By Jorge Elbaum on August 19, 2022
The gradual decline of unilateralism, generated by the emergence of a new center of power in Eurasia, explains the growing deterioration of political institutionality within the United States. One of its domestic expressions is the judicialization of electoral competition, aimed at discrediting the person who currently expresses the decomposition of public debate and the proliferation of hate speeches: former President Donald Trump.
The other, of an international nature, motivates the repeated use of international disputes to reposition Democratic and/or Republican candidates as leaders capable of preventing the restructuring of the world in a multipolar format.
The raid carried out last Tuesday by the FBI at Trump’s residence is inscribed in the logic that articulates the domestic and the global. The search executed by the FBI was carried out three months before the mid-term elections, in the period in which the internal elections are held to choose the candidates of each of the States.
The former president described the search promoted by the Department of Justice as typical of a banana country and associated it with the recent victory of his candidates in different internal votes within the Republican Party. According to the latest Harvard Harris Poll, Trump’s approval rating is the highest among all U.S. politicians.
The progressive judicialization of politics in that country does not seem to be a last-minute innovation. Strategic weakness, measured in economic and geopolitical terms, ended up impacting at the domestic level. Its resolution coincides, chronologically, with the assumption by the tripod of factual power -the military-industrial complex, Wall Street and transnationals- that Beijing was beginning to challenge Washington’s pretended supremacy.
In 2016, when the propaganda campaign against China was deepened by misrepresenting the situation of the Uyghur minority, the contradictions within the neoliberal bipartisanship also deepened: that year, two weeks before the elections, the then FBI Director James Comey decided to reopen an investigation against Hillary Clinton, a scenario that led to Trump’s triumph.
The former president, who had launched his election campaign through the pseudo-realist miniseries “The Apprentice”, is currently defending himself against three different charges. The one that prompted the FBI raid is related to the theft of classified documents transferred to his Mar-a-Lago residence
without authorization from the Department of Justice, after leaving the White House on January 20, 2021.
The second file – initially handled by a bipartisan House of Representatives Investigative Committee – relates to his role in the attempted coup d’état on January 6, when the Electoral Committee was about to elect Biden as its first president.
According to the investigation by journalist Maggie Haberman, published in her book “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America”, the former president made an arbitrary, irresponsible and illegal use of official documents during his entire term: he pulverized reports, incinerated records, disposed of documentary material that the regulations require to be archived and moved several boxes of papers, without authorization, to his private home in Florida.
The House Oversight Committee, which formed a committee to investigate the thefts chaired by Democratic representative Carolyn Maloney, considered that “Trump put our security at risk by mishandling classified information”.
Broken political system
Haberman recalls in her investigation that in 1978 the Presidential Records regulations were passed, stipulating federal government ownership of the documents. The raid was authorized by a court after the discovery of missing documents that could compromise Trump in the case of the failed “putsch” of January 6. After the FBI search, in which 15 boxes of documents were recovered, Senator Marco Rubio – one of the ultra-right-wingers working for Trump’s return in 2024 – considered that the “assault can only take place in broken and Third World countries”.
The imputation that however may have greater consequences for the political future of the bipartisan system is the one that focuses on the events on Capitol Hill, their background and ramifications. Last Tuesday, the weekly New Yorker published a preview of a publication by Peter Baker and Susan Glaser, “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” which details events leading up to the January 6 coup d’état.
One of the most significant – Baker and Glaser recount – refers to 2017, when Trump demands his generals to hold a military parade “grander than the one offered by Emmanuel Macron on the occasion of commemorating July 14, the day of the Taking of the Bastille.” “Trump returned to Washington determined to have his generals organize for him the largest and grandest military parade in history for the US Independence Day,” on July 4, 2018.
In front of his subordinates, the then-president further demanded that no wounded war veterans or soldiers in wheelchairs, as he had spotted in Paris, should be on display at such a future military parade. “That would not look good,” said Trump in front of Marine Corps General John Kelly, then Chief of Staff to the President. Outraged, Kelly replied that veterans who return with wounds from combat are the heroes of any country.
“There is only one group of people in our society who are more heroic than they are, and they are buried at Arlington.” According to Baker and Glaser, the general made – with that comment – an explicit reference to his son Robert, killed in Afghanistan. “I don’t want maimed,” Trump repeated. “They don’t look good to me.”
The dispute with Kelly – who lasted a little more than a year in office – was repeated in discussions with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chiefs, who advised criteria discordant with Trump’s whims: “Damn generals, why can’t they be like German generals?” the president vociferated. “What generals?” asked Kelly. “The German generals in World War II,” Trump replied. “You know they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost succeeded?” slipped in Kelly. “No, no, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the businessman-turned-prime minister closed the discussion.
Another of the officers whose testimony may be taken into account in the commission investigating the coup attempt in January is that of Mark Milley, who was appointed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the last year and a half of the Trump administration. In June 2020, after the protests over the murder of George Floyd and the eruption of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, Trump demanded that the armed forces repress the mobilizations led by the African-American associations.
“We look weak,” he told the military, asking them to apply the Insurrection Act of 1807 that authorized them to engage in internal repression. According to Milley, he demanded 10,000 soldiers in the streets and that the command be occupied directly by the chief of staff. The resistance of the military angered the President, who did not hesitate to address Milley: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs, or something?” he asked.
The third group of imputations against Trump refers to accusations about his tax manipulations. On August 10, he had to appear before the New York attorney general’s office in the Manhattan district to be questioned under oath about criminal business practices. He was sworn in and testified by U.S. Attorney Letitia James, a member of the African-American community. Trump refused to answer the prosecutor’s questions and accused James of being a racist.
The emboldening of the American supremacist sectors, promoted by the assault on the Capitol, has had immediate consequences: it allowed conservative sectors to enable the end of abortion rights, promoted a series of new state regulations aimed at limiting the vote of all those who are not white, and put on the agenda the conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement.
Puerto Rican novelist Giannina Braschi wrote more than a decade ago: “I hate neatness because it sounds like denial (…) But I like the obvious. I like to see things as they are… I have nothing against the smell of rottenness, but a lot against those who hide the rottenness of the United States”. In 2011 Braschi published “United States of Banana”.
Source: Alainet