What I'm Reading: The Trump 2.0 Special Edition
November 8 : Five reads that piqued my interest this week
The end of liberalism?
Francis Fukuyama’s essay seeks to explain the radical reordering that just occured with the American people's decision to re-elect Donald Trump, despite knowing everything that they know about him.
This compelling thesis argues that Trump is a rejection of neo-liberalism, woke liberalism and possibly liberalism itself.
Confounding many, has been the broad swathes of the American public that Trump was able to attract, in what the 45th/47th President himself called a ‘realignment.’
Fukuyama paints most of this as a male-led rejection of a globalised order, that has rewarded women, but left men disenfranchised.
In a world in which most workers sat in front of a computer screen rather than lifted heavy objects off factory floors, women experienced a more equal footing. This transformed power within households and led to the perception of a seemingly constant celebration of female achievement.
The rise of these distorted understandings of liberalism drove a major shift in the social basis of political power. The working class felt that leftwing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right. Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals. The former chose to vote Republican.
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Prior to the election, critics including Kamala Harris accused Trump of being a fascist.
This was misguided insofar as he was not about to implement a totalitarian regime in the US. Rather, there would be a gradual decay of liberal institutions, much as occurred in Hungary after Viktor Orbán’s return to power in 2010.
This decay has already started, and Trump has done substantial damage. He has deepened an already substantial polarisation within society, and turned the US from a high-trust to a low-trust society; he has demonised the government and weakened belief that it represents the collective interests of Americans; he has coarsened political rhetoric and given permission for overt expressions of bigotry and misogyny; and he has convinced a majority of Republicans that his predecessor was an illegitimate president who stole the 2020 election.
‘Ice maiden’: Trump appoints first woman chief of staff
Trump is straight down to business.
Susie Wiles is going to be the first female White House Chief of Staff.
There were just a handful of people Trump praised in his victory speech when he made history with his landslide win, cementing his political resurrection and the ‘greatest comeback in American history.’
‘Susie likes to stay in the back, let me tell you,’ Trump told supporters, referring to Wiles’ penchant for staying behind the scenes.
‘We call her the ice maiden. Come here, Chris. Susie likes to stay in the background. She is not in the background.’
Donald Trump famously burnt through a litany of chief advisers, national security advisers, secretaries and so on during his first term.
But Wiles has lasted the distance. Her relationship with Trump dates back to 2015 when she helped him win the state of Florida, a state that Obama won twice but so too, has Trump.
Last week she gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal and said that she was of one many inputs into Trump’s thinking, but acknowledged that she was ‘top of the village.’
What is obvious is that Trump respects her judgement, steeliness, calmness and disciplined approach and that she pushes back against him.
At one point in 2016, Trump thought he should be doing better in Florida and chewed out Wiles, saying she was low energy and too quiet. Wiles pushed back, telling Trump that if he wanted someone to set their hair on fire, she wasn’t the person for the job. But if he wanted to win Florida, she said, then he should let her do her job.
Trump won Florida with 49 per cent of the vote in 2016, reclaiming for the GOP a state Barack Obama won twice. Trump’s win there was called early, portending his shocking win nationally. Four years later he won Florida by a bigger margin, 51 per cent of the vote, with Wiles again running his campaign there, though he lost his re-election bid.
Those who have worked with her say she is unflappable behind her trademark mirrored sunglasses, avoids the limelight and is quick to give her team credit for her stack of victories.
‘Every campaign she’s been involved with, she’s been a calming presence,’ said Ballard. ‘He saw in her the DNA of a winner.’
Some of Wiles’s friends at the time gave her grief for joining up with Trump, she said, but Wiles thought he brought something unique.
She had previously shepherded GOP Senator Rick Scott to victory, winning the governor’s office in Florida in 2010 as well as coming to the rescue of Ron DeSantis’s struggling 2018 campaign for governor and netting him a narrow win.
DeSantis and his wife, Casey, later split with Wiles in part over what they felt was her getting too much of the credit, according to Florida political insiders, many of whom took Wiles’s side.
