"The World Should Prepare for Trump"

Says Richard Haass of the Ruling Class

Yesterday morning while cleaning up my apartment I had on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in the background. I caught some snippets.

There were stories about a jetliner that had to make an emergency landing in Brazil and the happiness of two astronauts stuck in a space station.

There were stories and commentary about the Boston Celtics being put up for sale, the Wimbledon tennis tournament, the health of Princess Kate, and movies expected to do best at the box office this summer.

There was an interview with a flustered former campaign operative who seemed to think (but didn't sound confident) that Joe Biden can still win the presidential election after his disastrous debacle of a debate performance last Thursday.

Sandwiched between two long commercial breaks, finally, “Morning Joe” broadcast a brief and brusque statement from a frowning Richard Haass.

You’ve heard of Richard Haass, no?  He’s a longtime major player in the making of so-called US ‘foreign policy,” a nice sounding term for mass-murderous American imperialism. “Haas was president of the Council on Foreign Relations from July 2003 to June 2023, prior to which he was director of policy planning for the United States Department of State and a close advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration” (Wiki). The CFR was long considered one of the leading US ruling class institutions if not the single leading US ruling class policy planning institution.[1]

And this is what Haass had to say in less than two minutes between hearing aid and joint pain commercials: the United States’ allies had better start preparing now for a second Trump administration and Republican takeover of the US Senate along with the continuation of Republican domination of the US House and federal judiciary.  Haas says the US will become a “parliamentary” state devoid of relevant “checks and balances.”

Haas sees this as the end of 75 years of great global progress under the benevolent watch and model of Uncle Sam. Never mind the tens of millions of people that the not-so peaceful “Pax America” has directly and indirectly slaughtered in the names of “democracy,” “security,” and “freedom”[2], cover for capitalist-imperialist exploitation of the world’s human and natural resources.   

Imperial criminality — no small matter! — aside, Haass is right to expect Biden’s defeat.  As he explained in an Op-Ed (titled “After Biden’s Debate Performance, the World Should Prepare for Trump”) that went up all over the world yesterday:

“The debate most likely increases the odds that Trump will occupy the Oval Office come noon on 20 January 2025. Going into Thursday night’s debate, Trump was slightly ahead in many of the national polls and, more importantly, in the half-dozen swing states that will most likely determine the election’s outcome. The debate only added to this advantage…The context favors Trump. This year has already proven to be a tough one for incumbents seeking re-election, as outcomes in India and France have demonstrated (with Britain up next). Polls also show a low approval rating for the prime ministers of Japan and Canada, which could lead to a change of leadership in those countries. Biden and the US are poised to be consistent with this trend…Like many of his fellow incumbents, Biden has struggled to manage rising immigration and economic challenges. His failure to deal effectively with the southern border has allowed some 10 million people to enter the US illegally. Then there are the effects of inflation, something voters are reminded of every time they go to grocery stores or fill their cars with gasoline. Biden can point to domestic and foreign-policy accomplishments, but they are less salient to many Americans…Most critical is the question of his age. Doubts are widely and deeply held that Biden is simply too old for what is arguably the world’s most demanding and important job. He is 81, turns 82 in November, and, if re-elected, would turn 86 while still in the White House. And he is an old 81. As the debate demonstrated, he walks stiffly, loses his train of thought and has a weak and raspy voice. Trump is only three years younger and makes little sense when he speaks, often taking bizarre rhetorical detours, but manages to project a more vigorous image…Given Biden’s better outing at a campaign stop the day after the debate, some believe he can bounce back. After all, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama recovered from poor debate performances. But that was because each was seen as a great orator who had simply had a bad night. Biden’s problem is that his poor showing reinforced an already-entrenched narrative that will be difficult, if not impossible, to alter. His performance could even threaten to turn him into something of a lame duck, further weakening his influence at home and abroad… Biden’s declining political fortunes could well prove to be a drag on other Democratic candidates come autumn. It is possible that a Trump victory could help bring about a Republican takeover of the Senate at the same time Republicans hold the House of Representatives. Together with a Supreme Court that has increasingly demonstrated sympathy for positions supported by Trump and congressional Republicans…. There would be few checks on power strong enough to mitigate this imbalance; on the contrary, Trump’s plans to weaken the independence of the civil service, together with his promise to politicize the Justice Department and regulatory agencies, would concentrate power further. Trump would be free to lower taxes, impose tariffs, further restrict access to abortion, ease already loose controls on gun ownership, enforce immigration law as he sees fit and increase the enormous debt.”

Haass is correct.  He might be a longtime leading agent of US ruling class imperialism and I might be a revolutionary Marxist dedicated to the overthrow of the criminal American Empire, but we concur on the ominous political trajectory of the USA.

Still, I see three glaring problems with Haass’s recent reflections:

1. His ridiculous[3] belief (or pretense of belief) in the benevolence and decency of the American Empire.

2.  Haass’s curious reference to the coming post-Biden Trumpist consolidation as “the American equivalent of a parliamentary system, with power consolidated in the hands of a party—one that is better understood as radical rather than conservative.”  

Yes on “power consolidated in the hands of a [single] party” and yes on “radical rather than conservative,” but no on “parliamentary system.” Try de facto fascist Christian white nationalist dictatorship, backed with armed force within and beyond government.

