The US establishment and a Trump presidency

Jul 25, 2024·Alasdair Macleod

If elected President, Donald Trump promises to reverse US policy withdrawing from foreign affairs and dropping Biden’s climate change agenda. Expect the Deep State to do what it can to stop him.

Introduction

Middle America never bought into Biden’s policies. The human and financial cost of his attempt to defeat Russia in Ukraine is senseless to them. Most of them don’t even have passports and have never left the country. America is their world: why get involved beyond it? Why rack up enormous debt, when the money is better spent on the US’s creaking infrastructure?

Then there’s climate change and decarbonisation. America was built on oil, and Biden’s pledge to reduce greenhouse gases by 50% from 2005 levels in 2030 while plentiful American oil is left in the ground makes no sense to Hilary’s deplorables. Shrewdly, Trump says he will lift Biden’s bans on fracking and ensure that oil prices fall on this additional supply, reducing inflation and allowing interest rates to decline. Simplistic maybe, but the voter appeal is obvious.

In this respect, the selection of Kamala Harris as Biden’s Democratic Party successor has probably increased the likelihood that the swing states will go Republican, despite allegations of voter fraud. Harris is left wing, woke, and a gender and racial identity promoter. Attempts to capture the middle ground will not be credible. The choice for voters will be simple: do you want more wokism and higher taxes, or do you want to back away from them?

Harris’s selection has almost certainly improved Trump’s chances of winning the Presidency, to the dismay of the permanent establishment.

Trump’s foreign policies are a worry for Washington and Langley. These entrenched bureaucracies have had a long-standing agenda of controlling the world in US interests. They succeeded under Reagan’s Star Wars in bringing an end to the Soviet Union, opening the door to capitalism, and Mao’s death led to an even more dramatic conversion in China. But inevitably, reformed China and Russia would eventually grow to challenge America’s hegemony.

The Deep State failed to come to terms with this reality. The entire armaments industry, the Department of Defence, the dollar-based monetary system, and US global business interests all depend on America’s military and financial power over the rest of the world being maintained. But in perpetuating it, America has made many strategic errors fighting reality.

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