Much, Much More Than Trump, by Robert Gore

How’s that lesser-evil thing working out?

As el gato malo recently observed, there are two types of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. One afflicts a subset of those who don’t like him; one afflicts a subset of those who do. Among the afflicted, mere mention of his name evokes either foaming-at-the-mouth rage or enraptured paroxysms.

Trump is the vessel for a lot of hopes and dreams, most of which won’t come true. Should he win, he would again be taking on a multi-trillion dollar totalitarian monstrosity (the term “Blob” is too benign), its remit every important aspect of life within the United States and around the world. Those trillions support millions of government employees, contractors, and beneficiaries. The monstrosity resists any challenge, even if that challenge is only rhetorical. Trump’s challenge the first time was exclusively rhetorical. The monstrosity was bigger, more powerful, more indebted, and more monstrous at the end of his term than at the beginning.

Elected officials come and go; the monstrosity is perpetual. It buries, sometimes literally, anything or anyone contrary to its interests. Even if Trump hadn’t been plagued by Russiagate and other schemes to cripple his presidency, even if he had devoted all his waking hours to vanquishing the monstrosity, it never sleeps and his effort would have amounted to a pinprick.

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Judging him by what he did versus what he said, on all the most important issues Trump was in alignment with the monstrosity. He appointed monsters John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Wilbur Ross, Gina Haspel etc. and got rid of initial appointments who were outside the mainstream, like Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and Rex Tillerson. Policy is rooted in some sort of philosophy. The monstrosity’s philosophy, if an all-consuming drive can be called that, is expand and command: grow the government and command an ever larger share of the nation’s resources and activities. Against that, Trump, who has no political philosophy beyond self-aggrandizement, was easily rolled.

America’s national debt ($34.5+ trillion) is like a giant goiter. The afflicted has other features, but the goiter is so grotesquely outsize that it compels your attention.

The goiter is malignant and metastasizing. The tumors spread: economic contraction, unemployment, higher interest rates, dedollarization, central bank debt monetization, and inflation. Average annual real GDP growth for Trump’s “strong economy” was 1.25 percent, lower than every president back to Eisenhower. Public debt increased $2.334 trillion per year. The metastasis continues under Biden. Back out so-called growth bought with debt and actual growth is negative for both presidents. Real incomes have stagnated since the turn of the century. The economy is not peachy and regular people know it, regardless of Washington’s propaganda statistics.

Trump used debt during his business career. It usually generated a return higher than its interest rate, although he had a few bankruptcies. Public debt funds consumption, corruption, weapons, forever wars, and, ominously, mounting interest on the debt, none of which generates an economic return. A debt implosion in the U.S. and much of the rest of the debt-saturated world is guaranteed, whether or not Trump is elected.

Trump promised an “America First” foreign policy that recognized U.S., Russian, and Chinese spheres of influence. However, Russiagate, unrelenting opposition, and the media’s “Putin’s puppet” label killed his initial inclination to try to improve relations with Russia.

Success has a hundred fathers; failure is an orphan. An inconvenient truth for those hopeful that Trump will extract the U.S. from its odious failure in Ukraine (he’s said he’ll end the war on his first day in office) is that Trump was one of its fathers. The U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014, when the war actually began, was on Obama’s watch, and the 2022 escalation was on Biden’s. However, Obama refused to send weapons to Ukraine as the regime-changed government made war on Russian-oriented Donbass separatists, violating the Minsk Agreements. Trump sent weapons. The monstrosity claims that shipping weapons to a belligerent isn’t an act of war. The rest of world doesn’t see it that way.

Trump may believe that assassinating Iran’s General Soleimani wasn’t an act of war, either. Again, it’s a minority view. Ukraine and Iran bely the claim that Trump didn’t involve the U.S. in new wars. Ukraine blossomed into a full-scale war, and if the neocons have their way, so too will Iran. The Iranians believe it already has.

Trump made himself a bed of nails in Iran by pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, which had allowed international inspection of Iran’s nuclear program, imposing strict sanctions, and assassinating Soleimani. The first two have been ineffective and the last one was merely an incendiary gesture. The net of it all is that Trump pushed Iran into Russia and China’s confederated alliance.

