A Nightmare on Trump Street

Is America About to Jump off the Edge?

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Halloween is upon us and the Democratic Party is clearly spooked, with good reason. It’s four years since Joe Biden managed to defeat Donald Trump in the midst of a lethal pandemic. Yet now, four years later, he is still here, and his movement is as strong as ever. After a brief period in early summer in which Kamala Harris seemed to have miraculously revived the moribund Democrat campaign, we are - incredibly - just over a week from an election that Donald Trump still has every chance of winning.

Once again, the polls hover on a knife edge, which is on one hand a better outcome than would have been the case if Biden was still been running, but is at the same time profoundly depressing.

Because now, we are all familiar with what Trump is. We knew in 2020 that he was a vindictive and narcissistic liar, that he was ignorant, racist, shallow, sociopathic, cruel, vulgar, greedy, dishonest, corrupt and instinctively authoritarian in a way that no previous American president has ever been.

But since power was prised from his deathly grip in 2020, we know more than that. We know that Trump has been found liable in a civil court for sexual assault - well, rape in fact - and defamation. We know that he is a convicted criminal, guilty on 34 counts of falsification of business records, with at least four other criminal cases hovering over him.

We also know that he is slipping into madness or senility. Trump’s supporters often accuse his critics of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but Trump is the one who seems to be suffering from it. In the last twelve months, his speeches have frequently descended into rambling incoherent gibberish - an oratorical style that Trump calls ‘the weave’.

In one recent speech, Trump was unable to weave, and submitted his audience to forty-five excruciating minutes of music, in which he swayed to his favourite tunes like a distracted extra from Twin Peaks. In the only open debate that he has dared to engage in, Trump was comprehensively unravelled by his intellectually-superior opponent.

None of this has made any difference. Biden dropped out of the campaign because too many people thought he was too old for office. Trump is not held to the same standard. He could literally froth at the mouth and grunt and his supporters would cheer him on.

In more than twenty rallies, Trump has espoused the most vicious and brazen racism of any presidential candidate in US history. He has called immigrants animals, murderers, rapists, gangsters, the ‘enemy within’, and the ‘worst people.’ In one particularly rabid outburst, he told his audience that Kamala Harris had ‘imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylum and mental institutions,’ to ‘prey upon innocent American lives’.

Hitler once used much the same kind of language to describe Jews, and Trump’s depictions of immigrants with ‘bad genes’ who prey on Americans with ‘good genes’ have the same distinctly Nazi stench. He has also accused Haitian migrant workers who were invited to work and live in Springfield, Ohio, of eating domestic animals - another classic dehumanising racist trope.

As if this was not enough, he has promised to round up and deport twelve million immigrants, a program shaped by his sinister speechwriter and former policy advisor Stephen Miller, that if implemented, would rip apart families and communities across America and require Nazi levels of repression and brutality.

None of this appears to have had the slightest impact on his popularity.

Trump has praised Hitler, insulted US veterans, pledged to use the army against his political opponents, and promised to gut the law enforcement agencies that he believes have unfairly persecuted him. His own former associates have called him a fascist.

Until his campaign pushed her to the sidelines, Trump was publicly associating himself with the white supremacist conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer - a no no to anyone with even a smidgeon of decency. His presidency is seen by the extreme-right Heritage Foundation as a vehicle for an all-out ideological assault on the American political system with a reactionary Christofascist hue, that will seek to roll back all the social gains that have been made since the 1960s for women and minorities.

If his supporters are shocked or alarmed by such possibilities, they aren’t showing it. At his Madison Square Gardens walpurgisnacht on Sunday, a succession of speakers seethed with racist contempt, white supremacism, vindictive rage and insane denunciations of the ‘radical left Democrats’ (you at the back, stop laughing).

No matter. Millions of Americans are still poised to elect a criminal megalomaniac who can barely put a sentence together. The polls in key states are almost tied. Some put Trump ahead. If Trump was running against Satan or Charles Manson, maybe you could understand it. But his opponent is an articulate, intelligent, empathetic former attorney general of Jamaican/Indian descent who promises to extend health care reforms, restore women’s reproductive rights, and nominate a Republican to her cabinet.

