Republicans are absolutely correct, the Democratic Party is horrible but, then again, so are Democrats, the Republican Party is awful. Interestingly, both are subservient to the same master and it is not the United States’ citizenry.
The second Trump administration is a disaster, domestically and internationally, but, in all honesty it’s not a worse disaster than the Biden administration, and, internationally, while terrible, it is no worse than the prior Obama and Clinton administrations which planted the seeds for so many of today’s problems (think of the Ukraine, and Libya and Syria and Yemen, etc.). And of course, the administration of George W. Bush was as terrible and inept as any of them, although, in each case, “inept” is measured only with respect to how such administrations benefit United States citizens. Each was highly apt as far as the billionaire class was concerned and with respect to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The sad part is that Mr. Trump’s inane behavior, rather than usher in a real independent and pro-United States administration comprised of people like former Congressman Dennis Kucinich or former Senator Jim Webb, real statesmen, it is very likely to usher in a new Democratic Party administration led by the Clintons and the Obamas and Pelosi, etc., also foreign owned, rather than one dedicated to world peace, domestic tranquility, prosperity and freedom from AIPAC domination. Thus, the more things purportedly change, the more they stay the same and it is our fault, yours and mine, both individually and collectively, for being so consistently gullible. Of course, things don’t quite stay the same as each subsequent administration becomes more vitriolic and more seriously abuses our civil liberties and constitutional rights, more thoroughly perverting and subverting the institutions and customs meant to preserve and protect us while the previous administration hypocritically laments the sad state of affairs.
For decades public opinion polls have shown that the United States electorate would prefer a political administration other than one controlled by either the Republican or Democratic parties but every election, thanks in large part to the AIPAC controlled corporate media, we are convinced that those are our only two choices and that voting for third parties or independents is merely wasting our votes, and that we thus have to vote for one of the two AIPAC owned political parties so that the other does not attain power. Thus, rather than voting our conscience and with our intellect, we tend to vote from artificially induced fear.
The stupidity involved is incredible! Albert Einstein would have described it as insane. But it is constant and consistent and anyway, it’s probably already too late to change things since, as may well have occurred in the United States already and as is occurring in Europe west of the Caucuses, electoral manipulation through distortive news reporting and, when that is not enough, electoral manipulation through abuse of the judicial system (as recently occurred in Romania) or, as a last resort, through electoral fraud involving destruction of inconvenient ballots (as was apparently again the case today in Moldavia) and through manufacture of necessary ballots, or else, through the hacking of electronic voting equipment will prevent changes opposed by the alliance of Deep States that makes a mockery of even the illusion of democracy.
For decades, especially since Eric Arthur Blair (writing under the pen name George Orwell) in his dystopian epic 1984 (published in 1948) warned us, we have been completely manipulated, duped, and our intellect and ethics have been insulted. We not only “should” know better, we in fact “do” know better, but somehow, that makes no difference. The genocide against which we purportedly fought a world war has now become acceptable, although, the reality, when one examines history, is that genocide has always been acceptable, one need only note the celebrated instances of genocide in the Tanakh (Old Testament), e.g., Jericho, or much more recently, the genocide perpetrated against indigenous Americans by European colonists, the genocide in the Congo perpetrated by the Belgians, the genocide in India and Africa perpetrated by the British, the genocide in Armenia perpetrated by the Turks and the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the second war to end all wars, thus, the genocide engaged in by the Nazis was apparently only horrendous because the Nazis lacked sophisticated public relations such as those employed by Zionists and, of course, the Nazis lost a major war.
So, … we rush towards Armageddon, many Christion Zionists with open arms in the hope that Yešu the Nazarene will deem it prudent to return and reward slaughter and mayhem with his holy presence. We rush towards Armageddon oblivious, polarized and incoherent but, apparently, blissfully so. Or, perhaps, we’ll just blissfully remain enslaved to our betters who apparently deserve to use us as they will. _____
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.
On July 21, 2005, Patrick Lawrence wrote a commentary concerning Gaza, income inequality, Israel and politics entitled “Sun Valley vs. Queensbridge”. It was published in Consortium News, one of the very few still reliable independent sources of information (Volume 30, Number 202 —Tuesday, July 22, 2025). To a great extent the article dealt with the cataclysmic victory of Zohran Mamdani in the recent New York City Democratic Party mayoral primary, apparently as unexpected as the purported victory of the mythic David over the equally mythic Goliath over three millennia ago. The article brought to mind, at least for me, how deluded, confused and manipulated most of the United States’ electorate has always been and the panic which the awakening of even a portion of that electorate is generating among the corrupt elite who has maintained us politically and economically enslaved since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. A sign I for one view as positive.
