Framing Trump as Global Scapegoat to Avoid Implications of Complicity
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 12 May 2025
Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens - TRANSCEND Media Service
Mea Culpa and My Bad versus MeToo and NotMe?
Introduction
There is an extraordinary amount of media coverage of the personality and policies of Donald Trump — in a period variously recognized to be dangerously exposed to polycrises and foreseeable disasters. It is curiously forgotten that he is claimed to have been democratically elected by a majority of citizens of the USA eligible to vote. As such both the person, and the policies he initiates, can be appropriately recognized as a reflection of the will of the people of the USA. Any suggestion that voters may now be changing their mind, and regretting their election of him, is somewhat naive — given the process of election, as framed by the principles of democracy. According to those principles the population as a whole owes allegiance to their democratically elected leader. Individuals failing in that respect are appropriately charged with disloyalty and subject to any sanction — if any effort is made to remove the leader from office.
More intriguing is the sense in which Trump has now become a focus for blame by leaders and commentators in other countries — as a consequence of the policies he has initiated, the relationships he has cultivated or deprecated, and the claims he has made. Again it should be emphasized that it is Trump who is the focus for that blame — and typically not those who elected him. Somehow the electors are disassociated from the initiatives of the person elected, and innocent of the consequences that those policies may engender elsewhere.
As the focus for global concern, it could be readily argued that Trump has become a convenient distraction from the many issues with which the world is faced. Framed as the prime disrupter of normal processes of governance around the world, he has become the ideal excuse for the failure of strategies in response to those issues. Increasingly every policy failure in other countries can now be credibly blamed on Trump — again, not on those who elected him, nor on those whose policies have yet to demonstrate that they are fit for purpose..
The advantage of this dynamic, for those whose policies were relatively unsuccessful prior to Trump, is that an acceptable explanation for their continuing failure can now be blamed on Trump. It is becoming increasingly unnecessary to imagine appropriate strategies in the absence of Trump. As previously articulated by Margaret Thatcher: There Is No Alternative (TINA). It could even be argued that there is no longer any need to demonstrate the viability of the many alternatives optimistically proposed by those who vigorously contest the TINA perspective. Indeed the disruptive framework offered by Trump provides a space within which strategies can be optimistically proposed without any need whatsoever to take responsibility for their implementation — given its improbability. Trump provides an ironclad, blame-free excuse for failure.
From such a perspective, through comprehensive projection of blame onto Trump, he provides a means through which others can effectively “clean up their act” and claim righteously to be completely innocent of complicity in strategic failure. The process might well justify the neologism of “Trump-washing” — potentially more comprehensive than other such uses of “washing” for purposes of misrepresentation.
That argument is subsequently explored in a wider context as a process of blame which features variously in distinctive phases of civilization. With the decline of democracy in the current period, as now widely indicated, this invites recognition of the linear progression famously identified by Plato as “Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty” (Lawrence Torcello, Why tyranny could be the inevitable outcome of democracy, The Conversation, 12 November 2019). Potentially more relevant is the later reframing of those conditions of society in terms of the social cycle theory of anacyclosis of Polybius — as currently presented by the Anacyclosis Institute. As might be expected from the chaotic intellectual fragmentation of the present time, any such unifying perspective is itself subject to processes analogous to those identified by the Ancient Greek theory.
Offering a broader framework for the social processes of the present time, the six phases of anacyclosis are tentatively visualized in the following exercise as six distinctive interweaving cycles in 3D. This tentatively provides a speculative insight into a more coherent experience of psychosocial processes and their institutional manifestations.
The experimental exploration has been variously enabled by AI. The responses from AI have been framed as grayed areas. Given the length of the document to which the exchanges gave rise, the form of presentation has itself been treated as an experiment — in anticipation of the future implication of AI into research documents. Reservations regarding the methodology have een presened separately (Problematic interaction with AI and its conventional social analogues, 2025).
Only the “questions” to AI are rendered immediately visible — with the response by AI hidden unless specifically requested by the reader (a facility not operational in PDF variants of the page, in contrast with the original). Readers are of course free to amend the questions asked, or to frame other related questions — whether with the same AI, with others, or with those that become available in the future. In endeavouring to elicit insight from the world’s resources via AI, the process calls for critical comment in contrast with more traditional methods for doing so.
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Tags: Trump
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