The Revolution Has Happened- no one noticed- Just that Trump Won

6 November 2024

Trump won the US election. A convicted felon, who achieved nothing positive in his last time in the White House except perhaps the only boast that was true, ’I didn’t start any wars when I was President’.

Trump will win the dodgy electoral college system, which gives small states more votes than they should have based on their population.  Someone said that the US has 36 Tasmanias, which is not a bad simile.  But he may also win a majority of the popular vote.

Why? everyone asks. ‘He had no policies’. ‘He was totally inconsistent’.  ‘He seemed not to know and not to care that he didn’t know’.  ‘How could he be trusted?’  ‘Even those who had worked with him in high positions came out against him’.  ‘He was lazy and self-indulgent’.  ‘He did a lot of dodgy business deals’. ‘He never paid his contractors’.

The biographical movie, ‘The Apprentice’,  (which is still on at the Palace Cinema in Leichhardt) is about Trump’s early years and shows him coming under the influence of an amoral lawyer, Ron Cohn. Cohn won by recording conversations and blackmailing judges, especially gay ones at a time when homosexuality was illegal.   Cohn used his methods to get rid of some bills and taxes for Trump and teaches his 3 principles:

1. Morality is an option,
2. Truth is whatever you say it is, and
3. You must never admit defeat because you must believe that you are a winner so that you can convince everyone else that you are.

At the end of the movie, having betrayed even Cohn himself, Trump, unkeen to talk to a would-be biographer states these 3 principles.

So why did people vote for him?

Because there has been a revolution that no one has noticed.  People no longer believe that the government can or will help them. Consider this. The rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer and the gap between the two groups have continued to grow. With the world turned into a market, US jobs in the steel industry and the car industry went offshore. Manufactured goods were increasingly imported, while working Americans lost their jobs.  The welfare and health system in the US are quite inadequate for a decent life, yet taxes to the rich are cut.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seemed to care. Bernie Sanders tried to point this out and looked like winning the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016 and even 2020, but the party put in Hilary Clinton and then Joe Biden to stop him.  The Republicans did not want Trump, but could not stop his populist campaign. Most of them were scared to speak against him, and when he won the nomination and looked a chance to be President again, they all supported him.

Trump spoke whatever suited him at the time. He used racial scapegoats for the national problems, but still recruited blacks and Latinos, presumably because of his speaking to their economic pain. When he did not win in 2020, he simply accused the other side of cheating- true to the 3 Cohn principles. He principally criticised the Establishment and said that he would change it. That was the key point. He was going to change the Establishment. That was what people wanted to hear.  He was right in the key issue. The Establishment had not fixed the problems of declining living standards. The wealthy were getting wealthier. Their benchmarks of economic growth were doing fine, and the mass media and business pages trumpeted their success. But a lot of people were hurting and no one seemed to care.  Trump criticised the Establishment and said that he would fix it.

Harris said that the election was about Democracy and Trump’s character.  But Democracy is an abstract concept and has not delivered material benefits for them. As far as a lot of people were concerned, if Trump could deliver they did not care about his character flaws.

So there was a revolution. People rejected Government as it has been practised by both Democrats and conventional Republicans. It is  just that no one has yet noticed that it was a revolution, and unfortunately the rebels have Trump instead of Sanders to lead them.