To many of my friends, especially among well-educated and intelligent fundamentalist Christians (as well as to many among some of my Jewish friends), Mr. Mamdani poses an existential threat because he is a vocal critic of the abuses of what passes for capitalism (but is in reality kleptocracy) as well as because he vocally opposes the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people orchestrated by American and Israeli Zionists. He is thus, in their perception, a “communist” anti-Semite. Those “buzz” terms are essential in order to deflect from factual analysis of his beliefs, beliefs which coincide with the premises underlying the economic and civic philosophy of the “messiah” who my Christian friends claim to worship and adore. Ironic, but that pavlovian reaction had been carefully crafted using behaviorist psychology long before B.F. Skinner invented that art form. It is essential in order to secure the counterintuitive support of decent people for indecent realities and for policies that are clearly against their own interests, policies such as universal healthcare and universal education at all levels and a real social safety net, something artfully crafted by the kleptocrats who rule us.
The foregoing has led me to reflect on the strange distortion of terminology that the kleptocratic corporate media has imposed on us. For example: “antisemitism” now means opposition to mass murder, torture, rape as a political tool, ethnic cleansing, organized mass theft and genocide. And “communism”? Well, that now apparently means daring to support mercy, equity, meritocracy, economic justice and the golden rule, but especially, the economic doctrines espoused by that certain Palestinian who, two millennia ago, taught that hoarded wealth was the surest route to perdition. You may well have heard some of the sayings attributed to him in the Christian gospels, “that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a hoarder of wealth to enter into the kingdom of heaven” and promising that “the meek shall inherit the earth”. Evidently horrible ideas.
Mr. Lawrence´s article, for some reason, also made me reflect on another hysterical current campaign, one again attributable to the kleptocratic elites who control us, in this case, through their so called Democratic Party (the kleptocracy of course controls both the Democratic and Republican parties). In this ancillary campaign, massively hypocritical outrage is being expressed at the association of Jeffrey Epstein which took place prior to 2003[1] with Donald Trump, ignoring Mr. Epstein’s similar association with myriads of Democratic Party heroes. It seems designed specifically to distract from the real scandal associated with the late Mr. Epstein, that being his role as an agent of the Israeli Mossad in which he used and abused under age men and women to obtain compromising material on leaders in politics, industry, commerce, etc., all apparently in order to blackmail them into supporting Israeli goals, a role which led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and millions of innocent people in the Middle East and elsewhere through perpetual wars whose primary goal has been the implementation of the Zionist final solution to the Palestinian problem and the creation of the “Greater Israel” to which Zionists aspire. Indeed, the Democratic Party’s orchestrated outrage seems designed to deflect consideration of related, recently declassified information concerning probable Mossad involvement in the assassination of United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (ironically a Democratic Party hero) as well as concerning likely Mossad involvement with the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same campaign, of course, also deflects attention from the genocide that has been perpetrated on the Palestinian people by Israel during the past seventy-five years, genocide affected with the full cooperation of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany as well as with the tacit assistance of the Middle East dictatorships such countries established and maintained following the Second World War. You know, the war purportedly fought to eliminate the threats to human rights posed by the Nazis and their allies.
Not that Mr. Trump does not deserve serious criticism but, that the foregoing criticism is directed at his amorous misadventures during the past century rather than his current support for Zionist genocide or his increasingly incoherent international economic policies or the betrayal of his promises not to perpetuate the cycle of endless wars and foreign military interventions in which the United States has been engaged during the past century, is not only ludicrous, but is blatantly malevolent. Then again, the Democratic Party is at least as guilty as Mr. Trump with respect to much of the foregoing so, … birds of a feather, … in every respect.
Caveat:
I am not a fan of Mr. Trump, who, for personal reasons, I dislike.
I am not a believer in any organized religion and find the Abrahamic religions especially disturbing and, inter se, incoherent. Especially given that of the three Abrahamic branches, Islam is the most reviled while being the closest to both of the others. Indeed, it is the bridge between them.
I am bitterly opposed to most political parties, both in the United States and abroad, finding that they are the embodiment of the “factionalism” rather than statesmanship that, in the Federalist Papers, James Madison promised would not occur.
As a historian, I am not a respecter of the collection of fallacies peddled to all of us as history but designed, not to elucidate, but to keep us deluded.
As I write this I am completing my seventy-ninth year on our planet, most of them depressed by how consistently we devolve into the people we would least like to see staring back at us from our mirrors. Nonetheless, it seems that hope is not yet altogether extinguished, especially when people like Mr. Mamdani continue to appear from time to time, although admittedly, usually only briefly and all too often all to quickly converted into that against which they once railed.
