First, an apology. 

Rather than continue to concentrate on academic research, a lengthy process that takes too long and on the resulting complicated articles, frequently involving technical language and complex grammatical structure that, when eventually published, have lost relevancy as critical time has elapsed, I have, during the past decade, concentrated on more immediate journalistic-style articles, published quickly, frequently too quickly to proofread adequately, but available while they still maintain relevance.  I firmly believe that length in such politically oriented articles detracts from their effectiveness as excessively long articles, even when their length is a result of efforts to attain objectivity and provide important context, are rarely finished by potential readers.  And this article is longer than I wish it were.  A lot longer.  But, given the existentially troubling historical instant in which we find ourselves, it has kept growing and growing, almost as though of its own volition, and I can’t bring myself to cull it.  Hopefully at least some readers will find it worth the effort to finish reading.  Of course, this introduction does nothing to cut it down to size.

Anyway, ….

During the past eight years I’ve, on a number of occasions, published articles defending Donald Trump from scurrilous, defamatory distortions and calumnies by his opponents and from the Biden administration’s abuse of state and federal judicial proceedings, both penal and civil, designed to eliminate him as a political opponent and to attain revenge on him for the political humiliation of Hillary Clinton.  However, as I always made clear, I was not a Trump supporter.  Nor am I now. 

While I’ve always found Donald Trump’s personality abrasive and egocentric, that is not really an objectively reasonable basis for opposing him.  One can support people one does not like and if one strives for objectivity and seeks truth, then whether or not one personally likes or dislikes someone should not impact conclusions one reaches with respect to their abilities or performance.  Still, on a personal basis I had some axes to grind with respect to Mr. Trump and in the interests of full disclosure, I will share them before proceeding with my analysis.  Mr. Trump and I both graduated in 1964 from rival military academies in New York, he from the New York Military Academy (NYMA) and I from the Eastern Military Academy (EMA).  Notwithstanding our rivalry, members of both institutions shared deep respect and affection for each other, especially after the demise of EMA in 1979 when NYMA took our alumni association under its wing.  My personal gripe with Mr. Trump is that when NYMA found itself about to close because of financial difficulties its leaders, including leading alumni, asked Mr. Trump for assistance and he ignored their request, something a graduate from a military academy ought never to do if he or she has the wherewithal to assist.  But that is a personal choice and declining to act was his right.  Then, however, when he first sought the Republican nomination for the presidency, he elected to give his first foreign and military affairs speech at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, from which I graduated in 1968, and there, he touted his wonderful experience with the military education he received at NYMA.  The hypocrisy offended me and I made that publicly clear at the time. Ironically, NYMA was sold in bankruptcy to the Research Center on Natural Conservation, a non-profit backed by a principal of China-based SouFun Holdings Ltd., and reopened after a two year hiatus during November of 2017.  So it was the Chinese, rather than Mr. Trump, that saved his “beloved” alma mater.

I, of course, am not the only one who finds Mr. Trump unpalatable.  He scares the hell out of the unelected classes that rule us through their control of the federal bureaucracy, the federal judiciary and the corporate media, an “informal conglomerate whose opponents, I among them, refer to it as the “Deep State”.  The members of the Deep State are terrified of Mr. Trump because he seems economically incorruptible, despite his ruthless business practices, and because of his unpredictability.  And they are terrified that his appeal to many, perhaps a majority of the American electorate, may solidify rejection of politics-as-usual and accelerate a drift from both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum towards democratic populism.  Mr. Trump is reactive and easily changes his mind as to details and his recall of past events and past statements is incomprehensible and easily distortable.  At best he seems to have an extremely “flexible” memory.  He is egocentric and abusive in his demeanor and either fails to understand concepts such as “communism” and “socialism” or perhaps merely prefers to distort them as emotionally useful pejoratives.  Indeed, to Mr. Trump, pejoratives are an art form.  But, despite his faults, he is his own man (except when it comes to emotional and family ties which, unfortunately, make him subservient to the most immoral force in the world today, the genocidal wing of international Zionism) and such unpredictability and independence is intolerable to those used to placing their own puppets in the Oval Office.

