#Trumps cult animosity shows up professional#

The trend which began during the Obama presidency’s second term has now been consolidated. LOSS OF TRUST AND DECLINE OF DEMOCRACY All these have started eroding popular trust in institutions and democracy. To add to the woes, it has now become a huge business run by PR agencies. Even the electoral system has lost its sheen due to the frequent use of such devious means as gerrymandering, voter suppression, and restrictive voter ID laws. Add to this the crisis faced by public education and health, victims of disinvestment, and outright privatization. The Congress itself is dominated by big money and powerful interest groups. Truth-telling institutions like the Congress, media, judiciary, universities are also on the wane. Under Trump, timetested mechanisms like checks and balances and separation of power have all been reduced to mere caricature. With independence and integrity eroded, the once-respected bureaucracy has become the butt of ridicule and condemnation. The best brains in the service were shown the door, and many crucial positions were either kept vacant or stuffed with his own cronies.

#Trumps cult animosity shows up professional#

What Bannon meant was destroying all government agencies and regulations responsible for protecting the people and their democratic rights! The professional civil service was the first casualty. According to his former election strategist, Steve Bannon, ‘the goal of Trump administration is to deconstruct the administrative state’.

There is nothing surprising in this as his notion of governance is based on the flawed assumption that the country’s government itself is the problem.

INSTITUTIONAL DECAY Ever since becoming the president, Trump has set out to destroy, systematically, every democratic institution. For instance, Dan McAdams, professor of psychology at Northwestern University observed: “Donald Trump exists only in the present moment, a man without a future or a past who lacks any sense of a life narrative, story or ethics beyond winning at all costs.” Trumpism, a byproduct of this and the X factor behind many of the current American woes is defined by a push for a brand of masculine state, selfinterested pursuit of power, cronyism, nativist rhetoric, and personality cult. The country’s leading mental health experts are even skeptical about his mental stability. “A President with no shame backed by a party with no spine and a network with no integrity,” is how New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman described Trump and the circumstances in which he rose to power. For him nothing is true, but everything is possible. Lies, intimidation, misuse of power, and utter contempt for democratic norms are the myriad ways through which he functions. One can't help be ‘mortified by his absurd power’, as the poet C K Williams described an imaginary White House incumbent and that would be particularly apt for Trump. TRUMP AND HIS ISM The problem with Trump is an uncanny obsession with himself and his self-interest and he has no qualms in using any means at his disposal towards that end.

Today, therefore, the Americans find it easier to imagine the end of the American dream, than ‘The End of History’. As for Trump, he added more to them while allowing others to exacerbate. In fact, many of them have a long pedigree whose antecedents date back to the Nixon period.

The argument here is not that all the above issues erupted during the Trump presidency. His tenure has witnessed a historic economic collapse, deep socio-political animosity, police brutality, civil unrest, institutional collapse, gross inequality, a pandemic with over 2,30,000 people dead, and militarisation of everything from domestic to foreign policy. To paraphrase Woolf, US politics changed noticeably since January 2016 with Donald Trump becoming the president of the country. It is amazing that a century later Woolf’s observation finds resonance with contemporary American politics, though for different reasons. To her, that was the time when feminism, class, radicalism, and artistic modernism influenced British politics. “On or about December 1910, human character changed,” Virginia Woolf once observed.