But, back to Mr. Mamdani who has become the focus of hate, fear and despair from followers of Mr. Trump and especially from traditionalists in the Democratic Party. He is, at least for now, perhaps a sign that, paraphrasing the articulate albeit hypocritical Abraham Lincoln:
“Perhaps the kleptocracy cannot fool all of us all of the time.”
Fortunately for the kleptocracy, because he is a naturalized rather than native born United States citizen, Mr. Mamdani can never become president. But, then again, perhaps sometime soon, someone who shares his values will appear on the national stage and, unlike Mr. Trump, will not so quickly betray the principles he promised to sustain. _____
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/.
[1] Mr. Trump purportedly ended his fifteen-year friendship with Mr. Epstein that year, barring him from Mar o Lago because of an incident involving unwanted advances towards the fourteen-year-old daughter of another of Mr. Trump’s acquaintances.
On June 28, 2025, Christian Paz published an article on Vox.com entitled “The Democratic Party is ripe for a takeover”. Apparently, the primary victory of Zohran Mamdani is the catalyst, or the symptom, or something. Except for the author’s apparent Trump derangement syndrome in which the Democratic Party’s sole goal should be to confront Mr. Trump, a situation historically reminiscent of the old Whig party’s focus on opposing Andrew Jackson, the article posits interesting possibilities, although possibilities in which I don’t believe or rather, possibilities I don’t believe are likely.
It is a positive that at least in the city of New York so many voters are apparently rejecting the calcified and corrupt leadership of the Democratic Party, a leadership without real ideals other than the attainment and maintenance of power in order to syphon off the country’s wealth to fund perpetual wars in a quest for hegemony, albeit under the control of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). But the Democratic Party is so tainted by historical sins and so cancer ridden with corruption that a Tea Party-like revolution ought not to save it, even if it could. The dust bins of history have been all too empty for too much time. Rather, as an apparent majority of the United States electorate frequently acknowledges (although it never does anything about it), what real liberals and real progressives and real leftists trapped in the quicksand that characterizes the Democratic Party need is a new political party of their own, one independent from AIPAC, the Deep State, the billionaire class and the forever war quest for hegemony that characterizes both the Democratic Party and most of the GOP. A political party that really prioritizes the needs and aspirations of its members, the reality being that the United States political system is a factionalist collective rather than a grouping of altruistic political movements concerned with the common good and the general welfare.
The current Democratic Party, at least since 1992, has been reactive rather than proactive, with faux political goals and slogans echoed by a captive corporate press successfully enough to delude the more noble elements of its membership. It went from GOP lite in the Clinton era, to a political hodgepodge during the Obama era more thoroughly controlled by the Deep State (an informal coalition comprised of unelected bureaucrats and judges) than is the GOP, amazing as that may seem. And today, its principle goal is to oppose Donald Trump, no matter what he does, unless it aligns with AIPAC goals, but then again, AIPAC virtually owns both the Democratic and Republican parties. And if opposition to Mr. Trump by any means, legal or not, has become the Democratic Party’s fixation, it is failing in that goal. Failing dismally, and floundering.
That echoes what happened to the Whigs with respect to their hatred of Andrew Jackson during the mid-nineteenth century, when irate voters with specifically defined goals and ideals abandoned both the Whigs and the Democrats to found the Republican Party, although it too was eventually taken over by the values it was created to reject.
The GOP too, like the Andrew Jackson controlled Democratic Party of the same mid-nineteenth century, has shifted its axis and threatens to splinter into various segments: one deemed traditionalist which tends to echo the current Democratic Party’s devotion to the Deep State and opposition to Mr. Trump; a wing that seems to worship President Trump the way Democrats once worshipped President Jackson; and a libertarian wing that rejects forever wars, foreign intervention and the abandonment of the liberty purportedly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. That libertarian wing would also do well to strike out on its own as an independent political party guided by real ideals and real goals, while the traditionalist wing should just meld with the current leadership of the Democratic Party, a leadership seemingly in conflict with a substantial number of younger Democrats who, according to Mr. Paz (cool name, it means peace in Spanish) seem to be rebelling.