Why is this happening? Clue. It’s not just Trump.

Good Voters Gone Bad?

There is a belief, generally located at the left-liberal end of the political spectrum, which assumes that voters who choose fascism and authoritarianism have been manipulated and hoodwinked into a ‘false consciousness’ that blinds them to their ‘real’ interests - usually defined in economic terms.

This belief is not entirely wrong, but it’s also politically-convenient to assume the existence of an intrinsically virtuous and rational citizenry that somehow, somewhere, wants the same things we all want. In this way, progressives can shift the blame for negative political outcomes solely onto the politicians who lie to them, or the (corporate) media - usually imagined as a single entity - that feeds them false information or refuses to reveal the ‘truth’.

But the last few months have also revealed a bleaker possibility: that millions of Americans like and admire Trump not in spite of his viciousness, but because of it. Some recognise his manifold flaws and see him the way evangelicals do, as a ‘flawed instrument’ for realising their political aspirations. Others simply refuse to believe what is said about him by his opponents.

Manipulation is not absent here, nor is paranoia and stupidity. Many Trump supporters don’t believe that Trump is a criminal and think the charges against him are the work of the ‘deep state’ or the Democratic Party. Many of them feel the same about the multiple allegations of rape, paedophilia, and sexual harassment that make Bill Clinton look like Saint Francis.

These voters might be prepared to believe that Hilary Clinton eats the brains of trafficked children to gain eternal youth, but when a former model says that she was groped by Trump in the company of Jeffrey Epstein, of course she must be a gold-digger or another tool of the Evil Ones.

Such frothing drivel courses hourly through Twitter/X and Meta, thanks to Elon Musk, Russian bot farms, and an army of pro-Trump trolls that will say and do whatever it takes to get their man over the line. In an age of misinformation and disinformation propagated through technologies that we are only beginning to understand, the free flow of lies via social media bubbles and social networks has corroded the idea of consensus, compromise and a shared understanding of the world on which democracies depend.

Too many governments know this, and yet like the US government, too few make any attempt to hold the companies responsible to account.

But manipulation cannot in itself explain why so many people revere and idolise a man who by any honest objective standards, represents the worst that humanity has to offer and the opposite of what a leader should be.

To understand how the MAGA cult has taken possession of so many Americans requires not just political analysis but psychology. We can learn from Freud’s recognition of the fragile nature of ‘civilization’, and the role of moral censure in inhibiting anti-social behaviour, which he expressed so persuasively in papers like Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.

We also need to look back at the work of some of Freud’s disciples, like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, who examined the morbid psychological connections between charismatic dictators and the crowds they sought to mobilize, between the Great Leader and the little man - or woman.

In an era in which misogynistic charlatans like Andrew Tate can appeal to the fantasies and vulnerabilities of millions, there will always be men who regard Trump’s sneering sexual libertinism as an expression of the freedom they would like for themselves (‘you can do anything’.) Others will see his contemptuous attitude to women as evidence of a ‘real man’ in a supposedly feminised society that ‘doesn’t know what a woman is’.

When Trump rages against the ‘elite’, he speaks - or pretends to speak - for voters who feel that their government has betrayed and abandoned them. In his appeal to racism, he invites his voters to embrace the worst of themselves without shame or censure and see themselves as an endangered and persecuted minority - the victims of a ‘replacement’ strategy aimed at producing more Democrat voters.

In attacking women and minorities, Trump appeals to the status anxiety of white men (and white women) who feel that they are losing their dominant position in 21st century American society.

It was not for nothing that so many Republican attacks on Kamala Harris called her a DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) hire - the idea that black men and women rise to prominence through affirmative action programs has been a weary staple of the American right for decades.

Trump has brought this racialised resentment and victimhood to the surface, and aligned it with the previously beyond-the-pale white supremacist sectors that see his presidency as a vehicle for their racist ideological agenda.