Mr. Trump is a man with a very public history spanning many decades and many forums.  Notwithstanding my personal negative feelings towards him as a person, I admit that in many, perhaps most respects he was an effective president during his first term and I acknowledge that his first administration was deliberately sabotaged from within and without by people whose loyalties are not to the United States but to the aforementioned Deep State; people who could not abide his threats to withdraw from the purportedly defensive North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“NATO”), an institution that had not only become anachronistic at the end of the First Cold War but had morphed into an aggressive (rather than defensive) permanent threat to world peace as it sought missions to justify its existence.  In addition, Mr. Trump earned the enmity of the Deep State because of his early threats to massively reduce the enormous complex of foreign military bases that drain the American economy and promote constant United States meddling in the affairs of other countries, an action that would permit a substantial reduction in the United States’ bloated military budget, in essence a massive tax on the United Sates citizenry for the sole benefit of investors, officers, directors and contractor of the military industrial complex against which Ike warned in late 1960. 

After Mr. Trump’s surprising victory in 2026, his opponents, rather than successfully confronting him on policy grounds relating to the foregoing (they tried but failed as such policies resonated with a majority of the electorate), successfully sabotaged his administration through three principal strategies, first, from within, by a continuous streams of leaks by firmly ensconced moles planted by former president Obama to unfriendly media accompanied by a refusal to implement his policies, the foregoing accompanied by a national campaign of resistance to Mr. Trump’s policies  coordinated on Mr. Obama’s behalf by his former attorney general, Eric Holder.  Second, by claiming that Mr. Trump was secretly a Russian agent, a Manchurian candidate planted by Vladimir Putin, a strategy developed and financed by the defeated Clinton presidential campaign with the assistance of Deep State moles but third, and most successfully, it was sabotaged by the orchestrated Democratic Party reaction to the Covid 19 “pandemic”, something that now appears to have been “manufactured” (the reaction, not the disease) in order to damage the world economy in order to facilitate Democratic Party victories in the 2018 Congressional elections and the 2020 presidential election.  Not that Covid 19 was not a serious virus, just that the mandatory vaccine demands and the related closing down of commercial activities were orchestrated for purposes with little to do with public health and welfare (unless of course, you were an investor, officer, director or contractor of one or more of the entities comprising what is now known as “Big Pharma”). 

As a result of the foregoing, Mr. Trump was successfully driven from office in 2020 in what was certainly a profoundly manipulated election, one very much impacted by Covid 19 related emergency electoral strategies that facilitated the possibility of widespread electoral fraud.  Whether or not any such fraud existed or was enough to have changed the electoral results is something we will never know as all efforts at investigating related allegations were promptly dismissed as a “Big Lie”, and groups and individuals who protested against the electoral results, most notably on January 6, 2021, were labelled insurrectionists and domestic terrorists and prosecuted as such.  In order to assure that Mr. Trump did not again threaten the Deep State, he was twice impeached by the House of Representatives (but never convicted by the Senate), once, shortly before he left office.  When such legislative efforts to disqualify him from future political office proved unsuccessful, the new Democratic Party administration and its allies, especially in New York, Georgia and Arizona, launched a series of legal actions, both penal and civil, seeking to destroy his ability to run for the presidency in 2024 but, despite some success in very legally questionable proceedings, the electorate was in what Abraham Lincoln might have described as “you can’t fool all of us all of the time” mode and, imitating the mythic Lazarus and despite news reports and  political polls, he emerged victorious in the 2024 presidential elections and is once again about to take office as president of the United States, but this time, apparently much more careful as to whom he selects to assist him as members of his administration.  Indeed, to popular acclaim, he has promised to purge the federal bureaucracy of the moles who made it impossible for him to implement his policies during his initial term; something that has his opponents terrified and seeking presidential pardons from the outgoing president for crimes they may have committed and for which they might be prosecuted in the future.

At any rate ….