The electorate in general appears to be angry and dissatisfied but has been manipulated and confused by false news and the false narrative that masquerades as history so that its ability to make electoral decisions has become nonexistent. We have been led to confuse the essential political concepts of democracy, liberty and pluralism because confusing them was essential for the small elite who rule us to attain and maintain political and economic power, not quite bleeding us dry, rather, like intelligent vampires, they understand that their victims, those who provide their sustenance, must be maintained at least barely alive. Barely alive but without realizing their condition or who is to blame, being led to believe that they actually have a voice in their own affairs through a system that sort of smells like a meld of the adversative concepts of democracy, liberty and pluralism, a useful illusion. A system that argues that peace can only be attained through perpetual war and prosperity through the diversion of taxpayers assets to defense contractors and their cronies. That Christian values are now premised on acceptance of genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as capital punishment. Somewhere, George Orwell weeps.
Democracy is the rule of a majority (more than 50%), not a plurality, and it does not guarantee that decisions will be correct, or just or equitable. Liberty is a diametrically opposed concept that insists that no matter what a majority decides, or even what everybody else decides, every individual has sovereign and autonomous inherent rights that cannot be curtailed. And pluralism? That too is an antidemocratic concept but one involving the right of collectives to be different and to have a say in their affairs notwithstanding majoritarian opinions. All three of those contradictory concepts are desirable so constitutions, in part, or at least in theory, exist to reconcile and prioritize them into some sort of workable political and legal system. Unfortunately, like the quest for a unified field theory in physics, it has always been a utopian ideal distorted and manipulated by elites, except that physicists by and large tend to acknowledge that their goal has not been attained, while most of the electorate everywhere in our planet believes that the particular political systems through which they are ruled are really theirs and that their leaders have their best interests at heart, after all, in most countries, it was purportedly that electorate who selected them.
That is certainly true in the United States and has been true for most of its history. For most of its history, the United States political system has seemed like a duopoly (a two party dictatorship) but rather, has always been a vehicle for the concentration of wealth and power by an elite few, today, not even an elite few in the United States but sixteen families that effectively rule the world and are responsible for almost all of the world’s poverty and for all of the world’s war and for all of the world’s disparity.
With reference to the surprise victory of Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic Party’s recent New York City mayoral primary, many Democratic Party leaders as well as most people who identify with the GOP are suffering AIPAC sponsored apoplexy because Mr. Mamdani is a Muslim with parental roots in Africa and opposes Zionism and genocide and ethnic cleansing and champions the working class and the downtrodden masses described in Emma Lazarus’ poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty and thus, he must be a godless communist, although he identifies as a democratic socialist as did Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, and as does Noam Chomsky today. And the opposition of the moneyed classes to Mr. Mamdani led by AIPAC may well result in his defeat in the general election, whether by the opponents he just defeated running as independents or even by a Republican if the GOP proves Machiavellian enough to select a moderate candidate. And perhaps the politics as usual crowd in both the Democratic Party and the GOP who Mr. Mamdani’s success has mortified have “nothing to fear but fear itself”. But it seems to me a positive sign that in the city that boasts the largest Jewish population of any city in the world, a significant portion of that religious group (it’s not really an ethnicity and certainly not a race) may have taken up the antizionist slogan “not in our names” and rejected the distortion of Judaism marketed by AIPAC and its Israeli masters and voted their consciences and in favor of real classical Judaic values and traditions which, perhaps ironically, it is Mr. Mamdani who represents. Or perhaps it’s not ironic. The reality is that no religion is closer to real classical Judaism in all respects (except perhaps in the respect that it renders to that certain Jewish Nazarene), than is Islam.
Because of the foregoing, according to Mr. Paz and other optimists, it sort of smells a bit like the “times may be a’ changing”, at least in the desperate Democratic Party, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. _____
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/.
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. _____
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/.
For most of this millennium, candidates for the United States presidency have been absolute horrors, recognized as such by the majority of the voters, but, what passes for democracy in the United States is really a multilevel filtering system that leaves the candidate selection process virtually free of public participation, thus, only candidates acceptable to the oligarchy that actually rules us ever obtain the major party nominations essential for electoral participation. Indeed, the process has failed only three times during the past century, the election of Richard Millhouse Nixon in 1968, the election of James Earl Carter, Jr. in 1976, and the election of Donald John Trump in 2016. In each case, the furious traditional political apparatus quickly destroyed the successful candidates. The latter case is the most interesting however, especially, as it was undone by electoral machinations during the 2020 election, and because a possible replay is in process right now, and it is carefully tied to the concept of a “straw man”.