Trump is slavishly devoted to Israel. If elected, he may yet give Netanyahu his dream and lead a full-on war with Iran. He won’t do anything to curtail Israel’s Gaza slaughter or expansion of war to other parts of the Middle East. Unlike Biden, he won’t even mumble useless pleas for Israel to take it easy on Palestinian civilians. He fully embraces Israel First, always a monstrosity priority.

Speaking of things Obama didn’t do that Trump did, there’s the U.S. government’s persecution of Julian Assange. The Obama administration didn’t bring charges against Assange, believing correctly that it would violate the First Amendment. In April 2017, Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo called Wikileaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” This purportedly made Assange an intelligence operative for publishing information provided by Army whistleblowers. Among the material was the damning Collateral Murder video, showing machine-gun fire from two Apache helicopters killing 11 Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists.

Trump’s Justice Department requested Assange’s extradition from Britain to face 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion. The British legal proceedings are drawing to a close, with Assange down to what is probably his last appeal. Assuming he loses, he’ll be extradited and subject to U.S. prosecution. Even if he won at trial or on appeal, he’s been denied his freedom for 14 years, including incarceration in Britain’s brutal Belmarsh prison the last five, and his health has deteriorated. The price he’s already paid sends a clear message: don’t expose the monstrosity’s monstrosities.

In a 2021 interview with Candace Owens, Trump said he considered pardoning Assange or Edward Snowden, saying he was more inclined to pardon one of them without specifying which one. It was talk after the fact, but there was no action during the fact. Pardoning either one would have struck a blow for civil liberties, but if Trump has ever read the Bill of Rights, beyond the occasional endorsement of the Second Amendment nothing he’s done betrays any remembrance of it.

Trump’s most egregious blow to civil liberties was his COVID response. On March 13, 2020, he declared a national emergency over a virus that had killed a handful of people and would prove about as dangerous as a nasty flu. On March 16 he announced a nationwide lockdown for 15 days, which turned into months, to “flatten the curve.”

Lockdowns threw people out of jobs, destroyed businesses, closed schools, and led to an explosion in government spending and debt. They also fueled Stockholm syndrome—many loved their imprisonment and their captors and long for lockdowns reimposition. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, set up in the Department of Homeland Security in 2018, enforced censorship for that small minority that objected.

Trump die-hards mumble that this all was really Fauci and Birx’s fault, he was just following orders . . . or something. In other words, the brilliant and courageous Trump, master of 5D chess, failed to ask elementary questions, failed to follow his own instincts, gave into the public’s fear— stoked by the Deep State—and was rolled by medical bureaucrats. It follows the usual die-hard rendering: Trump’s triumphs are Trump’s; his failures, well, the buck stops somewhere else.

There was rough justice for Trump. His COVID failure led to mail-in voting that allowed the Democrats to fiddle the vote and steal the 2020 election. Trump supporters claim that he learned his lesson and things will be different in a second term. However, to learn from your mistakes you have to admit them. Trump’s recent Truth Social boast, in response to a Biden State of the Union boast, suggests that he’s learned nothing at all:

The Pandemic no longer controls our lives. The Vaccines that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat Cancer – Turning setback into comeback!’ YOU’RE WELCOME, JOE, NINE MONTH APPROVAL TIME VS. 12 YEARS THAT IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU!

The vaccines have been an unmitigated disaster, a cure far worse than the disease, and they’re still wreaking havoc and mayhem. For the millions of vaccine-injured, their families and friends, and for survivors of the vaccine-dead, Trump’s post ripped off the scab and poured salt into a bleeding wound. Trump has learned nothing from blatant failure and he’s doubling down on it after the devastation is clear. Yet, in a second term Trump will supposedly take on the kind of monsters who were behind both COVID and the vaccines. That’s a classic triumph of hope over experience.

There has been one inevitability in presidential politics since 1913. No matter what the winning candidate promised, the government has gotten bigger and more powerful, and the liberties of the American people have shrunk, to the point where they’re now undetectable. It would take a president of the strongest moral fiber, ideological commitment, and unyielding integrity to do more than rhetorical battle with the monstrosity. That president is not Trump.

