Trump Versus Biden

21 October 2020

We are 14 days away from 03 November 2020, a year when I thought, America would vote to get rid of the person who became its 45th President by what I can call as the biggest stroke of randomness. For four years, USA has been witnessing a steady stream of lies, confabulations, and distortions of such brazen proportions that could last the White House for a century! Every system has only so much leg room, space for wriggling out from a tight corner, and under Trump’s first term the USA as a state and nationhood has exhausted all of that!

Why? The Trump administration has gone about in a very methodical way to further an agenda that is Redder than the True Reds, in a kind of Tea Party hack of the conservative movement to the power of infinity! If Mr Trump has forced the hand of the US Senate Republicans by cancelling the third tranche of relief measures for the on going pandemic so that he can ensure that the Senate focuses on confirming his nominee to the SCOTUS and he will have the Republican majority on the SCOTUS of 6-3, ( though Chief Justice John Roberts is increasingly voting ‘liberal’ as the latest judgement of the SCOTUS that tied 4-4 ensuring that the verdict of the lower court carried reveals!) which he has determined is very important since he thinks he can still manage another four more years at office, if somehow he can contest the results and they got into a legal trip wire, like it happened with Bush Jr versus Al Gore in 1999! Incidentally the ruling that tied 4-4 was about elections, where Pennsylvania mail in ballot extension decided in view of the Pandemic was sought to be overturned by Republicans, upheld by the State court. The ruling refused to stay a decision to allow mail in ballots as long as they were post marked on 03 November 2020 to be counted as valid votes as long as they arrived upto 3 days laterhttps://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/supreme-court-declines-to-block-pennsylvania-mail-in-ballot-extension-430244! So you can judge what Trump is all about, where relief for Americans is not as important as possible relief for him in a hypothetical situation going forward! That is why for Trump having Judge Amy Coney Barrett on the SCOTUS before 03 November 2020 is the only legislative priority.

There are many within the Democrats who don’t like how Nancy Pelosi is unwilling to negotiate for relief by parts, that she is being hard nosed and unrelenting in making aid for corporates conditional to aid for individual citizens, those $1200 Trump cheques as they are called! There are many amongst Democrats who don’t like what Mayor Pete is doing, talking about US Judicial reforms, especially about packing the SCOTUS and Federal Appeals Courts with members in such a way that only a 3rd will be affiliates of Republican or Democratic ideology while a 3rd will simply be non affiliated jurists! Yet, for me, 3 November 2020 is just the beginning of the reclamation of the USA as ‘Land of the Free’ should #BlueTidalWave be a reality or alternatively, the beginning of the end.

In many ways of how it would be instructive to other democracies, Dark Money has captured the soul of America for the last two decades, with neither President Obama nor President Bush Jr taking steps to counter it. Gerrymandering, filibuster are simply the legislative fronts used by the Dark Money forces, yet the screen that comes up for you is “White Supremacist movement’ with now ubiquitous gun toting protesters of various militia seen as the most potent terrorist threat to the USA. Today is not the day to go into how Obama particularly could have ensured that this was not visiting, especially when the #BLM movement saw white neighbourhoods apologising to blacks and a near unanimous condemnation of the deaths of blacks at the hands of White policemen is frustrating because there is simply no tool available to put this White Supremacist genie back in the bottle and cap it, unless you undertake a drastic measure to ‘defund the police’. It is that dangerous a precipice upon which American civil society stands!

If you consider how easily Black Americans are disenfranchised by various State laws in the American Midwest, Rust Belt and Southern ( Confederate) states, where already the jobs they held as miners, steel mill workers and other industrial workers got shipped to China, christened as traditional manufacturing jobs, which in any case is very unlikely to return to them even if decoupling happened, you can consider how redrawing of Congressional Districts to make red ones redder, or restricting access to voting centers in Black neighbourhoods or mail in ballots or in person early voting are all part of the same effort. It is an effort to under-represent US African American voters particularly and to over represent the votes of White Americans. It is a strange kind of minority-ism that Indian scholars would bracket as Brahmanism, which is an euphemism for casteism. ( Dr Ambedkar coined the best description of casteism not as Brahmanvad or Manuvad but in secular terms as “ ‘graded inequality’ by birth”! Again, this is Dark Money which is betting on racial privilege of the traditional White American and co-opting this population as its base population with whose electoral stamp it is set about to debase American polity!

Trump knows exactly what he is doing, despite his pretentious and sometimes over the board brazenness! It initially looked like Buffoonery to American voters, they even indulged him because he made an amorphous promise of MAGA-borrowing from a Reagan Slogan, which had a direct context of Siege of US Embassy in Teheran and a sense of US being targeted by all manner of terrorist groups, even as the Soviet Union loomed over in Western Europe and Asia! He is using his Presidency to enrich his businesses, to bail himself out from a tight personal situation, while at the same time, promoting the interests of this Dark Money web that wants to suck American vitals dry. The anti Immigrant, anti labour, anti universal health access, anti LGBTQ rights, anti abortion, are all, mere screens to cover the vested interest of these Dark Money spinners, which is to dismantle EPA and to deny Climate Change so that business can continue as usual. That is why Trump made withdrawing from Paris Agreement such a priority, which is why dismantling EPA domestically was such a priority. In this core area, Trump’s efficiency in delivering is phenomenal!

So Mayor Pete is right that USA is in danger not as much as from a challenge to liberal values, as much as it is to a vital challenge to its very soul. The soul which Candidate Biden promises to heal. The fence of iron clad statutes that VP Nominee Harris promises to provide for. The legislative background that Speaker Pelosi seeks to offer if the Democrats retained the House and flipped the Senate as well. That is why, unlike four years back, when Dems were laid back, worse, they were split wide down the middle, between those Bernie voters and those who felt Hillary was not a good enough candidate after Obama, today the Dems have come together to place an umbrella coalition from True Red Republicans to Leftist Democrats, with so many Republican leaders now endorsing Biden. Even more importantly, the young leadership of the party which accepted Biden, has not exchanged its iron fist for the velvet gloves of the Vice President! It has continued to process its energies in a single minded manner of an electoral machine, in voter registrations, in early in person votes, mail in ballots, that this election already ( 35 million votes) more than five times the votes cast in previous one (5.9 million on 23 October 2016) before 3 November, already stand cast and counted! https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/early-voting-more-than-34-million-americans-have-cast-ballots.html And Biden is pushing the pedal further, unrelenting as he warns Americans that despite his 10 point national lead and more than 50% electoral preference rating he has held for last four weeks nationally, that ‘this race is far closer than folks on (Twitter) think.” Most YouTube vloggers and news channels in USA admit to have never witnessed this kind of energy to close the polls from the Democrats.

So does that mean Trump is out? I felt Trump was a loser last year, this month, based on how swing voters viewed Republicans, his own presidential performance and their assessment of America as an economy. That was before Corona Pandemic and the deaths of more than 200000 Americans to it and before the economic pain became very clear to US main street! It is much like globalisation, which was already on a slowing phase termed ‘Slowbalisation’ since 2008, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/01/24/the-steam-has-gone-out-of-globalisation which has received renewed focus only because it is easier to understand as ‘decoupling from China’! So if you see how this is playing out, unless there is swing voter apathy and electoral fraud /contestation, I think that events of 2020 have only cemented the position of Democrats in US polity. Republicans have only themselves to blame by handing over their party to an outsider who has demeaned and debased their conservative core!