The concept of “straw men” and, in today’s egalitarian atmosphere, “straw women” is essential in today’s sociopolitical context where manipulation and hypocrisy are the rule and truth an irrelevancy to be avoided at all costs. In that context, the Democratic Party, a once essential ideologically-leftist political force (now bereft of any ideology except a quest for permanent dictatorial power dedicated to the profits possible in the antithesis of Kant’s “perpetual peace”), crafted the ultimate “straw” man”, a sort of golem, one essential to the modern ill-named Democratic Party (given its vacuity of principles). That is, given the reality that the principle candidates offered for the highest office by the Democratic Party generate little if any public support on their own and thus, it has become essential for that Deep State pillar to “create” a vilifiable figure against whom to run; a boogey man to frighten voters, one apparently as evil in every way as it is possible to portray so that the even more horrible candidates offered to the electorate by the Democratic Party seem the better option, a concept known as lesser evil politics. Of course, that also requires that other available options offered by non-traditional political parties and movements such as Jill Stein, Cornel West, PhD, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., etc., be hidden and silenced, but with a subservient mass media, that has never proven difficult.
Thus, enter “Donald John Trump”, a former Democrat and former best friend of the modern Democratic Party’s founders, Bill and Hillary Clinton, the “straw man” extraordinaire, particularly given the shade of his hair which so nearly matches that of Hillary. The perfect foil for first, Hillary Clinton and then, Joseph Robinette Biden, … at least, so it seemed. However, despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party and its puppet masters in the Deep State as well as of the mass media, things did not go according to script in 2016 and possibly, during 2020. 2024 remains to be seen. However, lessons were learned as a result of the 2016 fiasco, and with the elimination of anti-electoral fraud mechanisms through mass mailing of electoral ballots and their collection through indirect means without required verification, the ability of voters to make incorrect electoral decisions has been severely limited. Additionally, the criminalization of challenges to electoral results, regardless of how suspicious such results seemed, have made unacceptable results improbable.
The Democrat’s “straw man” for 2016, Donald Trump, proved enigmatic. He apparently started out with all the attributes Democrats had hoped for when Bill Clinton urged him to run for the presidency in opposition to his own wife. “The Donald” (as he likes to style himself) was and is an arrogant egocentric, egomaniac with a propensity for ludicrous superlatives for purposes of self-promotion, coupled with childish bullying tactics and a proclivity for name calling. Obviously, at least initially, he was the ideal opponent for the most polarizing and disliked political figure in United States at the time, Mrs. Clinton. Of course, he’d have to first defeat a host of Republicans eager to go head to head against Mrs. Clinton who, with respect to them, was bound to lose, so, the Donald had to be positioned, with the help of the docile mass media, for maximum exposure. After all, who, seeing the Donald’s ludicrous posturing, linguistic vulgarity and pomposity would not, in the end, consider Hillary the lesser evil and, holding their noses, covering their eyes, plugging their ears and covering their mouths, vote for her in preference to the Donald?
The first part of the plan worked, albeit perhaps too well. The Donald steamrolled his Republican opponents and became a darling of the populist segment of the Republican Party. A strange political bloc which had, in large part, rejected the corruption inherent in all major United States political institutions. It involved an informal hodgepodge of diverse political groupings ranging from libertarian to extreme conservative but, its largest segment involved a disorganized, leaderless group that described itself as the “Tea Party”. While not formally organized or led, people who self-identified as members of the Tea Party tended to vote in concert and, to the shocked surprise of the traditional segment of the GOP, they soon constituted a majority of the Republican Party’s electorate. The Democratic Party experienced a populist wave itself in the form of backers of purportedly independent and progressive Senator Bernie Sanders, but he quickly sold out his Sanderistas, leaving them sucking their thumbs and wondering what happened. That left only the Donald for those sick of traditional politics as usual, and lightning struck via the law of unintended consequences, leaving both Machiavellian Democrats and traditional Republicans flabbergasted.
The “Deep State” (an informal alliance of billionaires, intelligence agencies, the mass media and moles planted throughout the federal bureaucracy by the Obama administration), was especially flabbergasted but not totally unprepared. The Deep State, which had enjoyed an unbreakable grip on both major parties since the Clintons’ victory in 1992, was faced with the ultimate “loose cannon” in the Donald, a billionaire who was beholden to no one and whose megalomania knew no bounds. Indeed, the Donald seemed a sort of Mussolini who perceived that he was worthy of deification. Unfortunately for the Deep State, the Democratic Party and traditionalist Republicans, a major segment of the electorate agreed with him and still does, that despite the massive attacks to which he has been subjected since he was surprisingly elected president in 2016 and much more so since he refused to accept the obvious electoral manipulation and possible electoral fraud that led to his defeat in the 2020 re-run.
