It’s time to ‘Gird our Loins’ Here comes Trump 2.0 — By Don Rojas

By Don Rojas —

One week after America and the world was stunned by the outcome of the national elections on November 5th, 2024, we find ourselves debating, reflecting, agonizing and desperately seeking answers. As we continue to decipher the many complexities of the elections, we must also gird our loins and prepare for the enormous fights and challenges that lie ahead and contemplate the rise and political empowerment of an American oligarchy in the Trump 2.0 period.

One week on and the dangerous Trump 2025 agenda is coming into stark relief. Trump is executing swiftly on his “Promises made, promises kept” and is preparing to be a wannabe dictator come Jan. 20, 2025.

However, before we look more closely and “what is to be done” moving forward let’s engage in some analysis and put things into historical and structural perspectives. We are now at an inflection point, a moment of profound reckoning for this country and for the world.

So, we ask—How is it possible that tens of millions of people voted for a racist, misogynistic convicted criminal, a fraud and malignant narcissist, the greatest liar in US political history. We are referring to America’s #1 con artist, the same man who proved when he was president from 2016 to 2020 to be the most incompetent and inept president in the history of the United States.

This is a man with a disturbing king complex (as in monarch), a wannabe dictator consumed by vanity, vindictiveness and revenge, a mini man who surrounds himself with an army of rogues, criminals, bullies and MAGA maniacs; cultists who will do his bidding without questions or compunctions.

A combination of interconnected phenomena

In my view, Trump’s victory was caused by a combination of interconnected phenomena–racism, sexism, toxic masculinity, patriarchy along with the crushing inequities of the neoliberal economy and greediness of the oligarchy that keeps it alive. But unlike what many have claimed, it was not all about the economy. To be candid, tens of millions of white people, including 53% of white women, could not bring themselves to vote for a woman of color and so resorted to the false comfort of their white skin privileges.

Despite some glaring weaknesses, overall, Harris ran an excellent campaign with a little over 100 days to get her political and economic messages and her personal and professional history known to American voters.

Her major problem, however, was not in a lack of energy, discipline or her public persona but rather in her messaging, as dictated to her by the class of professional consultants who were latched onto the Democratic Party and the Harris/Walz campaign like the well-paid leeches they are and who refused to listen to sound advice from progressive political veterans like Bernie Sanders.

Instead, they turned their backs on the American working class while spending over a billion dollars on glitzy, celebrity-driven events, concerts, and faulty media ads, along with public fora featuring Republican, anti-Trumpers and conservative war hawks like Dick Cheney, not to mention their steadfast refusal to break with the fascist, apartheid regime in Israel that is engaged in ruthless campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine, Lebanon and other countries in the Middle East

In the seemingly endless angst expressed in recent days, there was much anguished talk about the “Latino Vote” breaking heavily for Trump. But the reality is there was no “Latino Vote.” The Latinos who voted for Trump were a geographically and culturally diverse group of immigrants from Latin America who decided to wrap their legitimate economic self-interests into an illegitimate Presidential candidate and into a racist MAGA. Large numbers of them come from macho cultures which believe that women don’t have the right or the capacity to rule nations.

To Black and Brown countries and communities in the Caribbean, Africa and the Americas, take note of the red flag now flying from the staff on Fort Trump.

The “browning” of America.

America was founded as a colonial settler state that has grown into an empire, with a white supremacist system resting on the foundational pillars of racial capitalism. Like empires before it in world history the American empire has several internal contradictions, forces that are opposed to each other, forces that are always in a dialectical tension. That ongoing struggle powers both progress and regress. Today, race and class are the fundamental contradictions of the US empire.

The steady “browning” of America is a demographic process that cannot be reversed by the extreme MAGA movement. By 2042, there will be more people of color than whites in the USA. Remember the Tea Party movement that mounted a series of racist protests against President Obama during his first year in office? That movement has evolved into the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement which is several times larger and more extreme.

Systemic white supremacy replaced chattel slavery with American apartheid, also known as “Jim Crow,” segregation which ascribed more democratic rights for white people only based upon the color of their skin.

Democratic strategist James Carville famously said back in the in the Bill Clinton era it’s the economy stupid. But in 2024, Donald trump’s first second and third issues has been immigration, not the economy. Not immigration from European countries but from black and brown countries in the Caribbean and Latin America.

In the months ahead we will confront a MAGA-consolidated trifecta of the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court all solidly in Republican conservative control, with no checks and balances exercised between the co-equal branches of government. Remember that Agenda 2025 calls for the destruction of the so-called “deep state”, i.e. the vast Federal bureaucracy, various government agencies and departments, including the Education Department, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Institute of Health (NIH), among others. The 2025 alternative is for the state to be run by an autocracy with total disregard for the rule of law and answerable to Trump, the authoritarian.

