Once burned, twice shy the Americans are not and the result of the Nov. 5, 2024 US election betrays the sordid fact that despite four bloody years under Donald Trump, voters have never learned that Trump is a lemon, a liability at the White House since he cannot even read a balance sheet and he’s been idolizing tyrants and dictators while working to eviscerate the very administrative state that keeps the US federal government working.
America is not the democratic state it purports to be since voters do not directly elect the President; the anachronistic detritus of slavery, the Electoral College, subverts the very idea of the power of individual voters as the real power in choosing national leaders. Democracy is about the rule of the majority, but the Electoral College is an obsolete tool to elect real leaders backed by a majority of voters. Donald Trump was beaten by more than 3 million votes by Hillary Clinton in 2016 but the Electoral College crowned him president rule. It was good that Joe Biden beat him by more than 7.5 million votes in 2020 and hauled more Electoral College votes to trounce Trump.
Critics have scored the US Supreme Court (SC) for deciding in Citizens United in 2010 that corporations are like any other citizen and have the right to spend their filthy lucre in support of candidates. This decision allowed billionaires to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to boost candidates who, in turn, would protect their interests. That is the clear and present danger that this distorted SC decision has created to favor Republicans, who have backers like Leonard Leo, the biggest lobbyist who has kneecapped liberals from joining the high court.
In this election, millionaires like Miriam Adelson, who supports incorporating the West Bank into Israel and stealing the land of Palestinians, Elon Musk, the bogus genius who continues to believe that he can create a synthetic atmosphere to prevent humans from dying on Mars, also wants to kill regulatory bodies, eviscerate federal agencies and like Betsy de Vos, dismantle the education department. On top of his evil plans for “government efficiency,” Musk is viscerally anti-labor, a racist who got the bug in his DNA from his childhood in South Africa. Musk worked illegally in the US while on a student visa and, despite his championing entrepreneurship, had to rely on $465 million subsidy from Barack Obama to keep his Tesla afloat. Musk became a US citizen only in 2002 and being foreign-born, he is barred from running for the US presidency.
The billions poured into the Trump campaign that funded the payoffs for voters and also financed the disinformation campaign waged by white supremacist backers of the Trump cult. After the wasted years under Trump, who enlarged the US debt by $7.5 trillion and profited from deals with sheiks and princes, and compromised national security by shooting the breeze with Russians and telling them about the use of laptop bombs to hit commercial jets, he also bragged about stationing nuke subs off North Korea, which the Russians passed on to Pyongyang. He tried to weaken NATO, cut a deal to abandon Afghanistan by letting thousands of Taliban fighters out of prisons and mischaracterized Covid 19 as common flu, and presided over the deaths of thousands of Americans. With his Project 2025, Trump will engage in deporting 15 million immigrants (not including Melania), worsening the labor problem in the US as cheap labor will be shipped out, with Americans unlikely to take jobs that pay less. Heritage Foundation also wants the federal bureaucracy to be lean while the private sector can do as it pleases, with nary a control on its baser instincts.
Heartbroken by the election result, Robert Reich wrote in his newsletter on Nov. 6, 2024 that “our first responsibility is to protect all those who are in harm’s way. We will do that by resisting Trump’s attempts to suppress women’s freedoms. We will fight for the rights of women and girls to determine when and whether they have children. No one will force a woman to give birth. We will block Trump’s cruel efforts at mass deportation. We will fight to give sanctuary to productive, law-abiding members of our communities, including young people who arrived here as babies or children. We will not allow mass arrests and mass detention of anyone in America. We will not permit families to be separated. We will not allow the military to be used to intimidate and subjugate anyone in this country.”
On Nov. 1, 2024, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz warned that Trump is offering a vision of crony rentier capitalism. In catering to wishes for tax cuts and less regulation, he would make most Americans’ lives poorer, harder, and shorter. It is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously. Some of the Trump campaign’s more absurd promises come from Musk, who claims to know how to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. He is ignorant of both economics and politics. He wants to cut one-third of all expenditures – eight times more than what the General Accountability Office (GAO) estimates to constitute waste or fraud. He will cut all “discretionary” spending, including on defense, health, education, and the Departments of Treasury and Commerce, as well as slashing Social Security, Medicare, and other well-established, overwhelmingly popular programs. Trump already had four years to dismantle the “administrative state” when he was president, and he didn’t deliver. Now he is making populist promises that would add to the deficit – more than $7.5 trillion in the coming decade.