The Donald’s policies mainly dealt with treating symptoms fairly well, while ignoring underlying causes and his administration did unexpectedly well during its first three years, but John Fauci, MD, the federal Centers for Disease Control and the corporate media came to the Democratic Party’s rescue during the fourth year of the Trump administration, successfully leveraging a global virus into an international economic disaster and blaming it all on the hapless Donald. It took a major Deep State managed misinformation campaign, a fake foreign political interference scandal and a gullible public, especially among African Americans to undo the 2016 debacle, but, with the help of a mole ridden federal bureaucracy, by January 20, 2021, the Donald was out of the picture, at least temporarily.
But the Clintons had created a political version of the Frankenstein monster, a golem who went on to crush them, and seems ready to do so again despite the Deep State’s new massive campaign against him, one pitting the subverted United States Justice Department and Democratic Party controlled state and local chief legal officers and tame judges and juries bringing deeply flawed legal and criminal actions against him. The Donald though, like a good golem, just refuses to die.
So, what happens if he wins again? He’s been leading in most polls, most of the time?
Well, there is a significant possibility that he would be prevented from assuming his office by a real “insurrection”, you know, like the ones foreseen in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, not like the limited protests that took place on January 6, 2021 (and which seemed to have been infiltrated by Deep State agents whose goal was to use them as a means of preventing more meaningful protests from taking place, a sort of “straw protest” strategy). If that takes place, all bets are off. The Deep State, which would have been responsible for orchestrating the insurrection, would immediately label opponents to that de facto coup d’état as “insurrections and, since it controls the armed forces, intelligence agencies, police forces, prosecutorial agencies and the judiciary, as well as the mass media, the real insurrectionists would continue to govern, and those seeking to defend the Constitution would promptly be imprisoned or, perhaps, even disappeared (as happens in so many countries that experience United States intelligence agency orchestrated coups d’état). And then what?
Good question.
There are of course, other options. “Non-straw person” options. At least three. There is African American philosopher, Cornel West, PhD, a brilliant civic leader who, unfortunately is running a terrible campaign; there’s traditional Green Party candidate Jill Stein, a brilliant Jewish woman opposed to Israeli genocide and military opportunism in favor of liberal domestic programs; and, then there’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK, Jr.), a courageous liberal anticorruption crusader with a lifetime of real achievements but who, unfortunately, is tied to Israel because a Palestinian assassinated his father in 1968. Of the three, the Israeli backing Zionists who control so much of the mass media (not Jews, Zionists) and the political bribery process known as campaign contributions will assure that only pro-Israeli RFK, Jr., has any chance, although his opposition to other Deep State military projects like the Ukrainian adventure designed to overthrow Vladimir Putin in the Russian Federation and the series of provocations designed to incite a hot war between the United States (or its proxies) and the Peoples’ Republic of China over the Chinese province of Taiwan make him anathema to the billionaire class that rules us. However, RFK, Jr.’s poll numbers keep going up, so much so that now, not only the Democratic Party is “dead” set on preventing his candidacy (I use the term dead because, notwithstanding the assassination of his father and uncle, the Biden administration refuses to provide RFK, Jr., with secret service protection), but so is the Trump campaign and a magnificent recently released video narrated by Woody Harrelson presenting the real RFK, Jr., rather than the parody portrayed by the mass media, is making so many waves, that the oligarchs of the Internet have started a campaign to block its distribution (his campaign just filed a related law suit against META). A campaign identical to the one waged by them against Mr. Trump in 2020. The link to the video, as of right now, is https://www.kennedy24.com/who-is-bobby-video-donate?utm_campaign=elon_musk&utm_medium=email1&utm_source=joinkennedy. Who knows how long it will be permitted to function. Watch it if you can.
Anyway, as we see the United States government, along with that of the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia defend Israeli genocide with all the armaments they can supply, even diverting armaments from the Ukraine, making a sick mockery over the claims made to justify military adventurism since World War I, we can sit by, glued to our television screens (if we’re older) or to our computers and cell phones (if we’re younger), being spoon fed deceptive propaganda and assured that everything is and will continue to be just fine, as long as we vote the way we’re supposed to or even, if we don’t. It may not make a difference how we vote anymore.
So, how about those Yankees? Or Dodgers, or whatever will distract us from the issues that will mold our future and that of our children for generations to come.
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. 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 (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.
