Who Are We and Who Does the World Think We Are

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I won the Election!
Official sources called this election differentlyNov 16, 2020

The above tweet was not issued after state after state reaffirmed the vote count, after court after court dismissed cases alleging significant voter fraud for lack of evidence, or as it was abundantly clear that there was no possible path to take President-Elect Joe Biden’s 5M+ popular votes, above those of Mr Trump, below the Electoral minimum required to win the presidency. This tweet from now gray-haired Donald Trump came almost two weeks after the election. 

Still, the President was instructing his General Services Administration to continue to withhold both funding and access to Biden’s transition team, encouraging maskless rallies outside the US Supreme Court and listening to his Secretary of State lie to the world saying that there would be a smooth transition into Trump’s second term. Still, Trump was firing senior administration officials, especially in the critical Department of Defense, to be replaced by lockstep loyalists.

The margin of Biden’s victory, the same Electoral margin that Trump described as a “landslide” when he took the presidency in 2016, was unassailable. With few very holdouts, virtually every country in the world had already sent congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on their election to the presidency and the vice-presidency, respectively. Twitter had to note on Trump’s blog above, politely, that “Official sources called the election differently.” Trump continued to pressure Republican legislatures and governors to replace the Electors apparently chosen by the voters with pro-Trump alternatives to reverse their votes… which, according to Trump without even dwindling possible evidence, were fraudulent.

When questioned by various judges, not only were Trump’s lawyers unable to produce any significant evidence of voter fraud, but when questioned as to whether or not Trump representatives were physically present at the relevant vote counts, these counsel were forced to admit they were. Top law firms, realizing that the President wanted them to lie to the courts, began withdrawing as presidential counsel with surprising uniformity. In many other, lesser democracies, all of these actions would be labeled for what they are: an attempted coup d’état. 

Was Donald Trump trying to take over the United States by circumventing the democratic process or simply delusional? Or, perhaps, was he using his battle as an excuse to increase his political fundraising (to run again in 2024) under the guise of winning the 2020 election through a court battle that would be determined in this favor, he hoped, by the Supreme Court? The fine print in his solicitation for court-challenge funding says rather plainly that some (perhaps all) of the money could be used for other political reasons.

The United States was already fighting to recapture the credibility it lost when Trump reneged on its treaty pledges, pulled out of multinational trade agreements in favor of attempted bilateral accords and ended its promised support of allies in battles against terrorist forces in critical regions. Simply, the world no longer looked upon the United States as a trust ally. After decades of progress in building international trust and alliances, one rogue president in one single term undid most of it. 

How exactly does a nation build alliances to protect against common global threats, participate in essential and predictable multinational trade agreements, and assemble other nations to act to create a global platform to solve common issues if other nations simply do not trust anything that country says or does? Are we no better than Russia and North Korea, willing to walk away from their treaties, able to embrace only those nations that are otherwise desperate to acquire their technology or military aid?

Our global political brand was tarnished the day Donald Trump was elected, and we have only slipped farther downhill during his actual term. It is entirely too risky and too expensive for the United States to attempt to go it alone, and there are some issues – pandemics and climate change at the top – that defy international boundaries anyway. If we are to move forward, we must understand that in an overconnected world based on international commerce, isolationism does not work, and bullying pretty guarantees that many will join in alliance against you in response.

“Nearly four years ago, immediately following the inauguration of a new American president, the German magazine Der Spiegel ran a cover illustrated with an image of Donald Trump holding a bloody knife in one hand, and Lady Liberty’s head in the other [pictured above]. A New Yorker cover from the same time also featured the statue, her torch snuffed.

“A few weeks before the 2020 elections, another prominent foreign publication, The Economist, wrote that over the past four years, President Trump has ‘repeatedly desecrated the values, principles and practices that made America a haven for its own people and a beacon to the world…. When countries that have fought alongside America look on his leadership, they struggle to recognise the place they admire. That matters.’

“A brand is essentially the manifestation of an entity’s values, how the world sees it, and how it sees itself. It may initially seem superficial, even glib, to reduce all the complex issues facing America and Americans today to a discussion about ‘brand.’ And yet companies are also complex organizations; far beyond the slick ads and products are things like accounting, supply chains, and HR departments. The brand, though, is ideally the north star that guides it all…

“The reality behind any brand, of course, is complex, sometimes messy, sometimes even ugly. The USA has always exhibited a divide between the myth and the reality: The promise of equal opportunity and the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, versus the evil of slavery and ongoing systemic racism, structural poverty, and the ever-widening gap of wealth inequality.

“Whether you’re a country or a carmaker, if you continue to fail to deliver on your brand promise, people’s trust will erode. If you continue to say one thing and do another, people’s trust will erode.

“The American promise of possibility is something everyone can agree on. Our differences lay in how to achieve it. Make America Great Again aims to get there by invoking the past, while scapegoating immigration, science, and anything else that may stand in the way. As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote ahead of the election in The Hollywood Reporter, ‘We aren’t selecting a president as much as we are proclaiming to ourselves and the rest of the world what America means: either we want to be a theme park version of Mayberry in the 1950s, or we want to be a vibrant and vigorous leader in democracy that our founders envisioned.’

“In an excerpt of his new memoir, former President Barack Obama writes that he’s not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America. That in an ever-increasingly interconnected world, facing challenges like climate change, a pandemic, mass migration and more, ‘we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed. … The jury’s still out.’” Jeff Beer writing for the November 16th FastCompany.com, part of multipart series on “USA: Can This Brand Be Saved?”

Donald Trump isn’t going away, even as he faces legal challenges for the foreseeable future. The GOP openly intends to use its election advantage in state legislatures to gerrymander themselves into hoped-for security. But their constituents are aging, dying off in many key swing states, and the younger generation, excluding those “left behind” and seemingly without direction who still flock to the false hope engendered in vapid populism, is deeply aligned in the opposite direction. They fear climate change, unaffordable housing, student debt and inferior or non-existent healthcare. They believe in diversity and tolerance. They do not understand how the United States, with 4% of the world’s population could possible have 20% of the world’s COVID infections. According to NBC News, 60% of voters 18-24 voted for Joe Biden.

Biden is going to have a rough four years as Republicans in Congress do everything in their power to prevent his judicial appointments and core platform policies from ever seeing the light of the day. But the movement of these young voters is not primarily a middle of the road old-line Dems. They did not live through the “red scare” or the Cold War. “Socialism” is not a pejorative; it is an alternative that will only grow in their eyes as artificial intelligence, and possibly future pandemics, take their jobs and opportunities away. They are mostly Bernie Sanders “progressives.” Ruth Bader Ginsberg was a hero to them. 

Just about everything Donald Trump has done in these past four years, supported by the GOP and punctuated by his parting slam at democracy, is the opposite of this new constituency’s most basic beliefs. If somehow the United States survives intact, as a warning to Trump populists, I suspect that this WWII quote, made after the Japanese Pearl Harbor bombing on December 7, 1941 attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, might be appropriate to describe these youngest voters: "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." 

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we cannot find a way for most Americans to get along, a workable and realistic basis for compromise, the accelerating irreconcilable differences will just rip this nation apart… hard and fast.