Donald Trump, like Grover Cleveland, will serve a split presidency but unlike Grover Cleveland, the Republican Party whose candidate he was will also enjoy the support of both houses of Congress.  The electorate has totally rejected the horrible, even malign performance of the Democratic Party during the last four years and has elected the Republican Party to lead all branches of government.  However, the perspective that Trump allies will have a free hand in governance is an illusion, a fallacy, one Mr. Trump may not perceive.  Specifically:

• The three seat majority in the Senate is an illusion given that “Republican” senators Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska have clearly demonstrated their antipathy for Mr. Trump in the past and are likely to do so again and Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky is a true libertarian maverick who may well oppose not only financing of Ukraine’s conflict with Russia but also Israel’s genocide throughout the Middle East.  Given the foregoing, when James David Vance assumes the vice-presidency in January, he may have his hands full breaking senatorial ties, especially with respect to confirmation of Mr. Trump’s cabinet.

• The narrow majority attained by the Republican Party in the House of Representatives is also illusory, first, given Donald Trump’s selection of important members of his administration from the incoming Republican membership in the House, albeit from apparently secure districts likely to elect Republican Party members as replacements, and, because of the infighting among traditionalist and libertarian factions within the Republican members of the House.  Unlike the House members from the Democratic Party who vote as a monolithic block under strict control from party leaders, Republicans tend to stand by their sometimes conflicting ideals and are clearly divided between traditionalists who have more in common with their Democratic Party colleagues than they do with Mr. Trump, Tea Party Trump allies, and ethical independents.  The GOP majority in the House of Representatives will temporarily be reduced from five members to one due to the presidential nominations and anticipated appointments and despite the historical fact that the districts from which they come have large Republican majorities, it can be anticipated that there will be a massive influx of “temporary” Democratic Party affiliated residents who will seek to vote in the related special elections, as occurred in Georgia during the 2020 special runoff elections for the Senate, thus putting the results of the special elections to replace the Republican congressmen entering the executive branch into question.

• The federal judiciary has been packed with politicized judges loyal to the Democratic Party (as are judiciaries in states controlled by the Democratic Party) and many of them, enough of them, can be counted on to do that political party’s bidding rather than to function in an ethically neutral manner.  Then again, partisanship is no stranger to Republican Party members of the judiciary.  However, as demonstrated by the large scale lawfare attacks against Mr. Trump and his allies during the past eight years, judges and prosecutors loyal to the Democratic Party are much more likely to abuse their positions for partisan purposes.  The unconstitutional usurpation of power by federal judges from both parties through the issuance of injunctions that apply beyond the territorial jurisdiction of their courts poses an additional weapon likely to be used to obstruct policies that Mr. Trump will seek to implement in his second administration.

• The federal bureaucracy at all levels and in all departments is riddled with moles planted at the direction of former presidents William Jefferson Clinton, Barak Obama and now Joe Biden who will leak like sieves and do everything in their power to obstruct the implementation of Trump administration policies and to make Trump loyalist seem like the incarnation of evil.  That is especially true with respect to the intelligence agencies which have more and more directly controlled the United States government since the mid nineteen forties and which orchestrated Mr. Trump’s ouster from government in 2020, and in the ill named Department of Justice.  They are, in all probability, not chastened by having been forced to come out from hiding and then having been rejected by the sane among us in the last elections.  Frank Church; where are you when we need you?

• Notwithstanding having completely ignored or ridiculed, the allegations by Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer, that while a Senator, Mr. Biden had raped her, and then, that the Biden Justice Department had hounded her into seeking asylum in Russia, allegations involving even consensual sexual activities involving men associated with Mr. Trump will once again become salient and the moribund #MeToo movement, like Lazarus, will rise from the dead.  Witness the successful attack on Mr. Trump’s initial choice to lead the Department of Justice on the current attacks on his nominee to lead the Department of Defense.

• Last but not least, the media, designated as either mainstream (a fallacy), corporate or legacy, and the owners of the Internet’s major platforms with the exception of X (formerly Twitter) will obstruct Mr. Trump at every turn, except, perhaps when he is doing the bidding of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) by which both the Democratic and Republican parties are controlled.