Trump trounced DeSantis and others in this year’s Republican presidential primary, and many saw the former president’s savaging personal attacks against DeSantis as fueled by knowledge only an insider would know.
Elon joins Trump’s call with Zelensky
One of the biggest and immediate losers is expected to be Ukraine, given Trump’s vow to end the war in his first day — a comment widely interpreted to mean forcing Ukraine into agreeing a ceasefire and giving up territory to Russia.
Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelensky held a call, also on the line was SpaceX, Tesla and X owner as well as Trump’s financial backer, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — the ‘star’ Trump praised in his victory speech.
The call between Trump and Zelensky lasted around 25 minutes, according to the sources who were briefed on its details.
After Zelensky congratulated Trump, the president-elect said he will support Ukraine, but didn't go into details.
Three sources briefed on the call all told Axios that Zelensky felt the call went well and that it did not increase his anxiety about Trump's victory. One source said it ‘didn't leave Zelensky with a feeling of despair.’
Musk also weighed in during the call to say he will continue supporting Ukraine through his Starlink satellites, the sources said. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Reality check: Much went unsaid, and much remains unknown. Trump and Zelensky did not delve into policies like Trump's purported plan to end the war, or the prospect of further US aid, the sources said.
Trump’s legal cases to be dropped
The legal prosecutions of Trump over his false claim that the 2020 election result was stolen from him, and his electoral interference efforts are all likely to be dropped, now he has been re-elected.
The DOJ’s thinking on Trump’s federal cases flows from a 2000 memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which affirmed a Watergate-era conclusion that a prosecution of a sitting president would ‘unduly interfere in a direct or formal sense with the conduct of the presidency.’
‘In light of the effect that an indictment would have on the operations of the executive branch, “an impeachment proceeding is the only appropriate way to deal with a President while in office,”’ the memo concluded, quoting the earlier conclusion.
The practical reality of Trump’s electoral victory Tuesday is that he is unlikely ever to face legal consequences in relation to the serious federal criminal charges brought against him by career Justice Department prosecutors working with career FBI agents.
Some commentators have said the charges were arguably more serious than the conduct in the Watergate scandal that cost Richard Nixon the presidency and left him banished from politics.
In the case accusing Trump of conspiring to illegally overturn the 2020 election, he is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.
In the classified documents case, he is charged with willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, lying to investigators and withholding documents in a federal investigation.
\The idea that you could win an election to avoid justice just cuts so deeply against my expectations for our legal system and for our politics too,’ said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney and NBC News contributor. ‘But the voters have spoken, and that’s where we are.’
Where did we go so wrong?
One of the better soul-searching pieces from the Democratic side is from Jamie Metzl.
There are lots of places to start, but one is with Joe Biden. I love and respect President Biden. He is my former boss. I was Deputy Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when then Senator Biden was Chairman and Tony Blinken was Staff Director.
I am deeply aligned with him on issues of policy and in my conception of America’s best values. I believe he’s done an excellent job as president, even if he could and should have done better on border issues and Afghanistan. But like with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a single bad decision can sometimes outweigh a lifetime of spectacular service.
One year ago, when President Biden was 80 and the oldest serving President in US history, he had a choice.
The right choice was to announce that his space cowboy mission had been completed, the madness of the Trump administration had been put to rest, and it was time to pass the torch to a new generation.
Had he done that, he would have been a hero, even today. Instead, and for what may have seemed at the time like an investment in continuity, he made the opposite choice. That choice prevented the type of competitive Democratic primary that was so greatly needed to let our best possible candidates emerge, including, potentially, Kamala Harris.
And that’s my list for this week.
Please do send me anything that’s caught your eye, I enjoy knowing what you’ve been reading.
Some of you have started to offer me copies of your books etc. Please email me at latika@latikambourke.com for a forwarding address for hard copies.
The overreaction to Trump is beyond my wildest fears of far left extremism. It is totally unhinged. No one, not one person, voted against “liberalism”. I.E a liberal democracy. They voted against the policies and division of their “liberal” politicians.
Huge difference.