Turkeys Voting For Christmas Or For Thanksgiving 🪶 Last Thoughts On Us Presidential Election

By AM Tuesday, November 5, 2024

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Barry Gilheany ✍ Contemporary commentators wonder and future historians will undoubtedly reflect on and analyse why a convicted felon with two Senate impeachments behind him as well as numerous, well-founded allegations and one conviction on the facts of sexually predatory behaviour and multiple allegations of business fraud stands on the threshold of a second Presidential term. 

Why Donald J. Trump could be moving into the White House in January 2025 for the second time rather than time spent in a penitentiary clad in an orange jumpsuit to match the colour of his fake hair perturbs most of humanity outside the sadly not inconsiderable amount of devotees of his MAGA cult and of cognate movements around the world.

Many words have been written about Trump and why he is a living symbol of an America on the edge of the precipice. I am not going to add to this literature on this occasion. Instead, I make a case by case, demographic by demographic, as to why US electors who are by no means of the MAGA ideal type and who are dissatisfied with the incumbent administration, should resist the attractions of voting for this particular “anti-system” candidate.

African Americans

To those young, particularly male African Americans who may have felt more dollars in their pockets under Trump 1.0 and who may be attracted to what they might see as the thrusting, hustling entrepreneurship of the Trump brand, think again. Quite apart from the fraudulence of the Trump brand, Trump 2.0 means more arbitrary mass stopping and detention of young Black men. This is the man who said that the Central Park Five should have been executed for the horrific rape of which they were later exonerated. This is the man who sought to turn the National Guard on the BLM protests in the wave of the murder of George Floyd. This is the man who whose “law and order” dictum is “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” – the notorious invocation of a slogan of a racist City mayor of the 1960s. If you are not aware of this history, then your elders most certainly are and whose wise counsel you should follow. Oh, and Donald and his father, Fred Trump, were found guilty of discrimination by New York City Council in the early 1970s for refusing to rent out apartments in their properties to African Americans.

Jews

Everyone of whatever religious, tribal or ideological hue of American Jewry should remember Trump’s praise for the “very fine people” amongst the torchlit Unite the Right protestors at Charlottesville in the summer of 2017 who marched to the echo of “Jews Will Not Replace Us”.

To Zionist or pro-Israel Jews attracted by the Trump’s bromance with his Middle Eastern alter ego Benjamin Netanyahu, remember that his support for Israel is purely transactional and is motivated by the need to placate his Evangelical Christian constituency whose support for the settling of all Jews in Israel is predicated on the End Times or Second Messiah scenario when all Jews will be converted to Christianity after the outworkings of Armageddon. That, by the way, is the provenance and antisemitic resonance of the Chosen People trope of “Christian Zionism.” In any case, Netanyahu needs to be reined in for everyone’s sake.

Muslims/Arabs

Yes, we all understand the anger, distress and frustration of Arabs and other groups associated with Islam at the support, if not outright acquiescence of the outgoing administration in which the Democrat candidate has served as Vice President in Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza in the aftermath of the 7 October pogrom. But for Michigan Arab Americans who have declared for Trump, have you forgotten Trump’s call in 2015 for “a total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and his attempt to impose a travel ban from seven Muslim majority countries in the first hundred days of Trump 1.0. It is to be hoped that a Harris administration will take a much tougher line on Israel’s conduct of its wars; what is certain is that Trump will give Netanyahu, like Putin, carte blanche to do “what the hell he likes.”

Hispanics

Like African Americans you may feel Trump 2.0 may improve your economic prospects and you probably feel resentment at the dumping of migrants who have entered at the southern frontier of the US in your communities without support facilities for them and the possible competition for housing, low paid jobs and other municipal services. Such frustrations have arisen in the UK and Ireland due to ill thought-out asylum and immigration policies. But Trump’s racist rants about “Mexicans bringing rapists and drugs” to the US, Haitians eating pets in Middle America, “shithole countries” and the Puerto Rican “floating garbage” joke at last week’s Nuremberg Rally at Madison Square did not come from nowhere. They come from a deep well of “othering” of differing skin pigmentations, different languages and cultures including religious ones that are deeply but invisibly baked into the dark nativist side of the American psyche which does at key inflection points in American history burst out into the all too visible shadow. Now is such a moment. The Christian nationalism which is the largest animating ideology behind Trumps would deliver the polar opposite to the harmonious melting point of nationalities story which the propagators of the American Dream tell.