This calamity did not emerge from nowhere. Trumpism followed two presidential terms under America’s first black president. To some extent Trump was the pushback against that. At the same time, his rise to power was the product of decades of failed wars; of rising inequality coupled with the near-collapse of a deregulated and corrupt financial system; of the gutting of the middle classes and falling living standards generally; of the out-sourcing of jobs and industries that have turned entire towns and neighbourhoods into urban wastelands.

These are the turbid waters where fascist and authoritarian movements always feed; where rage, frustration and insecurity can be turned into xenophobia, racial scapegoating, the targeting of minorities and the hatred of liberal ‘elites’.

It doesn’t matter if Trump is a member of the most corrupt and socially-irresponsible sectors of the ‘elite’, and associates himself with would-be oligarchs like Elon ‘dark Gothic MAGA’ Musk. It doesn’t even matter that his attempts to make America ‘Great Again’ have made his country weaker and less influential than it was.

The point is that he hates the same people his voters hate, and in a society where millions distrust and loathe their own government, he makes his enemies ‘cry.’ When he cheats and gets away with it, he appeals to voters who think that they should be able to cheat and get away with it too.

Of course this freak of political nature is backed by billionaires who believe that America and the world belong to them, who dream of tax cuts, deregulation and tariffs on China; who bribe voters with lotteries that further rot America’s failing democracy.

But when voters go over to the dark side, and reject any notion of morality or virtue, simply because they want to crush their enemies, the task of people like Musk and Peter Thiel is made so much easier.

And then there is Kamala Harris herself; an engaging and inspirational campaigner offering a still-nebulous vision of a united country that might be more attractive than Trump’s poisonous dystopia, yet who remains an untested leader propagating quite shallow politics, without the dark insurrectional energy that Trump has harnessed.

Israel and Gaza

When Harris calls on Americans to ‘believe in the promise of America’, she is speaking to millions of people who no longer believe in that promise. And as fresh and refreshing as she is, Harris remains tied to two wars: the ongoing massacre in Gaza, in which the Biden administration has been haplessly and disgracefully complicit; and a war in Ukraine that America does not know how to win.

All this makes it easy to portray Harris as the continuation of Biden’s war presidency, which does not mean that Trump supporters care about Gaza. Last weekend, prominent leaders of Michigan’s Muslim community described Trump as a ‘man of peace’.

To appear on stage with the author of the ‘Muslim ban’ - who has promised to do the same thing if he is elected - was bad enough. But it is staggering political illiteracy to believe that the man who has vowed to ‘crush’ pro-Palestinian demonstrators and recently told Netanyahu to ‘do what you have to do’ in Lebanon, has anything to do with peace.

This could still cost Harris dear if Michigan goes to the wire.

Some will say, good riddance. Others may vote for Jill Stein or not vote at all. And this is one more reason why America could see a degenerate would-be dictator back in the White House.

I hope that doesn’t happen. Because even in these dispiriting political times, there is a difference between the bad and the worst, and these differences will affect millions of peoples’ lives, and not only in America.

If Trump wins, Ukraine will go under, unless Europe steps up, because Trump and Vance are Putin’s men. If Trump wins, the annihilation of Gaza will very likely be followed by ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and an all-out war with Iran.

Whatever Michigan’s Muslim leaders may think, Trump will not be able to stop any of this, and will not even lift a finger to try - assuming that he even knows what is actually happening. If Trump wins, America will succumb to an eruption of political vengeance and state-organized ethnonationalist hatred, in which millions of mostly Latino immigrants will find themselves in camps, or on trucks and planes taking them to wherever Trump thinks they came from.

If Trump wins, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will turn America from a corrupt plutocracy into a dystopian billionaire’s playground. If Trump wins, the planet loses. If Trump wins, the Heritage Foundation and the MAGA Mafia win, and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer and everything that is corrupt and hateful about America wins.

If this happens, then similar forces across the world will be emboldened. If Harris wins, America gains another breathing space, in which possibilities that neither she or Biden have been able to realise may at least have a chance to flourish.

I recognize that none of this is certain. In a normal world, the outcome of that contest would not even be in doubt, but normality is long gone.

And in this age of political monsters, some choices are still better than others, which is why, in spite of everything and with no illusions, I hope the Democrats scrape through once again.