Haass wrote and sent out his Op-Ed before the Trump-appointed Christian fascist US Supreme Court ruled that US presidents have absolute immunity for carrying our “official acts” like staging a coup to stay in power, sending out military hit squads to kill political opponents, and taking bribes to grant pardons.  Still, that’s no excuse. Other analysts and I have been reporing and warning about the many dark signs of Trump and Trumpism’s FASCIST views, ambitions, plans and nature for years.  And there should have been litttle surprise about the Trump court’s ruling.

3.  The complete absence in Haass’s commentary of any call for US-Americans to rise up in the millions against a system that gives us the sick “democratic choice” between the decrepit, bloody-jawed warmonger Genocide Joe Biden and the re-ascendant malignant fascist Donald “Retribution” Trump.

A mass popular revolutionary movement is the last thing that a longtime leading agent of US capitalism-imperialism like Haass wants to see in the USA, of course.  That is perhaps part of why he fails to properly call the coming Trumpist consolidation what it will be: the rise to state power of US Amerikaner neofascism.  Calling what’s happening what it actually is – the triumphal ascendancy of an Amerikan white nationalist Reich, aided and abetted by a dismal neo-Weimar Democratic party of inauthentic opposition – is too provocative for the ruling class likes of Haass. Such truthful description suggests the need for millions upon millions of Americans to take to the streets and public squares to shut this country down and demand a whole new way of life, a world that could never give rise to fascism – “the radical reconstruction of society itself” and “systemic” change that Dr. Marin Luther King, Jr. near the end of his life considered “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters.

For Haass, the coming US Amerikaner fascist solidification is a shame but just the way it is and something the world should get ready to live with. The masses of the US should just passively accept this after they’d had their little atomized moment in the quadrennial voting booth.

Trumpenleftish nihilists and noir anarchish sorts I know find a dark sort of “blowback” justice in it all: Amerika has backed repressive right-wing governments, movements and authoritarian regimes, equipping “Third World Fascist” states around the planet for as long as anyone alive can remember, they say, so “why shouldn’t those fascist chickens come home to roost in the homeland itself? What goes around comes around.  We deserve it.” 

Well, um, no!  Ordinary US Americans have never come remotely close to making US imperial (“foreign”) policy.  They do not “deserve” a system that is destroying livable ecology and steering humanity to nuclear war anymore than they deserve to work ridiculously long hours in alienating, dangerous, exhausting, life-draining and otherwise stupid and perverse jobs designed for no higher purpose than the creation and transfer of surplus value for and to a parasitic investor/capitalist class that swallows up an ever greater share of social wealth and political power across the recurrent quadrennial, corporate-crafted, candidate-centered capitalist electoral extravaganzas that are sold us as “that’s politics,” the only politics that matters. At the same time, no people ple have greater and more potentially powerful and relevant responsibility to rise up against that fascism-, ecocide-, and war-hatching system than the masses residing in the world’s most powerful, parasitic, and lethal nation – the USA.

We must repeal our acceptance of the whole damn capitalist-imperial system that brought us to this supremely ugly point.

Repeat after me the Revcom chants:

1, 2, 3, 4, slavery, genocide and war

5, 6, 7, 8, American was never great

No Fascist Trump/No Genocide Joe/the Whole Damn System’s Got to Go!

Endnotes

+1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_N._Haass.  As historian Laurence Shoup wrote in the spring of 2021: “There are numerous think tanks in the United States, but three are the most central for the ruling class: the CFR, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Brookings Institution. Of these, the most important U.S. policy think tank, which has helped set grand strategy for the country for one hundred years, is the CFR, dubbed ‘Wall Street’s Think Tank.’ Founded a century ago, the CFR is the high-command plutocratic body promoting U.S. imperialism. It is the world’s most powerful private organization, the central think tank of U.S. monopoly-finance capital. It is also a membership organization and the ultimate networking, socializing, agenda-setting, strategic-planning, and consensus-forming organization of the dominant sector of the U.S. capitalist class….The CFR’s activities help unite the capitalist class into not just a class in itself, but also a class for itself. From its beginnings, it has been a behind-the-scenes organization and network led by well-connected financial capitalists of New York’s Wall Street. These capitalists are assisted by their expert allies in the professional class, especially from leading U.S. universities, but also from the nonprofit, government, law, and media sectors of society. From its founding, the Council has promoted an imperialistic conception of the capitalist class-based ‘national interest’ of the United States, promoting a hegemonic ‘primacy’ of the United States both regionally and globally. It has been very successful in its aims, setting agendas and policy as well as putting thousands of its members and leaders into high office.…  No less than seventeen Biden team members (out of thirty total, or 56.7 percent) are members of, have close family ties to, or are otherwise connected to the CFR). These include: vice president Kamala Harris; secretary of state Antony Blinken; secretary of the treasury Janet Yellen; secretary of defense Lloyd Austin; CIA head William J. Burns; national security advisor Jake Sullivan; secretary of agriculture Thomas Vilsack; secretary of commerce Gina Raimondo; secretary of homeland security Alejandro Mayorkas; chief of staff Ron Klain; climate envoy John Kerry; domestic council chief Susan Rice; Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt M. Campbell; ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield; chief of Council of Economic Advisers Cecilia Rouse; director of science and technology Eric S. Lander; and counselor Jeffery Zients.” The CFR has long been a really big imperialist ruling class deal, though its influence is diminished now in the Trump era.

2. Paul Street, “The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony,” Common Dreams, February 22, 2018, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/22/world-will-not-mourn-decline-us-hegemony

3. Street, “The World Will Not Mourn.”