Trump and the Deluge

The London daily paper The Guardian led with an article last Saturday saying that if you thought Bush was bad, imagine four years of Trump — deporting immigrants, expelling Muslims, marginalizing women, putting together reactionary alliances, threatening the use of nuclear weapons. How much more do Bernie Sanders supporters need to be convinced that there’s only one question that matters now: how to keep Trump from becoming president of the United States? Another plea being heard in the U.S. election is directed to Hillary Clinton: Don’t make a gift of the White House to Donald Trump.

The fact is that Donald Trump fighting for and winning the nomination of the Republican Party has caused big changes in U.S. politics. That’s because, as has been said repeatedly, Trump was an unknown in the U.S. political sphere. Since then, he has operated as someone outside that country’s political establishment and outside the Republican Party. But what has been shown is something not easily accepted — that luck, wealth and oratory influence the politics of capitalist countries to an unexpected degree. This appears to be the main thing behind Trump’s surprising success in the first phase of the fight for the presidency of the United States.

This presumably doesn’t mean that Donald Trump’s clear victory in the Republican race might be an early indicator of a presidential win for him. But, as he has said, Trump has pushed that country’s political discourse to the point that in all probability, he will be the party’s presidential candidate.

In discussing which Democratic candidate might be capable of beating Trump in the U.S. presidential election, the discussion has been focused to a great extent on the probable Republican candidate’s fascist, or very nearly fascist, ideology. In fact, the question is focused on Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and on their potential strengths to defeat Donald Trump. In this sense, Hillary Clinton seems to be better equipped for that task. However, every time they broadcast — more ferociously — Hillary’s failures in her role as Barack Obama’s secretary of state, and specifically, her use of private servers for official business, which could have risen to a level of no confidence, it calls into question her trustworthiness to occupy what is in fact the highest office in the U.S. government. On this issue, Donald Trump has said: We have to wait for whatever devastating discoveries the FBI makes on the case; however unpleasant it may be, we have to wait for the official reports on the case.

In the case of Bernie Sanders, there are two things working against him. The first is his age: He’s approaching 80. The second thing is the fact that although his ideology and platform for governing appear to be very popular among younger U.S. voters, they would probably be too radical for the general U.S. electorate.

Incidentally, Donald Trump has said that he would make radical changes in the energy sector, if elected. First, he would work for the construction of the Keystone pipeline, which Obama has blocked for environmental protection reasons. It would be expected that in this area, Trump would eventually come down on the side of strong delays to or rejection of global environmental protection measures, and would probably favor returning to greater use of hydrocarbons.

In a recent international poll, carried out in a dozen countries, we found that in practically all of them (Mexico included), the idea — or even the possibility — that Donald Trump might be the next president of the United States was strongly rejected. Survey respondents from all those countries said that, in summary, it’s basically too dangerous.

As regards foreign policy in general, we have reviewed some of his broader remarks. In an interview with CNN, Trump repeated that he is in agreement with conservatives who maintain that the spread of democracy will guarantee a more stable world. At the same time, he says that he rejects interventionism because it entails deploying the military — but without renouncing the use of the military on occasions when it may be necessary. At the same time, he has said that the use of diplomacy should come before putting military power into play. “In spite of what has been said against me,” he argued, “misrepresenting my positions, I have to insist that you cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength — although they may have said something different.”*

Trump also stated, in an interview published in the Paris magazine Le Monde diplomatique, that he would of course be inclined to negotiate with Russia and China, saying at the same time that it is not the job of the United States to guarantee peace at no matter what cost. The countries we defend must pay the cost of defense; otherwise, the United States would be obligated to leave them to defend themselves. Attacking the Obama-Clinton management of affairs at the international level, Trump said that the United States has abandoned Egypt and Israel; instead, Obama has spent a lot of effort and money on reaching a ridiculous agreement with Iran. In his speech, Trump emphasized the danger posed in the world arena by the Islamic State organization, which would disappear quickly if he were elected president. Furthermore, he said that in his international policy, he would prefer to defend Western values, rather than defending universal values — without any further clarification of his ideas.

Finally, one of the big problems in the current U.S. election is that criticism of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders is interpreted right away as support for the candidacy of Donald Trump.

*Editor’s note: Correctly translated, this quotation could not be verified in its entirety.