Daily Times

Trump has not only given shape to random fears. In the process, he has also created a wide constituency in electoral terms.

After George Bush left the White House and Barack Obama ushered in as the US president, most of the world breathed a sigh of relief. After the disaster in Iraq and all that flowed from it, the untested Obama was regarded as heralding a potential transition to a peaceful world. This got him the Nobel Peace Prize.

The question is not if Obama proved worthy of the Prize? The implication was that no one could be worse than Bush. In any case, Obama said the right things during his election campaign and was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq, which most US politicians, of all persuasions, had supported in a collective fit of jingoism.

But now that the US has Donald Trump as President, even Bush, at times, appears as a relatively moderate to some people. Bush embroiled the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and generally in the Middle East, where it is still stuck today.

Trump appears keen to take on the world for all its presumed acts of omission and commission towards the US.

Wherever he turns, he sees red, whether it is inside the country or the world at large. In the process, he tends to create a crisis out of any real or imagined situation. And this is necessary, from his point of view, because without a crisis situation, he won’t be the (super) president that he imagines himself to be.

Almost all his predecessors, Obama being the worst in Trump’s view, were either incompetent and/or negligent, thus, bringing the US to today’s sad state of affairs. The US supposedly lost its greatness and required Trump to restore it.

But it is a long haul if the imagined glory of the US is to be restored. In the meantime, Trump might whip up some national spectacle of glory. The recent military parade on July 4 to mark the US declaration of independence was a stark display of its military prowess. Even more importantly, it was a spectacle mounted by Trump with the presidential election in view next year. Generally, the US’s independence day is a public holiday where people do their own stuff to celebrate the occasion.

Such grand military parades are the stuff of dictatorial regimes like in North Korea or, in an earlier period, in Nazi Germany. No wonder, Trump expresses his admiration for North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong-un, who has unfettered control of his country. Wouldn’t Trump like to be the Kim Jung-un of the United States of America?

However, in the meantime, he needs to persuade his people that he would restore the US’s greatness. In articulating his country’s malaise, as he wants to be seen, he is giving words to the widespread anxiety and fear among many in the US that their country is somehow slipping back for a host of reasons and that they are losing control of their lives.

Such anxiety and fear are pervasive for a variety of reasons, such as loss of jobs from cheap exports from China and elsewhere, demographic changes in the US where its white population is likely to be outstripped by non-whites in the very near future, immigration, mainly from across the border through Mexico, the fear of Islamic terrorism and so on.

Trump has not only given some shape to these otherwise random fears. In the process, he has also created a wide constituency in electoral terms. He made much of Hillary Clinton’s statement during the election campaign that Trump’s supporters were somehow “deplorables.”

Even though Clinton might have meant by this a relatively small number of his supporters stirring up divisions in the country, it only seemed to add weight to Trump’s remarks about clearing the “swamp” of establishment elites, who looked down upon the common man.

In his book, ‘The People vs. Democracy,’ Yascha Mounk gives three reasons (as reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Adam Tooze) for the turn to authoritarianism in the US and elsewhere. These are the collapse of elite control over political media with the rise of the Internet; the failure of economic growth to distribute wealth and white anxiety about increasing diversity (demographic changes).

Internationally, Trump is aggressively trying to assert the US’s control of global affairs by downgrading established international multilateral institutions and even some of his allies. He seems to be pandering to his domestic constituency by loudly proclaiming a new virile America, determined to put its own national interests, as he sees them, ahead of anything else as part of the process to make the US great again.

He tends to create serious crises, as with North Korea and now Iran, and then seeks to show how he has somehow prevailed. Trump pronounced his diplomacy with North Korea a great success, his third meeting with Kim Jong-un, this time just across the armistice boundary, which ended the Korean War in 1953 (though it is technically not over as there is no peace treaty).

According to Trump, “There was a great conflict here prior to our [first] meeting in Singapore. Tremendous conflict and death all around them. And it’s now been extremely peaceful. It’s been a whole different world.”

But the truth is that he ratcheted up the Korean crisis with his threat of raining “fire and fury” on North Korea and calling its ruler, the Little Rocket Man, against Trump whose big rockets were capable of destroying North Korea. After expending his verbal fury, he is now claiming to have brought peace, even though nothing has been sorted out or solved.

Kim still did some missile tests, and the US is still committed to sanctions, more or less the way Trump is dealing with Iran, though in this case, there is still a heightened sense of crisis.

Whether his penchant to blow hot and cold is consolidating/expanding his domestic constituency is hard to say. There is no denying, though, that this could get out of control, with disastrous consequences all around.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia