After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.
Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion.
Military alliances and foreign policy no longer command the cross-party consensus of the cold war era, when politics could be relied upon to “stop at the water’s edge”, in the famous formulation of the Truman-era senator Arthur Vandenberg.
Now the politics don’t stop at all, for any reason. And alliances are for chumps.
This has been my thought lately as well. Donald Trump is simply a convenient means to an end. He is so ignorant and narcissistic that he will never see it coming when he is eventually given the Julius Caesar treatment by the techno-fascists.
The real oligarchy that is actually wealthy instead of pretend wealthy is chomping at the bit to get in the big chair permanently. Now that there is ample precedent with multiple assassination attempts on Donald Trump’s life, all they need to do is have him assassinated for real, declare martial law as you said, and then install their chosen dictator as the public lever puller.
They can blame this on whatever patsy is most convenient to allow them to swiftly tighten controls on an unsuspecting public. The ironic part being that in a twisted turn of fate, we may eventually end up in a situation where some of the people who got deported turn out to be the lucky ones. As Aimé Césaire warned, fascism is colonialism turned inwards, and whatnot…