To an objective political observer, admittedly an endangered species as, among other things, he or she would need to have been either politically neutral or supportive of political movements with no chance of attaining or sharing in political power, January 6, 2021 was a reaction against a series of real insurrections that began more than four years earlier, insurrections which began during early November of 2016 when the leadership of the Democratic Party orchestrated a slow motion coup. A coup orchestrated in conjunction with most of the corporate media, the outgoing Obama administration, a large portion of the federal bureaucracy (especially the intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice), a significant portion of the judiciary at both state and federal levels and traditionalist members of the Republican Party (who vehemently opposed their party’s candidate). The insurrection, in large part involved a quest for autocratic power by political professionals tied to the military-industrial-intelligence complex but included many decent citizens who were terrified of the president-elect, both because of the successful media campaign against him as well as because of his “shoot-himself-in-the foot pomposity, belligerence and immaturity.
The insurrection was clear and obvious on January 20, 2017, inauguration day, when massive demonstrations against the new president were held in diverse parts of the country but especially in the capital, Washington, D.C., seeking to disorder the inauguration where the “protestors” swore to do everything in their power to disrupt the new administration, asserting that the new president was not their president. Unlike the events of January 6, 2021, those efforts were carefully coordinated, orchestrated, funded and organized with former attorney general Eric Holder as the point person. Mr. Holder had been charged by the outgoing president, Barak Obama, to lead a “civic” organization purportedly engaged in coordinating large scale, full time activities to “promote democracy”. As important as the Holder led organization was the attack on the new president launched by the Democratic Party in Congress and through the bureaucracy alleging that Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election had been due to illegal foreign interference by the Russian Federation. In the federal bureaucracy, the insurrection was stimulated through a series of continuing leaks of both classified information and rumors, most of which lacked serious merit. Finally, concurrently with the foregoing, an ongoing series of nationwide violent disturbances, including takeovers of government property were coordinated with the assistance of local elected officials, purportedly in protest of police abuse of power resulting in the deaths of a number of people who were apparently, but not always, involved in illegal activities.
Supporters of the newly elected president watched all of the foregoing in dismay, protesting the lack of related enforcement of applicable laws and, concurrently, the whole country was put through the spectacle in Congress and in the Justice Department referred to as Russiagate. The new president was accused of violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution because his long established businesses continued to operate and a number of his supporters were promptly indicted by a hostile Department of Justice as unregistered foreign agents under rules that apparently did not apply to his political opponents. They still don’t. Nor, apparently, does the emoluments clause.
During the 2020 electoral cycle, as evidenced in information that became public when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, all the major social media platforms, major portions of the federal bureaucracy (especially the intelligence agencies and Department of Justice), all conspired to obfuscate evidence unfavorable to the incumbent’s opponent in the presidential election and to promote disinformation unfavorable to the incumbent, as well as to deprive the incumbent of access to most major media, social as well as corporate. In addition, purportedly based on measures required to avoid the consequences of the Covid 19 pandemic, most states controlled by Democratic Party affiliated governors relaxed restrictions designed to avoid electoral fraud by expanding access to both receipt and return of electoral ballots through mass mailing without required voter requests, and enabling their return, not by voters but by third parties, something anathema worldwide in states that seek to promote electoral integrity and avoid a market in votes.
The result of the foregoing was that an important plurality of the electorate lost confidence in the electoral results, especially when a barrage of mail-in ballots, many harvested by third parties and subject to discrepancies involving dates and signature verification, arrived at the last instant changing the anticipated electoral results. The foregoing seemed especially egregious in elections in the State of Georgia were many residents of foreign states were encouraged to move their voting domicile to Georgia in order to permit them to vote there. While problematic the issue became acute when a runoff was required in elections to the Senate and it was suspected that voters who had already cast ballots in other states, moved their voting domicile and were allegedly permitted to vote in the second round of the elections, although they’d not been registered in the first round. Numerous complaints of voting irregularities and improprieties were lodged all over the country but, in stark contrast to the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, the vast majority of such complaints were dismissed on procedural grounds and few were in fact investigated, exacerbating the suspicion that the election had been “rigged”.
