Trump times…

The events of last night in relation to Acting US Attorney General Sally Yates are telling in a number of ways. She clearly had the right to demur from his executive order, the administration seem to have the right to fire her. Whether this was the place for her to make a stand is a different matter but her successors clearly won’t. It is instructive in terms of showing up the manner in which the incoming administration will brook no criticism from within or without. But above all the sheer petulance of the White House statement on her firing is something else. That perhaps is the key indicator of the underlying dynamics where those who dissent will be attacked as well as pushed aside rather than just being pushed aside. How that plays out across the next four years…

And this links neatly into this, here where if even a quarter of what Maureen O’Dowd – and I’m no fan of hers – writes is accurate in relation to Trump’s response to the inauguration crowd we’re in much more severe trouble than we’d thought. And I suspect most of us figure we’re in quite a lot of trouble. It’s not so much the sheer pettiness of the issue as the sense that the new President is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, those around him unable to contain his seeming pathological desire to shape the world around him.

Of course if it were limited to that sort of stuff the next four years wouldn’t be a problem, but it’s not. Nowhere near limited to that. Already we have the chaos of the vicious immigration and refugee controls brought in – the seeming indifference to their economic effects (we’re way beyond this administration caring about human rights and what is it day nine?).

What’s fascinating, though, is how opportunistic all this is. There is no real Trump programme, the sheer incoherence of those around him points to the fact that different groups have grabbed his coat tails as he has swept (albeit not in an entirely commanding way) to power. What there is is a single man’s ambition to be President and what appears in retrospect to have been a disbelief on almost all those around him that he would make it (though one has to doubt he shared that disbelief). That’s kind of it and the alliances he made were all shaped to that end. Small wonder they’re so variegated given he was not naturally a Republican (and there’s a part of me that wonders could one run a counterfactual where he took a different path and became a Democrat nominee? Unlikely, but not absolutely so). Those of us who, however hesitantly still consider Marxist analysis of some utility, may find the sheer power of an individual, their ability to wrest events, troubling. Absent Trump, replace with Clinton and little or none of this would be happening. Absent Trump and replace with Cruz, some of this might be happening. But not in such a pointed way. But Trump is Trump. This is happening.

A deeper question remains. Does he represent a genuine rupture with all that has come before – the post-1945/post- 1991 dispensation or will matters return largely to that status quo ante when he (fingers crossed) leaves the White House in four, or God forbid eight, years? How resilient are the various global systems, or US democracy, or the US state and deep state? Part of me wonders why we haven’t seen his like in the recent past, he surely is not entirely dissimilar to some of the post-Soviet leaders in the former Soviet Republics (or would it be fair to say he is a Yeltsin like figure? ). But US democracy, with wobbles, has managed to at least propel relatively uncontentious people into the Presidency – sure, Nixon was Nixon but his flaws seem different to those of Trump. GW Bush likewise. Or is it that Trump, strangely, was just the right candidate for a social media inflected US?