Vendetta and Mayhem

One of the major motives of Trump’s activities is the desire for revenge – and not in the cold intellectual manipulative way of a Iago but in the petty and spiteful way of a spoiled brat. He wishes to punish those whom he sees as against him. He is psychologically incapable of bearing criticism, disagreement and opposition. He wishes to get even for losing office in 2020; he is obsessed by a hatred for Biden because Biden beat him in that year’s election. He is hostile to other countries whose policies, standards and goals obstruct his desire for the US to dictate terms and rule the roost. His reflex is to bully, browbeat, hurt: witness his attacks on Columbia and Harvard universities, his animadversions on the EU, his attempted public humiliation of the presidents of Ukraine and South Africa to show who’s boss, and now – the latest – move is his executive order to the US Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Biden and his staff for allegedly illegal actions taken in office. (Pam Bondi, a Scientology-friendly former lobbyist who supported Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent and served on his defence legal team during his impeachment process, has so far chiefly graced her office by ordering that the Department of Justice no longer use paper straws, removing any references to Trump and associates in the Epstein files, shutting down several investigations, and ordering that the death penalty be sought in the Luigi Mangioni case. With this track record since her appointment to office in February she can be expected to comply with Trump’s directive.)

Having already sought to remove Biden’s security clearance and to have a number of the former President’s actions investigated, Trump has now dramatically escalated to the claim that Biden was gaga in office and that his staffers illegally enacted policy without the authority to do so. The degree of pathology in the claim is evidenced by Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ claim that Biden died in 2020 and was replaced by a robot clone.

It is might seem hard to decide whether Trump is himself gaga – the irrationality of his pronouncements, their exaggerated absurdity, the degree of his megalomania, the blindness to large-scale problematic consequences as with his tariffs policies, all point to a considerable degree of derangement – or whether the fury of his dislikes is not without calculation. In terms of the chilling aims of the far-right movement that has spewed Trump (and his imitators elsewhere) onto the world stage, the idea of causing disruption and distraction at muzzle-velocity speed in order to upend the existing order and replace it with the far-right conception of utopia – via. unbridled power and rampant profiteering for those in control – Trump’s actions make a mad sense.

But both these things are, almost certainly, true. The people and ideas behind Trump, from Curtis Yarvin and Steve Bannon to Project 2025, have long publicly explained their strategy – the ‘flood the zone’ wrecking-ball strategy – and not bothered to conceal their aims. To have up front a loose canon blasting off in all directions, a bull crashing about in the china shop, a mean-minded self-obsessed ignoramus bloviating and issuing ill-thought if not outright crazy directives seemingly at random, is the perfect tool for their purposes. Take for example the violent swerves on tariffs: they are claimed by Trump to be deal-making moves, negotiating ploys, but the claim does not stand up given that they are too obviously punitive and coercive rather than strategic in form, and have already had dire consequences for the US itself – among other things destroying trust in the US and redirecting trade away from it to the benefit of China, to say nothing of raising costs for ordinary Americans (those costs that Trump claimed he would ‘reduce on day one’ when campaigning). It is par for the course with the far-right that it is not the people they seek to serve, but themselves by a destructive grab for power; so the fact that the cost of wrecking things at home and abroad is borne by ordinary folk does not trouble them one bit.

The cost to ordinary folk is not just money and living standards. Far greater a cost is the loss of liberties and rights that far-right dispensations have, of necessity, to impose in order to keep power once they have got it. That is why we have to resist, each by whatever legal and peaceful means is individually possible, all by whatever legal and peaceful means is collectively possible, what they are doing.