This is Donald Trump’s latest lie: He is a student of history.
A stooped US president shared this cryptic message with his gullible followers a few days ago, and by extension, a world that was already exhausted following his startling return to the Oval Office.
Trump wrote on X that “he who saves his country does not break any law.”
The quote’s provenance is unclear. But it resembles one attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, by way of actor Rod Steiger who portrayed the messianic, self-appointed emperor of the French in the 1970 film, Waterloo.
I believe that co-president Elon Musk or some other sycophant whispered the offensive saying into his tin ear because Trump doesn’t read books and likely avoids watching movies where he hasn’t made a forgettable cameo.
Napoleon’s admonition would, of course, be attractive to a strutting autocrat like Trump who is convinced that by divine right and intervention he, as president, is immune from prosecution and the law’s restraints.
Still, Trump ought to have reached for French King Louis XIV’s infamous declaration – “L’État, c’est moi” (The state, it is me) – better to describe his naked effort to erase even the, by now, performative features of America’s atrophied “democracy”.
Trump has made it clear with his horde of obscene words and deeds that he never intended to abide by the oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the US Constitution or to support Congress and the courts, two other equal branches of government that he treats with mockery and contempt.
Trump is more powerful than the president and is governing as he always wanted to, without fear and without fear of the negative effects that might follow. He is also more powerful than the president.
If polls of opinion are accurate, the majority of Americans would rather abandon the sagging remnants of the “democratic experiment” in the false hope that Trump will bring their angry, ailing home from actual and imagined foreign and domestic enemies.
Why do so many Americans continue to throw their lot, with a missionary fervor, behind a blustering charlatan who views the egalitarian ideals that gave rise to a republic as annoyant, anachronistic nuisances?
I think that the majority of Americans are no longer democratic because of that.
The pervasive patriotic symbols – the billowing-in-the-breeze stars and stripes, the hand-on-heart pledge of allegiance, the sometimes-soaring renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner – can no longer sustain the stubborn myth of America that the gilded few serve at the behest and in the interests of the less fortunate many.
By my count there were at least four precipitating events that, combined, exposed finally this calculated pantomime and made, perhaps, Trump’s emergence as America’s defining political, if not cultural, force inevitable by prompting millions of Americans, including a good share of thoughtful citizens, to sour on the supposed profits and promise of democracy.
The fabrications that President George W. Bush and other evangelical figures, including the entire US establishment in the White House, Congress, and a lot of a war-giddy press, made clear the lie at the heart of America’s phantom democracy.
A horrific invasion of Iraq in 2003 caused a sovereign nation to be disfigured and thousands of innocent people to die because of the fiction that Saddam Hussein had stocked and was about to unleash weapons of mass destruction.
The gilded few reacted to the demonstrations of dissention by the educated many as an act of quislings who preferred to coddle a tyrant rather than confront him.
The so-called “checks and balances” designed, in theory, to thwart Bush’s catastrophic misadventure were, instead, marshalled to quash defiance – big and small – and empower a rogue regime bent on “regime change” elsewhere.
Bush and a number of unrepentant co-architects who were the catalyst for the most notorious geopolitical crisis of the twenty-first century have prospered or are retiring comfortably.
Meanwhile, the scores of Americans in uniform who did the invading, fighting, maiming, killing and dying have been largely forgotten.
Once again, the many were disposed of or destroyed – in mind, body, and spirit – to satisfy the imperial aims of the few.
In the wake of a devastating hurricane that hit New Orleans in 2005, the tension between the governed and the governors widened even more.
A city was completely submerged in the hurricane Katrina’s terrifying force, as were the levies intended to keep it safe.
Homes and the livelihoods of largely underprivileged people who sought refuge on rooftops were destroyed by the flooding. There were more than 1, 400 deaths. Amid the epochal destruction, the living were obliged to fend for themselves in desperate search of shelter, food, and water.
President Bush praised his flailing government’s incompetent response as he hovered far above the apocalyptic scenes in a helicopter – an indelible image of a smug, out-of-touch commander-in-chief who had left forlorn Americans stranded, in more ways than one.
By way of instructive contrast, Bush rushed in 2008 to the rescue of the profit-by-any-means-necessary bankers on Wall Street and beyond who engineered, in effect, a nationwide Ponzi scheme that triggered the near-collapse of America’s greed-fuelled economy built on a sandy foundation known as the sub-prime-mortgage (racket) crisis.
Americans paid in full to stop the metastasizing contagion that threatened the entire, decrepit house of cards when the enormous bill was due.
During the “Great Recession,” which lasted for two years, besieged taxpayers pumped in $ 7.7 trillion in “emergency loans” to stop a number of teetering banks from foreclosure while attempting to fend off predatory creditors and make poor ends meet.
Bush, a member of the gilded few for the long run, stated that whatever the many were expected to bear or assume, his job was to protect his dear friends and enablers.
That shining, eloquent avatar of the resurgent Democratic Party, Barack Obama, capitalised on his humble roots to convince working- and middle-class Americans from coast to beleaguered coast that, unlike his craven, silver-spooned predecessor, he was the “everyman” they were yearning for.
Alas, Obama understood that like Bush, his principal task was to ingratiate, not alienate, the prosperous powers-that-be who made him president.
Obama’s trite, self-serving clarion call, “Yes, we can”, was a cynical ruse meant to dupe Americans into believing that he was an ardent ally of the “we” and not the mendacious magnates.
The practised facade dropped when it became apparent that the Obama administration refused to pursue seriously, let alone charge, any of the criminals-in-custom-tailored-suits responsible for the systemic fraud that produced such loss, heartache, and suffering among working- and middle-class Americans.
Obama’s shameful failure was proof of America’s two-tiered “justice system” that condemned the destitute and insulated the rich.
It’s only mildly surprising that milked and manipulated Americans have sought salvation from a demagogue who provides simple, instant solutions to difficult, ornery issues in this contemptuous setting.
Disappointment is sure to follow.
Source: Aljazeera
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