Trump Heads
to Asia Amidst North Korean Tensions”. CNN, November 3, 2017: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1711/03/cnr.06.html
[14] “The
View”, March 6, 2006
[15] “Access
Hollywood”, September 2005
[16] “Lifestyles
of the Rich and Famous”, 1994
[17] December 7, 2015
[18] “Good
Morning America”, ABC News, April 4, 2017
