(ANTIMEDIA Op-ed) — Many people believe Donald J. Trump is one of the vilest human beings the world has known. Think back to 2013 when satirical outlet the Onion wrote a piece entitled: “When You’re Feeling Low, Just Remember I’ll Be Dead In About 15 or 20 Years,” a comical op-ed portrayed as being written by Trump himself.
We knew what he was like even back then, and yet at the beginning of this year, he seized the most powerful throne in the world and has made headline news ever since, wreaking havoc across the globe.
Make no mistake: Trump should not be president of the United States. This week, Twitter erupted into a storm with the ever-trending hashtag #TrumpResign – an eventuality most sane people would actively welcome.
But what kind of world thinks the problems of today can be solved by Trump’s resignation and Trump’s resignation alone? A world that is naïve at best, simply put. Has the United States forgotten who Donald Trump’s right-hand man is, poised to take the lead should Trump ever be ousted?
As explained by award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill, Vice President Mike Pence (a) wants to criminalize abortion and previously signed a law that required fetal tissue from abortions to be buried or cremated; (b) hates gays and the rest of the LGBT community (unless they undergo conversion therapy); (c) wants to make the Patriot Act permanent; (d) would openly support Israel in a war against Iran; (e) wants to “fill up” Guantanamo Bay; (f) would deny refugees their rights under international law; (g) believes global warming is a myth; and (h) has a curious financial relationship with the founder of the mercenary company Blackwater – just to name a few.
Is this the president you want to take up the reins of the American empire?
In plain terms, the United States of America and the rest of the world are suffering a major delusion if they believe our problems will disappear as a result of Trump’s inevitable demise. In reality, Mike Pence is a Deep State insurance policy to guarantee the American empire can continue as it always has — just as it did under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its anti-Eastern global push to dominate the financial order of the world.
And what is the democratic value of forcibly ousting Trump from office? As explained by Glenn Greenwald:
“What they’re doing instead is trying to take maybe the only faction worse than Donald Trump, which is the deep state, the CIA, with its histories of atrocities, and say they ought to almost engage in like a soft coup, where they take the elected president and prevent him from enacting his policies. And I think it is extremely dangerous to do that. Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving. But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. That is a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it. And yet that’s what so many, not just neocons, but the neocons’ allies in the Democratic Party, are now urging and cheering. And it’s incredibly warped and dangerous to watch them do that.” [emphasis added]
It has also become very clear that people oppose Trump for completely different reasons than the humanitarian ones some of us oppose him for. Trump is continuing the murderous policies of the Bush and Obama years, burying civilians by the thousands in places such as Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Somalia, to name a few. He is also attempting to single-handedly take on Iran, North Korea and Latin America, countries where the CIA has long interfered, anyway.
The mass media, social media, and the intelligence community are completely silent on these topics. So what is the actual basis of their opposition to Trump? As sad as it is, most of the opposition to Trump seems to be rooted in the disgraceful comments he makes, not in the actual criminal actions his administration is regularly engaged in, just like Obama, Bush, and Clinton before him.
To the rest of us, it really just appears that Trump is continuing and exacerbating the worst policies of the previous administrations, all the while tweeting like a buffoon and making racist statements as he does so.
Trump was never the problem. He was a cancerous symptom of the problem, able to emerge like a zombie from the woods of the neoliberal Obama years.
No matter who is in office, the U.S. will maintain the highest incarceration rate in the world, will continue bombing civilians relentlessly in foreign countries, will continue turning a blind eye as its allies commit notorious human rights abuses, and will also turn a blind eye as its own police force becomes an execution force targeting unarmed members of the public.
Ultimately, the problem is that the U.S. has decided democracy is best implemented by requiring over 300 million people to identify with one man (or woman) as opposed to a more realistic inclusive and representative system that wouldn’t disenfranchise the populace.
The only decent element of Trump’s election campaign was that he vowed to draw down the wars overseas and work on pursuing détente with Russia, which whether we like to admit it or not, is in the interests of the global community. Since taking office, this has been completely undone, possibly in an attempt to appease his critics. Despite this, he is still on the verge of a collapsing presidency.
If the U.S. truly believes their problems will be solved by Trump’s ouster, followed by a presidency led by Mike Pence — or any of the other Deep State’s candidates — then perhaps we all deserve what’s coming to us.
Op-ed / Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo
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