Trump II: The Macro View
ANGLO AMERICA, 19 May 2025
Daniel Horgan - TRANSCEND Media Service
In the US there has been a lot of “shock and awe” felt by a majority of the population over the breadth and speed with which the Trump Administration has put forward its far-right agenda.
Trampling of the Constitution, specifically Free Speech and Freedom of the Press, and Due Process. This while making obsolete certain checks and balances; massively expanding executive power by over reaching into legislative authority and openly defying the courts. Equal justice of the law has also been eroded as Trump has weaponized the Department of Justice against political opponents, past and present.
Fascism: It is. Shocking: it shouldn’t be.
Why not?
Forget about Project 2025, a document written well in advance that contains in detail long and specific instructions to do all of the above.
Forget about the polarization of our society that has led us to this point that can be blamed on both left and right.
Forget about, but keep in mind our history of internal repression, mostly notably the violent apprehension of all Inherently Free Nations’ land, from the Penobscot Nation of current day Maine to the Lakota Nation (of many places).
Forget about the ripping of Indigenous Africans from their Inherently Free African Nations and having forced them into a system of chattel slavery in southern plantations of a burgeoning United States.
Forget about our sin filled colonial foreign policy that has exported terror through various military interventions. From our unknown which led to slaughters of peoples in the Philippines and Cambodia, to the more well-known battles in Vietnam and Iraq.
Let us instead take a look at the world today and then reflect back.
Sudan and South Sudan in 2025. Various numbers of conflicting armed groups creating one of the worst and largest humanitarian crises the planet has ever known.
A war spills into Ukraine threatening the Old Colonial Guard of European Nations, not by Russia in the 1960s Cold War Era, but current day.
And then there is Gaza. A population of refugees (from their homes 100-200 miles to the north) that is ruled by the democratically elected terrorist organization of Hamas in a land that is now being fully seized by the democratically elected terrorist state of Israel.[i]
(Ask the Indian Mystic Yogi, Sahdguru, if he is surprised by the number of armed conflicts on the planet today, and he will say something like, “What do you expect, with such large capacities to build modern weapons of war?”)
Human trafficking is at an all-time global high, with well over 50 million modern day slaves on the planet. And modern-day slavery, unfortunately, is a far crueler endeavor than past slavery systems.
Today in 2025, supposedly we are at the pinnacle of human progression, yet there is not an Inherently Free Indigenous Nation on the planet that can fully express its freedoms in the old ways of honor and central well-being. This holds true in the US as well. Just ask the Penobscot or the Lakota.
Global warming, whether we believe in it or not, threatens to destroy all of it, in what perhaps should be considered a washing away of all our sins, if it is to happen as such.
This writing is not designed to ruin your day. Nor is it designed to ignore many forms of human progress. It is, quite simply, a fact-based eagle eye view.
One thing that is important to understand is that the progression of human history does not, and has never moved, in a progressively upward trajectory of overall human well-being and happiness. Technology might move like this but don’t confuse the two!
And we return to Trump II. In his prosecution of political opponents, he has taken pages from the presidential administrations of modern-day Hungary, Turkey, and Russia. In his blaming of all our woes on immigrants, he has taken a page from Hitler.
Let us zoom out again.
Guatemala not so long ago democratically elected, for the second time, a right-wing president and former military general, Rios Montt, that inflicted one of the world’s worst internal modern-day genocides against its Mayan population. Then, star-time moments later, Guatemala elected the current president, Bernardo Arévalo, a left leaning socioligist and writer, who happens to be the son of Guatemala’s first president Juan Arévalo. (Juan Arévalo was elected in 1945 following a popular uprising against the United States-backed dictator Jorge Ubico that began the Guatemalan Revolution. He remained in office until 1951, surviving 25 coup attempts also backed by the US.)
The election of Rios Montt and Bernando Arevalo in such a short span, is exactly the stark juxtaposition that polarized democracies often find themselves in.
Modern democratic politics is like dribbling a basketball if you’re good at it. First you go right, then you go left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Just like in basketball you have to defend that, and that is what national populations seemingly have to choose to defend or be a part of.
In the US, we are no different.
The US ranks number 1 in total wealth, but 61st out of 168 countries ranked in income inequality by The World Bank.
The Global Peace Index (GPI) is a report produced by the Australia-based NGO Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) which measures the relative position of nations’ peacefulness. The US ranks 132 out of 163 countries in the index.
Despite our internal national beliefs, we, the US as a nation, are not a “City on a Hill”.
Noam Chomsky, a prominent linguist and political commentator, argues that,
(pre-Trump) the U.S. functions more like a plutocracy or oligarchy than a true democracy. While formal democratic institutions exist, he documents how real political power is concentrated in the hands of a wealthy elite and corporate interests, leaving the general public with limited influence over policy decisions.
Further he documents issues regarding the structural limits of change in government.
Chomsky acknowledges the U.S. Constitution as a framework that limits democratic responsiveness, with institutions like the Senate, Electoral College, and campaign finance system skewing power toward wealthy, white, and rural constituencies.
Trump is certainly both testing these summations while at the same time highlighting their truths.
Trump II: Fascism it is. Shocking: it shouldn’t be.
“The patriotic response to today’s threat is to oppose Mr. Trump. It should be to build a coalition of Americans who disagree about many other subjects — who span conservative and progressive, internationalist and isolationist, religious and secular, business-friendly and labor-friendly, pro-immigration and restrictionist, laissez-faire and pro-government, pro-life and pro-choice — yet who believe that these subjects must be decided through democratic debate and constitutional processes rather than the dictates of a single man.” That is the suggestion of a recent New York Times Op-Ed article.
In short, it would have to be something that defies the paradigms of many modern global democracies, including our own.
Note:
[i] In terms of the US position on Palestine: A drastic devolution to the current status in support of the terrorist state of Israel. This, despite that one president prior, we supported what has categorically been classified as genocide by any Nation or International Human Rights Body that is worth a salt.
_____________________________________________
Daniel Horgan is a US Citizen of Irish and Italian descent. He is a graduate of The European Center for Peace Studies. He has been an international elections monitor in the countries of Guatemala, and Colombia, and has provided International protective accompaniment for local election monitors in Sri Lanka.
Tags: Anglo America, Trump, USA
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 19 May 2025.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Trump II: The Macro View, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Join the discussion!
We welcome debate and dissent, but personal — ad hominem — attacks (on authors, other users or any individual), abuse and defamatory language will not be tolerated. Nor will we tolerate attempts to deliberately disrupt discussions. We aim to maintain an inviting space to focus on intelligent interactions and debates.