Donald Trump returns to the White House in nineteen days.
I feel I ought to express an opinion. My corner of the online universe is tiny, infinitesimal, but I am still an expat in Europe, number myself among those Americans who left their native land largely out of disaffection with U.S. politics. And I have written occasionally of U.S. political issues here in the past.
I don’t have a lot to add to views expressed in past posts. My Spanish tutor helped me translate I explain Trump to Spain in 2016; the 2018 first installment of USA in the Rear View is online in English only. I could quibble about a few points, but only a few.
“Degenerate oligarchy” has been my long-standing, two word diagnosis of ills in American leadership.
In the United States, America’s oligarchic elite has traditionally come from its network of Ivy League and other top-ranked universities. This is horribly unfair, of course, but what seems most relevant to me now is that this de facto system isn’t working well.
If I were a serious student of America’s problems, I would be less interested in the milieu that begot symptom-of-problem Donald Trump than in whatever culture spawned the core-of-problem Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, G.W. Bush and the neocons. Blaming the populist Trump for his own success is like a fifth-a-day alcoholic who blames cirrhosis on an uncooperative liver. The Republican rank-and-file wouldn’t have abandoned oligarchy candidates for the populist if G.W. Bush hadn’t launched the Iraq War.