The Ongoing Trump Shit-Storm

It's been hard to write about this, because it seems like whenever something happens, and I might be starting to have a coherent thought about it, something else happens before I can put anything together.

There's no need at this point to go through the litany.  It's obvious to any rational person that Trump is his own shit-storm.  It's also pretty obvious that rather than having any actual political philosophy, he simply sees the world and everything happening in it in terms of how it might affect him, personally.  He operates under something that used to be called the Illusion of Central Position.  Babies and very young children have this illusion: the world is there for them, they are at the center of it all.  And this is Trump.  No matter what happens, in his reactions he makes sure we know that it was all about him.



Of course there's more, and worse.  If he does have a political philosophy it is the one created by predatory capitalism: everything, and everyone, in the world was put there to make money for him, to serve his avarice for wealth.  Natural resources are there for him and his cronies to extract, exploit, pollute.  Human resources are there to provide him and his cronies with the cheapest possible labour, preferably free labor (if he had existed when slavery was legal I am sure he would have embraced it).  I guess it could have been worse, since his dumbness has never allowed him to be a really good predatory capitalist; it's been bad enough, though.

The political philosophy that grew out of the rise of predatory capitalism was embodied in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and parts of North and South America.  The ideal labor was non-paid labor.  The internal structure of the plantation was fascist, with all power, all rewards, all punishments moving from the top down.  This model served as a template for the factories observed by Marx in England during the Industrial Revolution, and in most parts of the world it continues to be the model, with relatively minor exceptions.  It is also the model for social relations in the US South.

So Trump sees the US as his private plantation.  He and only he can solve the problems, give the orders, dole out the rewards and punishments.  And, as on the plantations, any criticism is a sign of disloyalty.

Some of us knew he was this sick.  The only thing anyone needed to see was when he mocked the disabled reporter, publicly, on television.  After that, no decent person should have voted for him, because it was obvious.  But of course, the deplorables voted, and this is what we got.