During Donald Trump’s first presidency, many Never Trump conservatives attacked him as an “isolationist” who failed to understand the importance of the United States’ leadership role in global politics. Trump, however, took a much more interventionist turn after returning to the White House roughly 19 and one-half months ago. But according to Democratic insider Sidney Blumenthal — a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton — Trump’s “imperialism” is making the U.S. weaker, not stronger, around the world.
Blumenthal, in an op-ed for The Guardian, describes Trumpism as “the lowest stage of imperialism” — arguing that Trump showed how confused he is when he told members of the Alfalfa Club, “It’s never been my intention to make Greenland the 51st state. I want to make Canada the 51st state. Greenland will be the 52nd state. Venezuela can be 53rd.”
“Trump’s imperialism of piracy and plunder is less of a system even than that of the earliest imperialism of 17th Century privateers raiding the Spanish Main, the divine right of kings, and monarchs dividing up the spoils as favors to create their lords and earls,” Blumenthal writes. “His schemes of aggrandizement operating by threat and force are justified by no larger rationale, nothing as exalted as ‘the white man’s burden’ marauding wherever and however he can to seize resources. Describing his actions as some version of colonialism grants him a more orderly and coherent method than he possesses.”
The Democratic insider adds, “His pillaging bears not the slightest resemblance to the highly organized administration of Queen Victoria’s British empire. Trump’s predation is calculated to wreck the long-established arrangements of international trade, law and cooperation created after the Second World War and the fall of colonial empires, whose guidelines he sees as obstructing his own profit and power.”
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That won’t be enough.
We don’t want apologies (albeit it never hurts to give one). We want assurances that a new Donald Trump won’t happen. That y’all finally start using those checks and breaks and counterweights y’all keep proudly talking about.
That means we can’t tolerate any alt-right White nationalists at all. We have to “de-fascist” the country completely. Crush white nationalist organizations, block them from having an internet/social media platform, illgalize racist/confederate imagery, and destroy it. And rewrite the constitution.
Those who espouse hate speech (not just mere bigoted statements, but call for the denial of rights to marginalized groups) must be held accountable and sentenced to something like a fine and re-education.
We also have to purge religiofascism. Even private schools must teach a secular curriculum alongside their religious one. We have to ban at home school except in extreme circumstances. Churches must be taxed, unless they register as non-profit charitable organizations and actually provide non-religious community services.
A new Donald Trump will almost certainly happen. If not in two years, then in six or ten. Checks and balances are nothing but a bedtime story. The most democrats want to do is to return to the conditions before Trump, which were the conditions that produced him. If Trumpism were just some random fluke, he wouldn’t have been elected a second time. If anything, the next Trump will probably be worse.
A significant portion of Americans are simply “like that.” And they will remain like that for the foreseeable future.
Yah. Evolution takes more than one iteration. We get it.
Full rollback of every single thing Trump has done is also necessary, and full accountability for every one of his lackeys and string-pullers: no exceptions. Declare a state of emergency and arrest and detain every one of those human termites for sedition, insurrection and crimes against humanity.