The president of the United States is a carnival barker, enticing “the people” with daily Twitter shouts to come and look at his latest product, or perhaps drop a quarter in a jar to fund his serial con game. When we look - and we have to look, right - what we see is a concentration camp filled with refugee children and their parents, or an overcrowded detention center and ICE agents dragging someone off to certain deportation. Trump is not embarrassed, apologetic, or otherwise concerned with what you think about all of this. He only cares that you look: Look at him and the humanitarian disaster he is creating. But mostly look at him.
Meanwhile, this administration has, in two short years, gutted every regulatory regime and revamped the tax code to generate the greatest redistribution of income in decades. His administration has, in essence, finished the neo-liberal project of destroying the state’s capacity to rein in capital’s abuses, and he has accomplished this with almost no resistance. The feckless Democrats look on, resting assured that Trump is a phenom that can’t last. This too, will pass, they say, only too happy to stand aside as capital laughs in a slow stroll to the bank. They want you to look at the kids in cages too, right, but not think too hard about how Clinton and Obama helped build the foundation for this incarceration nightmare, and the accompanying “deconstruction of the administrative state” that is capital’s grand prize.
We’ve been here before, sort of. Trump is Bill Clinton, announcing his criminal justice plan at Stone Mountain, Georgia in front of a group of chained, mostly African-American, prisoners. He is George Wallace on the steps of the University of Alabama shouting segregation forever. He is, more precisely, Herbert Hoover, who launched a “repatriation” plan that detained, and expelled hundreds of thousands of Mexicans - 60% of whom were citizens. Trump is basically Vanilla Ice, shouting banal lyrics over a bassline someone else wrote.
Trump’s immigration pogrom is not, however, merely a distraction. No, it is a horrible corollary to the current phase of global capitalism’s excesses. Around the world, people are daily dislocated by violence, poverty, and the destruction of the earth under a warming sky. In response, leaders across the globe build walls. Literal walls and border barriers, more now than at any point in history, and figurative laws of restrictive immigration policies, offshored enforcement, and mass detention. Pundits decry the right-ward turn of the public face in “the West,” rarely noting the responsibility these countries hold for the murder, mayhem and impoverishment people are fleeing.
The fascists are winning, at least for the moment. And from Trump to Salvini, from Dutarte, Modi and Bolsonora, to Johnson, Le Pen and Mitsotakis, they are offering nothing but some kind of identity based on a mystified, or misty eyed, his-story glimpsed in the distorted review mirror of the nation; a nation under threat by others who somehow don’t belong here.
Nationalism is basically capitalism’s invisible middle finger and thanks to Trump, we can actually see that. Obama and even the syntax challenged Bush, would try to encourage us to think there was a grander purpose being served by our patriotism, oh city on the hill. Trump doesn’t even pretend. (White) America’s greatness is self-referential. It needs no external justification. Haiti is a shithole country, Baltimore a rat infested disaster, members of congress should go back to “their” countries, even if born here. While proudly proclaiming his own violence against women as mere "locker room talk," he calls Mexicans "rapists." U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
So, America you are a brand. If you don’t get this, you’re also a deadbeat, loser, and Trump has no time to explain it to you. We are being sold the appearance of a country, not anything of actual substance. This is the politics of the spectacle. We are the target of neuromarketing and social mediated elections. We are in essence fighting over click-bait, like hungry seagulls circling the shrimp boats on Instagram.
Meanwhile, there is an endless supply of immiseration to feed the labor needs of the United States and Europe, be it inside our borders harvesting crops and caring for the old, or outside our borders, placing battery packs in I-phones and sewing Disney-themed briefs for our kids. When people resist, with their feet and their will to turn the tide of history, there is more money to be made arming the border guards, and putting cameras over the dessert.
The profits of pain have no limit except the size of the market - and we are in the business of growing that market. That is the whole point. Trump and his ilk are just moving a little product, so capital can move even more, unencumbered by regulation or restriction. Love the nation, hate the state, give back to Corporate America everything you can. Make (Someone’s) America Great Again.