Will Trump deliver?

Posted on

Trump is promising economic and social mayhem for the USA, and all those places it influences. Will he deliver?

This is the audio version:

And this is the transcript:


Will Trump deliver what he says he's going to do?

I ask the question because I'm truly frightened about the prospect that he might, and when considering it, I have a sort of feeling of inverted déjà vu.

For those people watching this video in the UK, many will recall that before the July general election this year, we all pondered about what Keir Starmer would do when he became Prime Minister, as he obviously was going to be.

There were those, like me, who said he had no idea what he was about, and he was probably therefore going to do nothing. And, in retrospect, we've been proved right.

There were others who said, “Wait and see, this man's a genius. He's just playing his cards close to his chest.” It was called the Ming vase strategy, holding Labour so close, and so carefully, and so tight that the true policy could not be revealed until Labour was in office, when we would discover the majesty of his vision.

That was nonsense.

And in an inverted sense, we have Trump. The one thing that we know about Trump is that he has promised vast ranges of policy.

He says he's going to deliver trade war.

He's going to impose tariffs.

He's going to attack the BRICS countries -  Brazil, Russia, India, China and all the other developing nations who are not in the OECD -  who don't want to use the dollar as the reserve currency for the world, and on them he's imposing a threat of a hundred per cent tariffs if they drop the dollar.

He's threatening 11 million or so Americans with deportation.

And he says he'll deploy the army within the USA, which is something that has not happened for a very long time in U.S. history for very good reasons, to make sure that those people are deported.

And he will put them in camps until they are sent out of the country.

All of this, and much more, including his policy on climate change, is truly terrifying. The consequences are almost unimaginable. The disruption will be enormous. The human anguish that he will unleash in all sorts of ways is almost unimaginable.

But he has promised this. And in that sense, he's the complete opposite of Keir Starmer.

The trouble is, Keir Starmer lived up to his promise. He promised nothing, and he's delivered nothing.

Trump is promising everything. My fear is he will try to deliver it.

So, will he? Might he be, and I use the word wisely, mad enough to try to do all of these things, quite possibly simultaneously?

And my answer is yes, I think that is truly what he wants to do. Why do I believe he'll do that? Because he does have people like Elon Musk on his team.

Remember, Musk bought Twitter, and within days he had sacked vast numbers of staff. He had gutted the organisation of the very essence of what it was in some ways, removing all the controls and checks and balances that made Twitter at least an approximately safe place in which to exchange opinion, and making it into something pretty noxious that most of us now want to avoid as a consequence.

He's got plenty of others from the same camp in his cabinet.

This is the richest, most remote from the population of the USA, Cabinet in the history of that country. It is made up very largely of billionaires - by definition, an extraordinarily unusual breed of people, almost out of touch with reality because their wealth makes them so.

And those billionaires believe they can do whatever they like, and they believe that people will jump when they tell them to. And that's because they've run private companies where that type of tyranny can take place.

In a private company, if the boss says jump, then you either have a choice of jumping or leaving. If that's the way in which the USA is going to be managed, people haven't got the choice of leaving. That's their home, the only place where they can be. And yet, they might be told to jump, and they might not want to jump in the way in which the US Cabinet, under Trump, wants them to jump. And that is what is so dangerous about this situation.

A government in a democracy - and one has to question whether the US now has a democracy, but let's presume it has - a government in a democracy has to represent all the people. It must take them with it to win popular support for the rule of law. If it doesn't, then the rule of law breaks down.

If Trump does what he says he plans to do, there is a very real risk that he will not take all the people with him. That there will be mass protest. And there is the risk that that mass protest will be violently suppressed, that there will be deaths, bluntly, as a consequence. After all, Trump in the past has talked about civil war and so have others in his administration, many of whom are also completely indifferent to the idea that a diverse nation is a strong nation and have said so, and yet, the USA. is an intensely diverse nation.

So, the threat that Trump might actually do what he's promised is, in this case, deeply worrying because mayhem would follow. So, whilst I prayed that Keir Starmer might actually have an idea what he was doing last June and might reveal a vision when he came into office, even though he didn't, in the case of Trump, my prayer is the opposite one. Trump has promised a great many things. And I pray he won't try to do them. My fear is, he will.


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