Donald John Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States on January 20th 2017, against all predictions. Trump, a wealthy businessman and former television personality won the elections over his more favoured opponent Hilary Rodham Clinton by winning the ‘electoral college.’ Essentially the ‘electoral college’ system of voting is a throwback of the deal the north struck with the previous slave-owner southern states. This system allowed the United States Constitution to make provision for the election of 538 electors, (people who cast votes for the president and vice-president), with an absolute majority of 270 electoral votes required to win an election. In real terms, this in effect means that America has a ‘dummy election’ for the people, known as the popular vote, and the ‘real election’ determined by these electors (influential people).
Unlike all the presidents before him, Trump isn’t a ‘Washington insider’, is the oldest, wealthiest and most scandal plagued person to be elected to office. It became very clear that Trump wasn’t going to play by the ‘rule book, when during his first week in office he signed six executive orders that precipitated a ‘fight with the very American people who elected him on the campaign promises of rebuilding the American economy by retaining jobs, creating more jobs and rebuilding their core industrial base of the fabled sixties when the country was an industrial powerhouse. The on-going war of attrition between the president, hardly anyone now wants and the people of America has demonstrated that perhaps it is true that ‘we get the president we deserve’ at least subconsciously.
Trump is anti-intellectual, racist, narcissistic, patriarchal, misogynistic, egotistical, arrogant, brash, has an over developed sense of his own rightness and believes that wealth is a prerequisite determinant for success. But is that not a by-product of the ‘American dream’? America’s greatest flaw is the belief in its own ‘Exceptionalism,’ the delusional notion that everything it does is God ordained and every act it commits is an ‘act of God’. Surely if we are products of our environment, it can be argued that the Machiavellian Donald Trump is the fulfilment of Nietzsche’s ‘ubermensch’ and the ultimate but natural progression of what it means to be a true, ‘blue-blooded’ American? Or is he too obvious, not subtle enough, too in-your-face? Surely a man who has amassed such wealth by employing American ideals like the industrial titans of its ‘golden-age’ should be trusted, respected, admired and even emulated? Donald J. Trump has achieved one thing no American before or since has done, he has shown the ordinary American people for perhaps the very first time what the product of the ‘American Dream’ actually looks like and it scares them because there is no Hollywood to romanticize or filter the truth or sanitize the end product. This is as real and life-like as it gets, and now the American people are apprentices in their own horror show they’re so fond of creating and are so exceptional at playing.
To be continued…Dodd-Frank other accoutrements, the porn scandals and how this affects the American psyche.
