What Donald Trump Has Shown Us All

It was a fluke, really – a case of the enemy having their guard down that enabled Donald J. Trump to navigate his way to presidential victory in 2016 to begin with.  Personally, I chalk it up to overconfidence on the part of the establishment: A smug certainty that such an entrenched, politically-connected public figure as former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could easily wipe an outspoken billionaire-entrepreneur-turned-TV-personality off the map without much rigging of the system.

But of course, they were wrong.

A recent short article by Thomas DiLorenzo spells out what happened next as well or better than I ever could, so I will quote an excerpt here to illustrate my next points.  It begins with statements made at Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017:

“We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American people.”

“[A] small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

“’Washington flourished — but the people did not share in its wealth.”

“The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.”

“He said this surrounded by the entire Washington establishment on inauguration day.  That is why they spent every waking hour of every day for the past four years spewing vitriolic hate at Trump and his supporters.  It doesn’t matter if he did not achieve the transfer of power to the people; merely saying such a thing in public was enough to ignite the everlasting hatred of the hordes of serpentine peons and psychopaths who populate the Washington swamp.”

The political parasites, for the first time since time out of mind, were finally saddled with a president who was not one of them, who wasn’t playing on their team, who had run for office in the first place – not for his own self-emolument or to advance the interests of banking cartels and foreign governments – but to “save America.”

Hurl as many rocks at that as you will from a purist libertarian standpoint. Harp on about Trump’s obvious ego and narcissism. It still does not erase the fact that he was the first American president since at least JFK (and we know what happened to him) to come to the Oval Office deciding not to play ball with the status-quo.  Trump was and is no large-scale liberator, no voluntaryist, no market anarchist, no Ron Paul on a dose of loud and defiant steroids. But observe the uproar – how riotous and relentless his enemies became at even the statist modicum of reform measures Trump introduced and pushed: America First. No more kowtowing to communist China.  No more footing of NATO’s military bills.  Reduced participation in UN-led international commitments, organizations, and programs.  Scrapping of the Paris Climate Accord, and anti-US trade deals. An end to war against petroleum fuels. Repeal of reams of domestic business regulations.  Tax cuts.  Other than the ludicrous bump-stock ban, support for gun rights, and the NRA.  A drawdown of troops overseas, and foreign conflict.  The makings of a possible peace deal with North Korea.

So what did they do about it – those who saw Donald Trump from the very get-go as a completely unacceptable threat to their decades-long domination of everyday Americans, and the globe at large?

Whether, not unlike 9/11, you believe that COVID-19 was a coincidence, or a “plandemic,” this much remains certain: In classic Rahm Emanuel fashion (“Never let a good crisis go to waste”), it was used a vehicle to further lambast Trump, to destroy the economy his policies helped make possible, and rig the 2020 election in a way that they wished they’d had the foresight to do in 2016. Be damned with their alleged sacred cow, “Democracy,” to hell with “Of the People, By the People, For the People”…and let’s not even dignify the asinine concept of “consent of the governed.” The establishment was absolutely determined to reinstall one of their own in the person of Joe Biden – who for sheer evil and insidiousness remains unmatched since at least the time of LBJ — another time, incidentally, of tumult and division.  Although I would argue that in 2021, the stakes are much higher, and far more serious.

So what did Donald Trump show us? That his quest was a quixotic, even naïve one:  the supposition that one man of honest intent – even if that man accedes to the highest political position on earth – can affect meaningful, lasting positive change, and not be destroyed by the system in the process.  The Nancy Pelosis, the Chuck Schumers, the Adam Schiffs, are far too numerous in the “Swamp” to ever be rooted out.  The Swamp is, after all, of them; intrinsic to the nature of government itself. You might as well try to remove the salt from the oceans, or the oxygen from the atmosphere.  Perhaps Trump realizes this now.

But what of the millions and millions of everday Americans out there, paying 40% of everything they earn for the rest of their lives to a cabal that regulates them to the gills, tracks and spies on them, lies to them routinely, sells them out to foreign interests, wages war against free speech and gun ownership – and then on top of it all, rigs any election result that even slightly threatens this arrangement? For those who may have previously felt that having a mere attempt at changing their rulers every couple of years made all the rest of everything else tolerable to some degree – what now?

Many, no doubt, are thinking violent revolution is inevitable – since, obviously, even peaceful facsimiles of revolution have been rendered impossible. The system is now openly, unabashedly nothing but a sham.  I can’t predict what the future holds, except to say that it isn’t looking good.  Not from any rational metric. And it only promises to get worse.  Rapidly, even.

The American people could, on the other hand, abandon the idea of government altogetherThat would “drain the Swamp.”  It would deprive those sadistic parasites of their power and influence once and for all.  We’d be free.  Finally.  After thousands of years of playing these stupid, pointless games over and over and over again, ad infinitum.

But I’ve never been real good at holding my breath anyway.

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Alex R. Knight III is originally from Groveland, Massachusetts, where he grew up listening to rock and roll, reading J.R.R. Tolkien, and the comic books of the 1970s.  He today lives in rural southern Vermont where he welds, plays guitar, paints abstracts, reads avidly, and writes.  He is the author of the short fiction collection, Tales From Dark 7in addition to the novels The Morris Roomand Empty World.  And, he is a Voluntaryist. Visit his MeWe group here.