Trump’s victory: “Manipulable, Aggrieved, Gullible, Ahistorical”

On the day after the election half — but only half — of Americans woke up sombre, stunned, sickened, and rightly very scared

On Tuesday Rudy Giuliani, disgraced and debarred lawyer and felonious election denier, arrived to cast his vote in Florida in a car which he had been ordered by a court to surrender. This was part of the $148 million settlement for defaming two poll workers from Georgia after the 2020 election, in furtherance of the lie that the election was stolen. Also voting in Florida on Tuesday was convicted felon Donald Trump — despite the fact that over a million ‘regular’ voters are banned in that state because… they are felons.

Those episodes epitomise the smug lawlessness of the elite which is gripping the United States. To list only the most egregious of his many crimes (for none of which is he now likely to be held accountable), Trump tried to overturn the last election with deadly violence; he boasts of his many sexual assaults and serial rapes; he is avowedly and proudly supremacist, racist and misogynist; he stashed classified national security documents in his bathroom on leaving office in 2021 and refused to give them back when ordered to do so; he called for the assassination of his (political) opponents and of members of the press; his staggering number of lies and unpredictability made his last administration chaotic as well as dangerous.

A majority of voters willingly elected a fascist dictator. It was no ‘fluke’. Now, his lawlessness may give way to laws simply being changed to allow massive oppression of the populace and destruction of the Earth.

Maybe MAGA should stand for Manipulable, Aggrieved, Gullible, Ahistorical. Grievances are real. An acquisitive, hierarchical, and coercive society like that of the capitalist United States ensures that large sections of the population (working people, non-whites, women and LGBTQ+ folks) are systematically oppressed. But even in those groups many nevertheless chose their own oppression and disease anyway (junk science merchant Robert F Kennedy is likely to hold a key post in the next administration’s public health plans).

Why did they vote in such decisively large numbers for Trump?

Three factors account for this week’s outcome. The first is that Trump’s character, conduct and transgressions — from ‘indelicacies’ to proven criminality — simply don’t matter to his cult’s members. Facts don’t matter. The electorate seems to have got fixated on lies they were told about the economy, which in the end was ‘stronger’ under the Biden administration than it was under Trump’s. But spend an hour or two with cult members’ main sources of disinformation and you’ll discover that a sizeable minority of voters has a frighteningly slim grasp of reality. Worse, they tend to see and believe what they want to see and believe. Trump’s unsuitability to run a roadside lemonade stand — let alone have his hands on the nuclear codes of the most powerful and influential country in the world — long ago became irrelevant to his supporters. They dismiss his crimes and failings as too far in the past to worry about, or as ‘communist propaganda’. Reason doesn’t play much of a part in the MAGA approach to ‘analysing’ the (political) scene; from the point of view of clinical psychology, confirmation bias is much more powerful.

Secondly, the propaganda which is fed to both sides of the post-truth US electorate is based, not on substance, but on personalities and their positioning. For instance, to level the charge at Trump or his party that they are likely to further hasten climate collapse, does not provoke the response that there are evidence and facts against which such a plan of his can be judged, but that the critic’s identity or position on the political spectrum make their opinions invalid. The criticisms are deemed invalid because the critic is a political enemy, a communist, a ‘bad person’, or someone that should be dismissed with a silly epithet — ideally of a crude or foul nature. For most commentators or allies, that suffices. Argument over. Issues as such are rarely discussed; “they’re the enemy”, “she’s an extremist”, “he served our country in the military”, “she lives in a ‘transgender neighbourhood’” is all you will hear. Similarly, the reasons why someone would advocate peace in Gaza and the West bank and not want to see (southern) Lebanon reduced (further) to rubble doesn’t seem to grab anyone’s attention. The fact that an opponent sided with Palestinian protesters is what counts — their label-able stance is as simple and important as the colour of their hair.

Thirdly, the official ‘opposition’ to the MAGA movement, the Democratic party, acted consistently as if it were oblivious to political science, and the history of fascism. Indeed, they admit no substantial or effective critique of the way capitalist, male-led polities work. For the candidates and vast majority of commentators this all looked to be little more than the usual game of tennis: “First it’s my turn to run an oppressive and destructive system in the interests of the elite. Then it’s your turn”. None of the many correspondents, pundits, commentators, observers — even celebrities — on the so-called mainstream left stopped even once in the last couple of years, took a deep breath and (eyebrows and voices slightly raised) asked, “Just a minute. How the hell did we get here?! Why didn’t Biden’s Attorney General (Merrick Garland) assemble and press the charges against Trump as soon as he could after his crimes were committed? And why didn’t the Department of Justice foil the evasive actions by the judges to whose courts the cases were assigned? Why did Biden insist on a ‘softly softly’ approach to the MAGA cult? And why did Harris have Polyanna with her at every rally”? Indeed, post-election ‘analysis’ almost immediately began to argue about ways to present a “better and more convincing message” to the voters, one which “addresses the grievances” mentioned above… time for fresh balls from the freezer, change ends and continue the match.

Anarchists put no stock in elections, politicians and party systems. Yet in the US, the Democrats stand for ostensibly (but not really) honest and ‘neutral’ ways to support the status quo with all its inequalities, belligerence and destruction. ‘Old style’ Republicans pretend to stand for those things too; but their platform is really a way to aggressively and unapologetically promote selfishness and destruction. And over the past eight years the MAGA cult has developed an unstoppable promotion of white supremacy, misogyny and anti-intellectual denial of the sciences, in particular climate collapse and decaying public health.

Few outside the genuine radical left appear to have even begun to understand the threats of fascism in the United States and its rise globally. Now that Trump can deploy Project 2025 with absolute immunity and without the opponents in the Republican party who were there last time to temper at least some of his excesses, things look very grim indeed.

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Louis Further

(Reprinted from Freedom News)