Trump: Villain or hero?

JUDY V KUBLALSINGH

FOR FOUR years Donald Trump unapologetically attacked the lynchpins of US hegemony, earning him unprecedented hatred from the Washington establishment and the adoration of a growing populace resentful of unbridled economic and political power wielded by corrupt Washington officialdom.

Here are some reasons to hate or love Trump.

Nineteen years after the US deployed troops to Afghanistan, with troops in Iraq for 17 years and thousands deployed to dozens of countries, as Trump moved to remove US troops from Afghanistan and Syria, calling Syria a land of “sand and death,” official Washington was livid. The outrage bordered on hysteria, with the press core saying that Trump hated the military; no celebration as you would think, with the prospect of Americans out of harm’s way.

What mainstream media will never tell you is that nearly half of senior Defence Department officials are inextricably linked to military contracts. Weapons manufacturers pressured the Pentagon to override the decision of the president on Afghanistan. Trump’s calling out of the defence industry was unprecedented. “Top people at the Pentagon want to fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs, the planes, everything else…they’re happy.”

On the heels of Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s horrific eight-year assault on the Middle East causing a mass exodus of millions, a refugee crisis and the killing of millions, deep state warmongerers, plying for war in Kosovo and Serbia, the Middle East and North Africa, Syria and Afghanistan, were stopped in their tracks.

Trump would fight trade wars for America, reduce oppressive regulations to incentivise companies, focus on rebuilding the American manufacturing base, and making America great again, not regime change wars abroad. His forte is trade, business and manufacturing, not genocidal wars.

International and local mainstream media which were largely silent on these atrocities had their job to do from the moment Trump announced his candidacy. Trump comes from construction, the kind that changed the landscape of New York in the 80s and 90s. From part European lineage, also marrying outside, brash, tough-talking, outsider Trump was an immediate, dire threat to Washington swamp establishment. He called out the media, "the most dishonest people on the planet,” acknowledging upfront the concentrated capital in the hands of their corporations and elites to which Washington is begotten.

Trump’s challenge of US intelligence agencies was also unprecedented, exposing glaring chinks in FBI and CIA armour, showing up that compromised estate for what it is, begotten to big business and politicians.

He renegotiated global trade agreements (NAFTA, he rejected TPP Trans-Pacific Partnership) which favoured large global monopolists and which had over time debilitated the working and middle classes and US small and medium businesses. He negotiated a more equitable funding of NATO. He moved the US towards energy independence, towards mining energy at home rather than fighting energy wars abroad.

He was anti-Big Pharma, establishing laws to reduce pharmaceutical prices for US citizens. He tackled the opiate trade and entrenched criminal gangs, partly through border control. Under his direction, the Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed group of Kurdish and Arab fighters, “knocked the hell” out of the ISIS caliphate which once stretched across Iraq and Syria.

Obama boasted about giving out more food stamps than any other president in US history. Trump put able-bodied food stamp recipients back into the workforce, with nearly five million Americans coming off food stamps.

In less than two years in the Oval Office, Trump pushed for criminal justice reform, passing the First Step Act which targeted many shackled by the unfair and unjust sentencing laws which were instituted by the Bill Clinton 1994 Crime Bill.

Trump, not Obama, passed the most comprehensive criminal justice reform bill in decades despite Obama having Democratic control of all branches of government for his first two years. Ninety-one per cent of the total inmates released have been black Americans.

Trump appointed his presidential advisory board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), the backbone of educating blacks since the end of slavery, signed an executive order to push funding in programmes, passing HBCU legislation faster than any other president in American history, increasing annual budgets by 25 per cent.

Trump campaigned as the greatest jobs-creation president. Under Trump, African American unemployment reached its lowest rate in modern history. This was the case for almost all ethnic groups before covid19 shutdowns. This is factual and verifiable. As media outlets downplayed the effects of Trump’s economic policies, IRS tax filings won’t lie.

Opportunity zones established under the Trump administration in designated low-income areas drove more than $75 billion in private investment into disadvantaged communities in the two years after it was created.

Liberals in America have taken a harder and harder stand that conservatism translates to racism. None held Obama accountable for his then VP, Joe Biden, who participated in busing during school segregation and was one of the main advocates for the 1994 crime bill which decimated the black father, locking up young black men in droves for non-violent crimes for over 25 years.

Democrats have mastered the manipulation game to win votes. They have managed successfully to create a political correctness culture lumping racism, illegal immigration, minimum wage, and LGBTQ rights into one blended issue. It would be comical if not so devious. The party of slavery, Jim Crow, the 1994 Crime Bill and welfare dumping has branded itself as the voice of social and racial justice.

The wholesale and uncritical importation of anti-Trump rhetoric into global mainstream media and media columns and the uncritical acceptance of this rhetoric betray a woeful grasp of history and contemporary global hegemony. The current US proxy wars on the borders of Ukraine/Russia and the Israeli/Palestine front are just a prolongation of 400 years of this history.

Judy V Kublalsingh is an attorney