“In the United States, the impossible is what we do best.” That was the most intelligent phrase in a speech full of darkness. The most encouraging thing was the commitment to fight to end the ongoing wars and to avert the risk of a World War III. But “the impossible is what we do best” was a magnificent compliment to American pride. The pearl of the speech with which he assumed office again. The rest was a parade of disturbing signs.
The worst was the “foundationalism”, messianism and denialism. Like all populist leadership, left or right, he proclaimed himself the founder of “the golden era that begins” with his government. Calling January 21 “Liberation Day” was also a founding absurdity because it is equivalent to equating his rise to power with the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany, and the Democratic government as a totalitarian occupying force.
That the reality described does not fit with real reality is a dark sign. Talking about the US as if it were a failed state in Central America and not the superpower that achieved the best standard of living for the greatest number of people, won world wars and broke records in scientific and technological advances, is to describe a reality that does not fit into real reality. The height of the “story”. What the propaganda apparatuses of communist and fascist totalitarianism do.
In the 18th century, the philosopher Thomas Paine made an immense contribution to emancipatory rationality, by writing a revolutionary pamphlet: Common Sense. With those pages he contributed to the independence of the overseas monarchy, because it was a common sense forged in republican and democratic logic. Trump appealed to the construction of “common sense”, but not like the one radiated by Paine’s work, but rather the one that will be forged in the social networks managed by his close mega-millionaires.
Another dark sign was messianism. He referred to the attempts on his life, saying that God “saved him to make America great again.” And to that he added global warming denialism by announcing that for the second time he will withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
In those words the hope seemed to be diluted that the second Trump would be more reasonable and democratic than the one who tried to destroy an electoral process by launching a crowd against the Capitol, which is one of the reasons for the paradox involved in shooting the accusation of “criminals” against an ocean of desperate migrantsTrump being the only convicted president in the history of the United States.
In the prelude to the return, a Trump had been seen who was not in a Trump pose. For example, in the second row of the burning chapel that fired Cartersitting next to Obama, showed a distant modesty of the millionaire who looks at the rest of us mortals from the roof of his New York skyscraper.
Minutes earlier he had praised the president who initiated awareness about the environment, the acceptance of sexual diversity and the value of social equity. Carter was the last Democratic leader in the tradition initiated by Woodrow Wilson and deepened by Franklin Roosevelt regarding the Welfare State, Keynesian capitalism and support for the middle classes and the America of the workers. Ergo, Trump spoke well of an exponent of the North American center-left.
The Trump in the anteroom of the Oval Office had flashes of geopolitical reasonableness. He issued signals about the war in Ukraine that did not sound as encouraging for the Kremlin as all the previous ones. As if he had understood that giving a total victory to the Russian expansionist warmongering is to invite him to continue his progress and also to move forward towards Putin’s great goal: the replacement of NATO for a Eurasian military alliance led by Russia, which puts an end to Europe’s cultural Westernism.
Another sign of reasonableness is in the pressure he exerted through his emissary Steve Witkoff on Netanyahu to accept the truce proposal that Biden had presented in May, which is not “the victory” for Hamas that the most extremist wing of the Israeli government fallaciously describes, but offers a path towards “the two-state formula.”
When the Israeli prime minister refused to accept what he had been rejecting for months, Witkoff explained that Trump was not asking him to accept, he was demanding it. With the same tone he conveyed that position to Emir Tamim bin Hammad al Thani in Doha, without first going through Prime Minister Abdulrahman al Thani.
That is why Qatar put pressure on Khalil al Haya and that leader who occupied the political leadership of Hamas after the death of Ismail Haniye sent the message to Mohamed Sinwar, who commands the Ezzedim al Qassem militia and is heard because he is the brother of Yahya Sinwartop leader killed by the Israelis in Rafah.
Encouraging signs that produce an illusion that fades when we see who makes up this government. With climate change burning down Los Angeles, the Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, a fervent denier of global warming and defender of fossil fuels. Businesswoman Linda McMahon, who amassed a fortune with wrestling shows, is the Secretary of Education, an area that ultra-conservatism wants to destroy because it is considered a Marxist instrument of the woke agenda and a bastion of environmental activism.
The same feeling of mockery of common sense causes the Secretary of Health to be Robert Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist who spreads conspiracy theories. Also the power of Elon Musk, who put his social network to promote the European extreme right, with special support for the German neo-Nazi party AfD, and Viktor Orban, the pro-Putin leader of Hungary.
Unless it is his card in the magna to negotiate with China, since Musk has vigorous interests in the Asian giant, his relevance in the government would prove two risks for liberal democracy: One is the use of the power of his networks to turn them into devices of personalist cult and demolition of his critics. The other is to alter the institutions until power remains in the hands of arch-millionaires, turning North American democracy into a Darwinian plutocracy.
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