Undecideds

Just like the Arab/Muslim demographic, you feel rightfully angry and distressed by yet another iteration of Israel First or Israel Right or Wrong by the Biden/Harris administration in relation to the ongoing cataclysm in Gaza extending to Lebanon. As stated before, it is to be hoped that a Harris administration will continue to a much more meaningful degree the process of shifting the dial on Israel/Palestine that has begun tentatively under the outgoing Presidency. There is precisely zilch possibility under Trump 2.0. To those of you who may be thinking of voting for one of the alternative candidates; the Libertarian candidate, Professor Cornell West and Dr Jill Stein of the Greens; that is a wasted vote, and the US and the rest of the world cannot afford the luxury of such indulgence. Remember Ralph Nader in 2000 and how his poll tilted the balance in favour of George W Bush and all the global consequences of his election. Oh, and Dr Stein’s credibility should be spent in the eyes of any progressive with her record of giving cover to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and to Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities in Syria including his repeated use of sarin gas and other banned chemical weapons ordinance on civilian populations.

Women

The sight of so many women devotees at the rallies of a man who drips in boorish, misogynist, and sexist jibes and whose well attested predatory behaviour to women is profoundly depressing. But women have always played a role in right wing nationalist and nativist movements and antifeminist figures such as Phyllis Schlafly have carved out niches while also enjoying the freedom from the domestic drudgery they would enforce on other women; Ms Schlafly was a successful lawyer who campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. Right-wing women have aways been active in pro-life and pro-family movements. However, the Selzer opinion poll in Iowa at the weekend putting Harris ahead by three points in a traditionally Republican state is the potential game changer and decider. Because if this is the pattern in other Republican states then it would deem to indicate that women are voting en masse for Harris and against Trump over reproductive rights. They could well have been galvanised, soccer moms, homemakers, and high earning professionals alike, by the Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe v Wade.

So, this election is to an extent never before seen in most democracies being contested over women’s bodies and their right to their autonomy over them. Abortion is never usually a wedge issue in general elections and usually that is healthy because of the visceral cultural divide around it. But on this occasion because of its symbolism for all the other cultural cleavages that Trump has weaponised, it is on this hill that the fight may well have to be won and lost on.

The Rest

To those who would welcome the end of the oft recited “US led rules based international order” that a Trump victory, be careful what you wish for. Yes, the rules-based order lies in reputational tatters for many because of the failure of the USA, UK, and other Western democratic allies of Israel to rein in the Netananayu’s government retaliatory war of destruction in Gaza and now Lebanon. (It could be argued that it was tarnished beyond repair by President Obama’s failure to enforce his” red lines” over the illegal use of chemical weapons by President Assad in the Syrian Civil war and before that the failure to stop the Rwandan and Darfur genocides). But plausible scenarios in an America First could be US withdrawal from NATO or at least of any logistical support for Ukraine in its existential struggle against Putin’s war of aggression; the division of the world into autarkic trading blocs as a result of sky high American tariffs on imported goods from China and other “enemies” without and a Hobbesian global economic and security order underpinned not by the US dollar but by a block chain cryptocurrency payment system constructed by the BRICS alliance and other contra-liberal democratic states. Wither then respect for international boundaries, the territorial integrity of states, for the prevention of genocide and protection of human rights within otherwise sovereign states. The EU would then have to step up to the plate in establishing the Euro as the financial pillar of what remains of the association of democratic states and greater military integration. What then for post-Brexit Britain? What then even for Ireland?

Vote Kamala.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.