As to specific policies, many of the policies espoused by Mr. Trump seem reasonable to me although in too many cases, they are focused on symptoms rather than on the causes of the critical problems the United States currently faces and even more so, with the problems that will confront it in the future.  His proposed appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as unpaid advisors in an informal new “Department of Government Efficiency” (“DOGE”) is an extremely timely and necessary move, as are his nominations of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, in each case, charged with reforming corruption and abuse riddled government institutions largely responsible for the loss of faith by the United States electorate in the ability of government to protect them from monopolistic abuses in the pharmaceutical and agro industries as well as for the state of perpetual war which is making nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

To me, Mr. Trump’s major drawback, and it is existential, is the control over him exercised by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but then, AIPAC controls both the Democratic and Republican parties.  It has turned the United States from at least the illusion of a beacon of liberty, democracy and justice into an accomplice in ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide as evil as that of Turkey in Armenia at the beginning of the twentieth century and Germany during the second war to end all wars (World War II).  In the latter case I note with interest that the obviously flagrantly distorted and inaccurate current mass propaganda in favor of Israel’s current campaign of genocide in the Middle East is leading some of the more objective among us to wonder just how accurate Zionist propaganda following World War II, now calcified as purported history, really was and is.  Is it possible that those who doubt the accuracy with which German atrocities have been reported have a point?  Until recently that was unthinkable.  Now?  They may be worth reexamining.  Thus, in foreign affairs, Mr. Trump’s promises present an incoherent and dangerous dichotomy.  On the one hand, he claims to oppose war and interference in the domestic political affairs of other countries but there’s a glaring exception where anything to do with the State of Israel is involved.  There, he is as subject to domination by AIPAC as are the leaders of the Democratic Party and that means full support for the Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing and lebensraum in the Middle East that has been taking place since 1948, something which, as heretofore alluded, raises serious questions with respect to most of what we’ve been taught about the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Nuremburg Tribunals and the existence of human rights and international law. 

Another problematic complex of issues involving Mr. Trump involve his penchant for international “economic” warfare using a combination of tariffs and sanctions as well as abuse of international monetary and banking institutions to attain the geopolitical objectives he espouses.  Such tactics have proven problematic in the past and have been abused in a bipartisan manner with results that the legendary “Murphy” (he of Murphy’s Law) might envy.  Reactions to economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies on their adversaries, sanctions violative of the United Nations Charter and international law (or what passes for the illusion of international law) have led most countries, especially in what is becoming known as the Global South, to align with China, Russia and other United States adversaries in a quest for a multipolar rather than hegemonic world order and that primarily involves abandonment of the United States dollar as the principle means of exchange in international commerce.  Mr. Trump has aggressively asserted that he intends to continue to rely on such tactics to maintain the supremacy of the United States dollar in international trade and against the rise of the “Global South” and the proposed multipolar world order, especially with reference to the evolution of the BRICS economic alliance.  All of such inclinations promise disastrous consequences not only for the United States but for the entire world and belie respect for human rights, equity and state equality in the international sphere.  Bulls rampaging in china shops come to mind.

Mr. Trump is admittedly a far better choice in every aspect as the prospective president of the United States than was Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.  And that is as true today as it was in 2020, and as accurate as it was with respect to Mrs. Clinton in 2016, but that is not synonymous with the assertion that Mr. Trump is a good or even a decent choice.  He is not.  However the United States political system, one dominated by two political parties, neither of which is independent of the billionaire class that owns them or of AIPAC which controls their foreign affairs in alliance with the military industrial complex, is, at best, dysfunctional and at worst, a force for inequity, inequality and injustice, both domestically and internationally.  As structured and protected by discriminatory federal and state legislation and with judicial decisions incompatible with constitutional guarantees of equal protection, the current United States political system assures only that the most competent and decent among us will rarely if ever attain our highest political offices.

And here we stand, for as long as “here” lasts, just as Eric Arthur Blair, writing under the pen name “George Orwell”, predicted in 1948 when he published his seminal novel, 1984.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.