On January 6, 2021, Donald Trump was still president of the United States and called for massive but peaceful protests, much the way the Democratic Party did in 2017, but also, to assure that protests did not get out of line, he urged that federal troops be deployed to protect the Capitol, an offer rejected by the Democratic Party leaders who controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the United States infiltration of political and civic movements by local, state and federal agents has become normal and the groups that organized the proposed protests for January 6 were thoroughly infiltrated, apparently not only by agents charged with gathering intelligence, but by agents provocateur who apparently participated in encouraging some of the protesters to invade the Capitol grounds in order to delay certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election by the Democratic Party controlled Senate while a member of the Republican Party still served as that bodies presiding officer. Apparently, some hoped that the vice president would order an investigation of the claims of electoral fraud and delay the certification but in that, they were very mistaken. A small group broke off from the massive protests and apparently, in many cases with the assistance of Capitol police, invaded the Capitol seeking to occupy it. Something not common but not unheard of either in other protests during the past century. To many of them, the Capitol represented the most appropriate site to engage in political protest, but some of them crossed the line and engaged in ludicrous activities as though they were souvenir shopping or engaging in photo sessions. There was some violence but the only serious violence was that taken by federal agents and police against the trespassers, in one case, involving what appeared to be the type of abusive taking of life which had led to the prior year’s Black Lives Matter protests. It is interesting to reflect on the purported terror the trespassers caused among the members of Congress present, members from both parties, members despised by most of the electorate with an approval rating at the time of only 20%. That approval rating is now even lower. Perhaps they have good cause to fear the electorate which, however, while disapproving heartily of Congress as a whole, keeps reelecting the same people in their own districts.
The consequences of the protests and trespass on January 6, 2021 were completely different than the reactions to myriad protests during the prior four years, many of which involved violence and takeover of government property on a long term basis, but few if any charges or prosecutions. Instead of investigating the allegations of electoral irregularities which led to the protests concerning the results of the 2020 elections, many of the protestors as well as the trespassers were charged with serious crimes, with many prosecuted, found guilty and, if they dared to fight the charges, sentenced to lengthy periods of incarceration. The fact that they honestly believed they were performing their duty to protect the Constitution was, despite constitutional guarantees and especially the provisions of the Declaration of Independence, deemed irrelevant. As was the comparison with the activities of the four prior years.
The last three years have done nothing to diminish the absence of faith in the legitimacy of the electoral system. Indeed, flagrant attempts to defeat democratic (small “d”) support for the ex-president have increased, with the full weight of the judicial system at both the state and federal level, both the penal and civil systems, weaponized to prevent the former president, who leads all the presidential polls, from returning to power; to prevent him from even appearing on presidential ballots. That, of course, reinforces rather than diminishes the certainty among those who believe that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”, that they were right, and that those involved in the disturbances at the Capitol three years ago were brave patriots fighting to preserve, rather than to overthrow democracy.
Many believe (with cause) that the electoral systems in purported democracies all over the world are unreliable, and that includes many in the United States. They may well be right. They are probably right. Even if votes are actually counted accurately, as to which there is now serious doubt, manipulation by the corporate media, social media, the bureaucracy and the judicial system has become fairly obvious. That is a systemic problem in a system where selection of members of the judiciary is a thoroughly politicized process and where self-serving billionaires not only control all media, but own it, and have the technological tools to completely manipulate it.
The issue of a downward spiral involving geese and ganders is now very concerning. If Mr. Trump regains power, what happens next? The bureaucracy is so thoroughly entrenched, as is the judiciary, that attempts to reform them would require massive dismissals, something that the courts could easily obstruct for at least four years. Calling for a new constitutional convention may be an answer, but the specter of declaration of a state of insurrection, martial law and the emergence of a permanent, formal dictatorship seems all too likely. The former may be the case regardless of who wins given that another election deemed stolen may well lead to a real insurrection, and as Abraham Lincoln taught us, the only way to deal with real insurrections is through an autocratic dictatorship. Not that we’re all that far from such a situation now.
Donald Trump is not the cause of the foregoing problems, although he may well be a catalyst. It is hard to understand, given his personality and mannerisms, how so many voters support him, but they do. And, as in the case of so many who vote for Democratic Party candidates although they loath them and their policies, many Trump supporters support him, I strongly suspect, because they loath the party of perpetual war, ever increasing defense and intelligence budgets, foreign intervention and polarizing woke policies, the Democratic Party. And because in both cases, although other options exist (in this electoral cycle, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jill Stein and Cornel West come to mind), they are frozen out of the quest for power by the corporate media and the duopolous dictatorship under which we’ve lived all of our lives.
As an aside, one wonders how those who celebrate the 4th of July can feel so opposed to political insurrections by citizens who honestly believe in the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence celebrated on such date. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, believed that such reactions were healthy and ought to take place at least every twenty years. While to me that seems extreme, given our current polarization and the extent to which our civil and political liberties are being curtailed, I acknowledge that populist reactions from both the left and right wings of the political spectrum appear to have reached a boiling point. Given this sad state of affairs, one obvious to those of us who live abroad but apparently invisible to too many of those who live in the United States, the future certainly bodes ill for the United States, but as far as most of the world is concerned, that may not be a bad thing.
Things on which to reflect, seven plus years after the start of the successful Democratic Party insurrection of 2017. _______
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. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (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 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/.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 