Power of the right-wing media eco-system

One key revelation from the election results is the power of the right-wing media eco-system with its digital products such as podcasts and social media at the center of this universe. This dominant influence of the right-wing digital media universe will require the strengthening of progressive, digital media as a countervailing force. Most voters, especially younger ones, got their news not from legacy media outlets like newspapers, magazines and television networks but form digital media which is prone to misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories.

So, what is the neoliberal economy that we speak of and how does it complement a neo-fascist and authoritarian political order? Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of our time. It shapes us in countless ways yet most of us struggle to articulate what it is. We have been persuaded to accept this extreme creed as a kind of natural law. Think tanks, corporations, the media, university departments and politicians of all persuasions are all deployed to promote the idea that people are consumers rather than citizens. This “invisible doctrine” subordinates democracy to the power of money and it traces a direct Line from neoliberalism to fascism, which preys on people’s hopelessness and desperation

Neoliberalism is the enemy of democracy. It has given rise to a billionaire class in America of less than 1000 people who control more than 60% of the wealth in a country of 335 million people. This class of US oligarchs are expecting two basic rewards from the Trump administration–tax cuts and deregulation with absolutely no restrictions on the operation of the so-called free market. Remember that the net worth of the world’s 10 richest people grew by $64 billion the day after the US election. Now under the Trump Administration their political power and influence will increase as their wealth continues to expand.

This tiny economic elite will have an outsized influence on all policy decisions moving forward without any accountability whatsoever to the voting public. Elon Musk almost single handedly funded an effort that costs more than $175 million in campaign funds for the swing state of Pennsylvania, $30 million of which were spent on a large direct mail program and another $22 million on digital advertising in right-wing social media. disinformation and conspiracy theories to confuse and bamboozle the American public Elon musk’s personal wealth increased by $26 billion just 24 hours after trump’s victory last Tuesday

Trump’s South African allies

Four of the most influential voices around Trump are 50-something white men with formative experiences of apartheid South Africa and this probably isn’t a coincidence. Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sachs, the venture capitalist who had become a fundraiser for Trump and troll of Ukraine left when he was aged 5 and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee.

Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons and Paul Ferber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living in Johannesburg has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the Q-Anon conspiracy that helped shape Trump’s MAGA movement.

Trump’s recent claim about American girls being raped, sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens preyed on white fears. The white South African nightmare in the 1980s hanging over everything was that one day black people would rise up and massacre whites. Like the US, South Africa was a violent society and became more violent in the 80s.

Musk warned in early 2023 about potential genocide of white people in South Africa. And it’s not just a fear of violence. It’s also a fear of replacement. Note that it’s not just JD Vance who obsesses over single women not having children. There’s also a Musk who has 12 children by at least three different ex wives and girlfriends and Donald Trump, of course, has five adult children from three marriages.

These men and their favorite media carnival barkers like Tucker Carlson and a cadre of fascists and Nazi supporting podcasters in the “manosphere” spend huge amounts of time hand wringing over Americans not having enough children, obsessing over low marriage and birth rates among American women and low testosterone rates among American men compounded by fears that brown and black people are out producing them.

There is an insane conspiracy theory that the Jews are conspiring to import millions of non-white immigrants to replace mostly whites but also non-white working-class Americans and especially voters that’s now common parlance inside the Republican Party

This helps to explain why white conservatives, and increasingly some of their Black and Latino followers, rail against illegal nonwhite immigration and make wild claims that immigrants from black and brown countries are a horde of extravagantly violent criminals, rapists and pet eating savages.

Oligarchs who steal public assets

In short, Republican conservativism has been thoroughly “Boerized” and is increasingly funded by and steeped in the ideological firmament of the white men and their adult children who lost control of South Africa to black Africans and now fear losing control of the US to black and brown folks. It is why halting the advance of multicultural democracy is such an imperative that

So how have these oligarchs become so fabulously rich almost overnight. One of the main reasons is that they have stolen public assets and manipulated financial markets to their advantage. The Republican Party now has morphed into a party of these oligarchs, the party of the 1% who have allied themselves with its one-time reality TV man who relished in telling his guests “You’re fired”.

Remember how Trump said during the campaign that what he admires most about Musk is that he can and does fire people who work for him willy nilly, always showing his people who is “the boss around here” the same way Trump treated people who worked for him when he was president from 2016 to 2020

One of the great ironies of the 2024 election is that apart from his ‘whiteness’ Trump has nothing in common with the vast majority of those who voted for him. He is a billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and who was bequeathed $400 million at birth by his Nazi sympathizer father. Unlike millions who voted for him, he has never had to worry about where the money was going to come from to pay the next month’s rent or put the next meal on the table for his family, never experienced the anxiety of being laid off from a job.

