Cultural symbols (sacred, mundane, profane) are at the heart not only of so-called traditional societies but of so-called complex modern and postmodern societies like that of the United States as the recent symbolic theatrics of American president Donald Trump point up. Trump and his ilk, including many White Nationalist American worshipping so-called Christians, like their women domestic and domesticated and their men leaders of men and women. They like their dudes to be dudes (John Waynes, Rambo’s, feudal knights) and their dudettes to be dudettes (helpmeets, damsels in distress) and they justify and rationalise it all by claiming and maintaining that such social and cultural constructions are god given and hence universal. The fetishisation of culture.
These socially and culturally constructed gender meanings along with political, economic, and geographic meanings and realities were evident in Trump’s and his mini-him J.D. Vance’s treatment of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelinsky at an oval office meeting before cameras at the White House last week. Trump and Vance gave their target demographic what they wanted, namely a manly man warrior king, the messiah of a resurgent American nation, berating the president of a foreign nation at war as if he were a supplicant child of a less powerful feudal estate of less status, a vassal. But then that is exactly what Zelinsky is. He is a vassal of a weaker feudal estate relative to the “beneficent" United States and its "gift giving” king and messiah, Donnie Trump.
As such this event points up the fact that power, the thing that really makes the world go round is often if not always at the heart of cultural meanings and theatrics. Trump was not only showing his groupies or devotees that he is indeed their king and messiah by standing up, as they see it, for poor downtrodden America and for poor downtrodden Americans, something, one presumes, his target audience found the spectacle reassuring even if it was, from a more objective point of view, rather like a school yard bully confronting the weaker members of school society but then Trump and Vance do seem to like their Social Darwinism and eugenics. He was also showing Zelinsky American power, showing the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, that things had perhaps changed, showing America’s once close allies that things had likely changed, and preparing the American people for likely changes in US foreign policy. This last seems to indicate that even the Trumpies, those elites at the top of the Tangholio cult, are, at the moment, not fully ready to jettison support of the Ukraine before preparing the ground with a narrative in which the president of the Ukraine is a bad, bad man who has no respect for the United States or its king-messiah, Donald Trump. For as demagogues and conmen like Trump have learned over the years the more manichean, good versus bad, a story is the more likely it is to sell to the lowest common denominator masses.
Given this it is important to recognise that Drumpf is not interested in real negotiations, in real compromises. He is interested in expressing, symbolically, his power and expressing America’s power. He wants thing his way. It is thus a waste of time trying to negotiate anything with a brick wall, which the self-righteous Trump is. He simply wants vassals to give obeisance to him and to the power of the United States, a superpower, a superempire. The stuff about fentanyl in relation to Canada is simply a hyperbolised smoke screen, a smoke screen to cover up what Trump and his minions are actually doing. Those who have to deal with this adolescent still in diapers and this now adolescent government in diapers must, therefore, look for other options. Canada, for instance, should probably consider reintegrating more strongly into the Commonwealth once again and increasing its political, economic, and cultural ties with Europe, including one of Canada’s mothers, Britain. After all, it is clear that you can no longer trust a nation like the United States that treats its friends, like Canada which has an economy that is legally and officially integrated with that of the US, like shit.
Another recent instance of the symbolics of Trumpian politics involves tariffs. Trump, of course, needs to show the faithful that he is actually trying to do what he told them he would do, make American great again. He is thus creating a narrative in which he is using tariffs to make American great again by bringing manufacturing back to the US and he has been able to achieve some successes in this thanks to supplicant sycophantic economic elites who have agreed to build new facilities in Texas though some might argue that such facilities are more needed in other places such as Ohio. He is trying to use tariffs in the same way the US did in the mid and late 19th century and in much of the twentieth century, to bring manufacturing to the US by making the prices of goods made elsewhere more expensive.
Whether this tariff plan will work in the long run is an open question. One has to ask whether tariffs on China and Mexico (those on Canada are another matter and are closely tied to power and the long standing American manifest destiny urge to annex that country) will work. Are these tariffs likely to make shipping goods from China or Mexico to the US so much more costly that cost conscious Americans looking for the cheapest prices and the best deal likely to switch to American goods even if they are American nationalists?
A fundamental problem here, of course, is that American wages are higher than those of China and Mexico something that will make American produced goods more expensive than goods produced in those countries prior to tariffs even with the additional shipping costs. One could, I suppose, cut American wages making them lower if not as low as China and Mexico hoping this will bring down the cost of goods (but will American economic elites want to cut their salaries and benefits too in order to accomplish this?). The problem will still remain, however. How will the American working class, poor, and middle class pay for the maintenance of their beloved and holy consumer lifestyles? Credit? I am sure American usurers are salivating over that scenario.
Of course, Trump could do other things such as raise taxes on corporations and wealthy American to subsidise the brave new American world he hopes to ressurect. He is, however, unlikely to do this given that that would be akin to foxes guarding the hen house. He has already said he wants to cut taxes and the reason he thinks he can (a rationalisation and justification of his class and status position) do this is because of downsizing at Trump, Inc., also known as the US government, and increased tariff revenues coming into Trump, Inc. Time, as always, will tell.
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