Was this deal achieved because of Trump or despite of him?
If we are honest we don’t know the answer, and there is a third option too: maybe the Trump administration was irrelevant to this outcome.
It would be normal politics to claim credit for it. Trump is doing just that and as we are accustomed, he does so by trampling on political traditions (yes, today’s GOP is anti-tradition) with the secretary of state and the White House now used as Republican party election-props. We can only imagine the GOP’s uproar if Obama had dared using the People’s White House, paid for with citizen’s taxes, as the base for his re-election campaign. Two measures? for sure. But there are no consequences.
The Democrats express their disgust: “He thinks he can do this!”.
Nah, he doesn’t. He knows he can do this. American democratic institutions, tools and processes are maybe the weakest of any democracy. A President can ignore or manipulate all of them. Whether it’s the judicial, police, military, FBI, CIA, the News, the Postal service, the elections, education, environmental protection. Ignore them or fire the boss and put someone in who serves your every whimp. It’s as simple as that. Russia, China, North Korea, the Phillipines, these countries show you how to do it. It’s like a business. Ensure you have only followers around you and you have all the power.
Trump has shown to us that ‘The Greatest Democracy’ is an emperor without clothes, a paper house, a prop for a dictator. The democrats, the people, the institutions, all powerless against a president who only listens to himself and who shows respect for national strongmen like Putin, Bolsonaro and Xi and utter disdain for international institutions, like NATO and the UN. That Grand Old Party also finally threw its veil of respectability to show its complete dedication to Big Money, power and disdain for those not lucky enough to have been born in a rich family and not lucky enough to win in the game of business, and let’s not even start on racism.
Maybe the US, if they decide to be a democracy again (no Biden is just that veil again), can start to build their house with bricks, now that their paper democracy has been shown to be utterly futile.