Disaffected veterans were the core of a group that would grow to millions, their “faith” in government and the people who ran it obliterated by its repeated failures and lies. Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors. The mainstream media is filled with vituperative, patronizing, and insulting explanations of what’s “behind” the Trump phenomenon. It all boils down to revulsion with the self-anointed, incompetent, pretentious, hypocritical, corrupt, prevaricating elite that presumes to rule this country. It is, in a word, inferior to the populace on the other side of the yawning chasm, the ones they have patronized and insulted for decades, and the other side knows it.

“Much More Than Trump,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 12, 2016

Trump was a hand grenade when he landed in Washington in 2017. Unfortunately, the pin has yet to be pulled, and Trump won’t do it. Fortunately, Trump is a small part of a movement that is much, much more than Trump and the United States, powered by global revulsion with the self-anointed, incompetent, pretentious, hypocritical, corrupt prevaricating elite that presumes to rule. The people versus government is the defining war of the twenty-first century.

Trump is old, and his ideas are old . . . and tired. So too, of course, are Biden and his ideas. It’s long past time for the Boomer gerontocracy to clear out. Revolution is coming, but its spark will be from generations after the Boomers, who are gradually realizing that the Boomers and their predecessors have left them well and truly screwed.

Exhibit 1 is the debt. Boomers’ progeny are scheduled to bear crushing tax rates for the Boomers’ Social Security, Medicare, debt service, and wars. (The younger generations get to fight those wars, too.) Boomers howl that they paid into Social Security and Medicare, and that’s true as far as it goes. However, both systems are pay as you go—money paid in is paid out a microsecond later. As money paid out increasingly exceeds money paid in, the draw on general funds will increase, and debt and taxes will go up.

The younger generations are having trouble finding decent jobs, starting families, buying houses, and paying student loans, but they’re being presented with the Boomers’ bill. Keep in mind that Boomer payees are older, whiter and more affluent than the expected payers, a combustible element in an already flammable brew.

The younger generations are predominantly collectivist, which makes them just like the rest of the population. In practice rather than what’s preached, the U.S. is thoroughly collectivist. There are no ideas older or more tired than collectivism and top-down “order” imposed through theft and violence. Robbing Peter to pay Paul has always received Pauls’ votes, but now that younger generations are the Peters, collectivism will lose some of its allure. When the system crashes, Peters and Pauls will be broke and everyone will be confronted with the necessity for a different system.

The gerontocracy, including Trump, is top-down collectivist and has no intention of even marginally changing things, much less instituting a different system. That’s an omelet that won’t be made without breaking a miles-long line of eighteen-wheelers filled with cartons of eggs, but those eggs will be broken. Reality is reality, and consequences are consequences. Fortunately, God, in his infinite wisdom, invented death to give younger generations a chance. Repudiation of debt and many other legacies of past generations will be some of the broken eggs.

Who knows, repudiation and the emergence of different systems might involve extremely limited or no governments, decentralization, freedom, and an embrace of production, keeping one’s earnings, voluntary exchange, sound money, saving, and investment—the things that work. Stranger things have happened. Where will the wherewithal come from for collectivist theft when the world is flat broke? And how else will shattered polities attract valuable producers and innovators other than by offering them the freedom to produce and innovate?

If you’re so inclined, vote for the candidate of your choice, perhaps on the lesser-evil rationale. Trump is the lesser evil and has phenomenal staying power and persistence in the face of the nonstop effort to destroy him. He has all the right enemies and a lot of the right friends. However, don’t count on either a fair vote count or, if Trump is elected, magnanimous acceptance of the results from the losers.

By the way, how’s that lesser evil thing working out? Evil has had an uninterrupted run—aided and abetted by lesser-evil presidents—for over a century. The monstrosity has rendered the Constitution a dead letter, fought pointless wars, plunged the nation into debt, made promises that won’t be kept, turned cities into nightmares, opened the border to hostile hordes, surveilled, censored, persecuted, locked down, vaccine-murdered, and put its citizens at each others’ throats. Would it be any worse if voters had voted for the greater evils? Lesser or greater, evil is always evil.

Whatever lesser evil we elect this year will have to deal with a century-plus worth of consequences that’s already overwhelming the monsters. While that’s rough justice, the rest of us have to deal with those consequences, too.