MICHAEL BASSETT: MAKING SENSE OF THE WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

These days, making sense of the chaos and confusion coming out of the White House is a full-time job. Threats, bribes, illegal use of the National Guard, family kleptocracy, foreign adventures, some well-intentioned, others the product of no serious prior contemplation, keep all Americans on tenterhooks. The world watches with uneasy anticipation, and selective condemnation.

My association with the United States goes back 65 years since I first arrived at graduate school in North Carolina early in the presidency of John F. Kennedy. All told, I spent nearly five years of the 1960s living in the US, studying and researching American history. Times were uneasy. A low level of paranoia was already circulating, especially within the Republican Party where the fanatical John Birch Society endeavoured to take control. In the Border South where I was, racial barriers against African Americans were falling, some voluntarily, others under federal pressure.

Resistance to change was building. Governor George Wallace of Alabama tried valiantly to engineer nation-wide resistance, while several fanatics gunned down people like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, and the huge inquiry that followed, gave rise to some genuinely insane theories. Paranoia continued to spread during the 1970s with President Nixon and Watergate, and then took off in earnest when Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993. In time Hillary Clinton who stood against Donald Trump in 2016 was identified by Republican crazies as the central figure in what they labelled a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles attempting to control every facet of American life. Their headquarters was said to be a pizza bar in Washington.

In a recent book called “The Coming Storm: Inside America’s Radical New Politics of Paranoia”, a BBC journalist, Gabriel Gatehouse, recounts his exhaustive efforts to understand the overwhelming waves of social media frenzy and the growing MAGA movement within the Republican Party to defund the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice and other strange demands. America’s opioid epidemic, as ruthless pharmaceutical companies pushed OxyContin on communities, stirred low intelligence Americans into believing sinister forces were at work. QAnon, a crazy movement of people vented such arguments during Donald Trump’s first presidency. When he was beaten fair and square in the 2020 election, theories were shouted from the roof tops about crooked voting machines, rigged electoral boundaries, evil judges and biased officials that were stealing democracy from unsuspecting Americans. Despite there being no evidence, believers surged into Washington as part of the “Stop the Steal” movement on 6 January 2021, egged on by the defeated Trump himself who refused to accept he’d been beaten by a plurality of more than 6 million votes. We saw them all on TV, smashing their way into congressional offices, intent on lashing out against the election outcome.

Slowly but surely, then picking up speed under Donald Trump, the Republican Party had gathered strength from the poorer and more deprived parts of America. Racist elements had been aboard since the Civil Rights days of the 1960s. The Deep South, was gradually augmented by the voters that J.D.Vance describes in his prize-winning book “Hillbilly Elegy”: the poorly educated parts of Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky. Many manual workers convinced themselves without any hard evidence that they were falling behind and blamed the eastern states, the cities, the educated, and the Ivy League universities. The white supremacist Proud Boys dressed in yellow and black sweat shirts and QAnon worshipping voters bereft of a quality education were very much to the fore after Trump’s 2020 defeat. Republican intellectuals associated with the likes of William F. Buckley and Nelson Rockefeller who were prominent Republicans in my day were now either dead, or had long since fled the party, significant elements of which these days resemble a cult that believes their political opponents are run by Satan-worshipping paedophiles.

Donald Trump has the weakest educational background of any recent president. He easily fitted into the current Republican Party and has helped to shape it. His new cabinet, for the most part, have similarly impoverished backgrounds. The party has gradually lost many of those with above average intelligence. The people with whom Trump associated during the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency were eager to help him draw up “to do” lists for when their leader returned to the White House. Trump is said to have talked each day with the radical Stephen Miller, now his deputy chief-of-staff, about political enemies and critics who needed to be dealt to. None of these acolytes seems to have bothered to read the Constitution of the United States, or the Charter of the United Nations, or the NATO agreement, preferring instead to pretend that the President is all powerful and can do anything he wants to. Trump recently told us that he believes the only limit on his power is his own sense of morality!

In the run-up to the 2024 election Trump’s team concentrated more and more on immigration, an issue which was constantly in the news as Biden’s administration conspicuously failed to control the steady stream of migrants entering the US through the southern border. It is a ready-made question guaranteed to excite the MAGA movement’s paranoia. Immigrants encourage racial dislike, concern about foreign cultural practices, and law-breaking because migrants often fail to obey registration requirements. And they compete for American jobs. Dealing with immigrants since re-taking office has enabled Trump to use the National Guard, sometimes illegally, as the Supreme Court on the eve of Christmas told the President in relation to his round-ups in Chicago. The President has taken almost no notice of the Supreme Court’s ruling, as is evident in Minneapolis where significant numbers of black Somalis now live. Trump has unilaterally decided to strip many of them of their American citizenship and is deporting them. It’s blatant racism and Trump’s approval ratings with the public have stopped sliding. We will see more of it….

With the only limitation on Donald Trump’s authority being his own seldom apparent sense of morality, there is now little difference between him and Vladimir Putin, or for that matter most other dictators in history. As I watch what he does I have to concede that there are no precedents for his conduct in the American political history that I spent so many years studying. Short of some significant revival of former Republican interest in constitutional norms and long-revered presidential practices, no limits to Trump’s erratic behaviour are on the horizon in the immediate future.