Thursday, July 3, 2025

Trumpism and American Exhaustion

                                                  Trumpism and American Exhaustion

A lot has gone on since I’ve been on vacation! On June 9 Donald Trump sent the National Guard to quash peaceful protests opposing the ICE crackdown against immigrant workers in Los Angeles. He did this against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsome and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass who felt the Los Angeles city police and county sheriff departments had the unrest under control.

On June 12, Latino California US Senator Alex Padilla was thrown to the floor and handcuffed at a press briefing of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Padilla was in the local federal building fo r a meeting with the General Gregory Guillot, Commander of the United States Northern Command who oversees the military action in L.A. As a US Senator, Padilla was already being accompanied by FBI and National Guard officers, when he entered the press conference. He was accosted by Secret Service and other FBI officers, when he rose and began to ask Noem a question.

For the Trump administration the optics of a high-ranking Latino public official being roughed up over its immigration policies looked good. It showed they weren’t taking any s—t from those brown immigrants and their leaders!

On June 18 National Guard troops assisted the Drug Enforcement Administration in rounding up over 70 people suspected being undocumented working on illegal marijuana farms near Palm Springs. This was in neighboring Riverside County, over 100 miles from LA.

This early deployment of the US military in domestic law enforcement and its creeping spread beyond its initial mission synchs up nicely with the American bombing of Iranian nuclear sites on June 24th. That was in support of the Israeli bombings of numerous sites, military and non-military in Iran beginning June 12, which led to Iranian drone and missile attacks on Israel.

In both southern California and the Middle East Trump chose bullying and militaristic tactics: the simplistic approach that suits someone with no appreciation for the complexity of our immigration issue or how Israel and Iran ended up as enemies. Bullies just want to have things their way and are willing to beat up their adversaries to achieve their ends.

But Trump’s mean-spirited militarism has landed him in the White House again, because it speaks to the exhaustion and exasperation plaguing the American psyche after over eighty years of offering itself as a model for domestic social orders and the organization of international relations.

Domestically, people on the cultural right are tired of the incessant debate over what it means to be an American, which animates racial identity politics. In earlier posts I’ve dubbed folks on the moderate right as White assimilationists and those on the far right as white nationalists. Some White assimilationists, being more moderate, are willing to keep talking about American identity in an attempt to rebuild a pragmatic political center. White nationalists, Trump’s Red America MAGA crowd, are done with that conversation and actively seek to dismantle institutional spaces where multiracialist visions of America’s future hold sway. This is why Red nationalists oppose diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. They don’t want us to interrogate our differences, especially where inequitable or exclusionary practices might obtain. And they want to undermine democracy to get us all to stop questioning why those inequities and exclusions take place.

Globally, the US has been the leader of the White Western advanced capitalist bloc of states since the end of World War Two. The West was fighting fascist aggression in Europe and the Far East. But because Nazi fascism was racist, anti-racism became inextricably linked to the war effort. Anti-colonialism was also baked into wartime aims via documents like the Atlantic Charter signed by President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill in 1941. The charter called for self-government to be restored to peoples who had been deprived of it.[1]

The Atlantic Charter laid the framework for what would become the United Nations system and deepened the global discourse on human rights, which had been generated out of World War One and the creation of the League of Nations. But human rights including the brown mostly colonized peoples of the Global South were always a mixed bag for the White countries of the East and West. Their superpower competition for geopolitical-military dominance trumped any concern they might have had for the political aspirations of those countries emerging from colonization.

The Soviet record during the Cold War of catastrophic policies indifferent to the aspirations of Southern countries, though real, is beyond the scope of this post. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, they recognized they could no longer afford to compete with the US militarily or economically under the communist system. They sought reform, which led to the wholesale collapse of that system. Soviet state socialism was exhausted. In the period since the early 1990s, Russia has experienced decline in importance and influence in global affairs.

Today the United States is similarly enervated in its posture toward the world and Donald Trump personifies this mood. The US led Western liberal democracies in defeating fascism in World War Two, and outlasting communism in the Cold War. But in Vietnam and again in Afghanistan and Iraq its massive military power and hapless attempts to employ “soft power” proved incapable of sustaining Western-oriented regimes.

Trump accurately reflects the frustrations of many Americans who saw the country dragged into wars in “weak” Southern countries that it was unable to win. How could a country that could defeat the German Wehrmacht in WW II and Soviet Bear in the Cold War lose to “people without history” in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq?[2] Why do we keep bankrolling European security while countries in the Western Europe enjoy higher qualities of life than we do? And why have we continued to dump billions of dollars into to foreign aid programs when many Americans are suffering at home? Many Americans think it’s high time that the US excuse itself from the complexities of the world and concentrate on the problems here at home.

As is the case in domestic politics, Americans are exhausted, in these cases because the country’s outsized role in global affairs doesn’t seem to reap dividends in terms of compliance with our objectives or broader allegiance to our model for society.

But power abhors a vacuum, and commentators are already observing the ways that China (economically) and the China-Russia axis (strategically) are stepping in where the US steps away. Shares in European military producers‘ stocks are already selling higher, and European, Japanese and Chinese universities are poised to take on the research and graduate students that as Trumpism abandons US leadership in scientific and technology development.

The working class MAGA base in its surge to isolationism doesn’t seem to care about these international complexities, and the corporate elite, university leaders and Republican politicians fear Trump. So they cower in fear rather than stand up to his crazed policies.

Trump has chosen moving toward a police state at home, and his rash use of force against Iran exemplifies his effort to police the Middle East in Israel’s favor. The annals of US use of force in the global South since the 1950s is riddled with unintended consequences. I’m not here to predict what will ultimately happen with Iran now. But stay tuned both to that international crisis and the immigration one closer to home. There might be interesting shoes to drop that will expose Trump as the lunatic, rather that those in US Agency for International Development that he summarily fired a few months ago.

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