He is a crass neoliberal opportunist who always advances his own narcissistic agenda at the expense of the powerless. His first and last interest and concern was and always will be what is good for Trump, not for those who worship him.

Beware of the neoliberal trap

Many governments in black and brown countries of the Caribbean and the broader Americas have fallen into the “neoliberal trap” under pressure by the IMF and the World Bank to adopt the neoliberal economy with its crushing “conditionalities” as the path to regional social and economic development. It is incumbent upon these governments to create alternative, people-driven paths to development. Programs and initiatives based on Reparatory Justice for the crimes of slavery and colonialism can be a far more effective pathway to development than neoliberalism.

Contrary to what its proponents would argue the neoliberal economy is not an efficient system. It creates huge inequalities of wealth and income, which in turn, fosters widespread social instability, inhibits civic engagement and social cohesion and prevents the development of a popular democracy that works for all.

In their roles as global financial institutions, the IMF and World Bank are instrumental in promoting the neoliberal economic model across the globe. They act through financial assistance conditioned on economic reform, policy advising, and support for infrastructure development that enhances integration into the global capitalist economy.

While their efforts have been credited with stabilizing economies and encouraging development, the neoliberal policies they support have resulted in mixed impacts on social equity and national economic autonomy. Many argue for the need to tailor these conditions more closely to the unique economic and social contexts of recipient countries to ensure that they support sustainable development.

The debate over their role reflects broader tensions between global economic integration and local economic needs and priorities and this debate will intensify in the Trump 2.0 period.

The new Trump Administration’s foreign policy towards countries in the Caribbean and the Americas will be shepherded by Secretary of State-to-be Marco Rubio, a right-wing Republican Latino senator who, most likely, will pursue an aggressive and reactionary posture towards, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and other progressive countries in the region. Such a posture can have devastating impacts on the governments and economies of these countries.

Prominent Caribbean political economist, Dr. Michael Witter, believes that a wide range of issues emanating from Trump’s Agenda 2025 will have significant relevance for the Caribbean and the Americas. He argues that the broad outlines of the expected foreign policy of the Trump 2024 regime suggests that options for the Caribbean to diversify its international relations will be increasingly limited and costly, while the region can expect declining international cooperation to manage the impact of climate change.

Witter is also concerned about Trump’s anti-immigration policies. He says that Caribbean emigration has played a significant role in the economic development of the region since World War II. Emigration to the USA has been particularly important for the region’s economies since around 1960 as a way of shedding surplus labour in return for remittances.  This has been particularly true of the relatively large economies of the western Caribbean – Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

“Deportations will reduce the flow of remittances to the Caribbean and the wider Latin American region, while increasing the pressure for public welfare by the governments and private family support for deportees. This latter will contribute to more social and maybe security problems in the region”, he says.

Building a new America

In the weeks and months ahead we must begin the process of building a new America that can truly be a beacon of hope for all of humanity—a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious democracy governed by the principles of peace and social justice with an economy that works for the real producers of wealth, the working people, both those who were born here and those who came here as immigrants in search of a better life for themselves and their children.

We must move quickly to build a broad united front in the US and around the globe to fight against the new forms of imperialism and neoliberalism, with a strong anti-racist labor movement at the very center of this united front.

We must stop with the finger pointing and blame gaming. It is counterproductive and a waste of time. The struggles that lie ahead command our collective energy and commitment. We cannot afford to mourn. We must follow the imperative of organizing instead. We must strengthen our human solidarity and collaboration throughout the 50 states of the US and across the entire globe. Despair is not an option.

Let’s step up our efforts to support the practice of fearless, adversarial and investigative journalism that exposes and explains how the autocrats and the oligarchs will govern. Collectively, we must begin the process of building a new politics, one based on truly participatory democracy, an inspiring vision that could help bring the neoliberal era to an end.

So, what lies ahead is more Trump chaos and corruption, more economic inequality and uncertainty, more wealth disparities and an overall dismal prospect for people of color and for the working class in the United States.

The time has come for us to stop worshipping at the altar of profit and to stop accepting the inhumane notion that property rights trump human rights

So, moving forward into a new period of struggle we must be intentional in developing and executing on both anti-fascist and anti-neoliberal strategies and united fronts.

Beginning tomorrow, we all need to be steadfast watchdogs, barking loudly whenever and wherever we smell corruption, exploitation and oppression.

Featured image: Donald Trump (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)