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How Can Trump Still Win The Election?
Yesterday the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet lambasted Trump and called on Americans to not reelect him:
The Trump administration's further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.
Today the Financial Times adds to the onslaught. Its not paywalled page 1 report on Trump's reaction to the pandemic is pretty devastating and adds some juicy details:
Again and again, the story that emerged is of a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings from January, dismisses anyone who claims to know more than him and trusts no one outside a tiny coterie, led by his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner – the property developer who Trump has empowered to sideline the best-funded disaster response bureaucracy in the world.
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“Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it,” says a Trump confidant who speaks to the president frequently. “That advice worked far more powerfully on him than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate.”
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It was Trump who chose Robert Redfield to head the CDC in spite of widespread warnings about the former military officer’s controversial record. Redfield led the Pentagon’s response to HIV-Aids in the 1980s. It involved isolating suspected soldiers in so-called HIV Hotels. Many who tested positive were dishonourably discharged. Some committed suicide.
A devout catholic, Redfield saw Aids as the product of an immoral society. For many years, he championed a much-hyped remedy that was discredited in tests. That debacle led to his removal from the job in 1994.
“Redfield is about the worst person you could think of to be heading the CDC at this time,” says Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist who has reported on epidemics. “He lets his prejudices interfere with the science, which you cannot afford during a pandemic.”
One of the CDC’s constraints was to insist on developing its own test rather than import a foreign one. Dr Anthony Fauci – the infectious disease expert and now household name – is widely known to loathe Redfield, and vice versa. That meant the CDC and Fauci’s National Institutes of Health were not on the same page.
Besides the insider fighting there is the question if and how Trump might manage to win a reelection. It's all about the economy one might say but there will also be other factors. Trump will certainly follow Steve Bannon's advice and blame everything bad that has happened on China:
Economists say a V-shaped recovery is unlikely. Even then it could be two Vs stuck together – a W, in other words. The social mingling resulting from any short-term economic reopening would probably come at the price of a second contagious outburst. As long as the second V began only after November, Trump might just be re-elected.
“From Trump’s point of view, there is no choice,” says Charlie Black, a senior Republican consultant and lobbyist. “It is the economy or nothing. He can’t exactly run on his personality.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, had a slightly different emphasis: “Trump’s campaign will be about China, China, China,” he says. “And hopefully the fact that he rebooted the economy.”
I find it unlikely that the economy will be halfway back by November. The states are opening up too fast and without the abilities to control a further spread of the epidemic. The infection numbers in Texas and elsewhere are rising. Some states will have to shut down again when the casualties mount.
The 'blame China' strategy might work though because Trump can also use that against Biden and his family.
But will it be enough to win?
Trump will probably be reelected for one very simple reason: he makes sense for the USA of the time.
Steve Bannon is also correct when stating the most sound electoral strategy for 2020 is the anti-China one.
If I were the USA, I would do as follows:
1) Strategic objective: destroy China.
2) Tactical objective: create an anti-China “arc of freedom” in order to encircle China and thus bring it to submission through economic war.
3) Other tactical objectives: consolidate American hegemony in Latin American and the European Peninsula (i.e. Europe minus Russia); keep the status quo in Africa; militarize and begin to build American hegemony in the Transaustralian Oceania (i.e. “South-East Asia”).
To reach its main tactical objective, the USA’s most promising outcome would be if Russia collapse after Putin’s death. In this sense, Trump’s/Bannon’s strategy is also very sound: play nice with Russia, always consider it an inherent ally, reinforce their Christian cultural identity and their white racial common identity; wait for Putin to retire or die; help put a pro-American (Yeltsin II) in power; open Russia to another IMF ransack.
With Russia firmly in American control, China would be closed off Eurasia and would be essentially reduced to an Asian power. The BRI would be certainly over. Those infrastructure projects in the Heartland (i.e. Central Asia) would be cancelled and dismantled. China’s supply chains would be disrupted to almost beyond repair. With Japan and Transaustralian Oceania in hands, China would certainly starve.
Next, it would be time for classical hybrid wars in China proper, culminating with the usage of HK and Taiwan as beach-heads to destroy China’s social fabric. This would reduce China to a sea-based Third World nation, away from its peasant heartlands in Central China, thus in entirely American domination. By this time, Tibet would be probably lost, cutting Central China’s second main water supply, resulting in mass starvation and emigration from the Chinese heartlands. The new centers of this new China would be Taiwan and HK, which, to maintain their local hegemony, will have to reinforce American domination daily, so as to keep the Mainland economically down (the same way the Brazilian elites in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo act as American envoys and keep the “hinterland” at African levels of subsistence).
But Rome wasn’t built in one day, and, to achieve all of this, the USA must begin by enforcing embargoes and denying local markets to Chinese enterprise. Hence Trump’s “trade war” against China. The American people certainly understands that, and support Trump wholeheartedly in his endeavor against China. In this sense, Trump (Bannon?) is man of his time, the ideal leader for the USA of the 21st Century. If I were Trump, I would escalate right now by freezing and seizing Chinese assets in USD, thus inducing a series of bankruptcies in China, impoverishing its people and adding more fuel for a future regime change.
Then I would apply whatever lawfare necessary to expropriate and bankrupt Huawei, thus ending, in one blow, China’s technological dominance aspirations in mass markets. A persecution of Chinese notable individuals in American territory would sent the right message both to the micronations around the world and to the far-right-wing people in America – the base which is willing to fight China to the death.
The far-right will play an essential role here, as they will serve, at the same time, as the praetorian guard to impose order in the USA and as cannon fodder in foreign wars to be waged in the Western Pacific. I would also enhance Christian education and ideology, by massively increasing fund to Christian churches and schools. I would also elevate Christianity to status of official science, and ban “pagan” theories such as Evolution (Natural Selection), Modern Synthesis (Neodarwinism) etc. My focus would be on the rapturist variants of Christianity, as it would give me a legitimate claim on the Levant (Israel as the Promising Land) and open a lane to the elevation of the USA as a literal world empire.
Australia would become an important outpost for this new, transformed American Empire, as it would serve as the base of operations against China through Oceania and SE-Asia. A new round of military spending should happen in the Northern coast, centered at Darwin. That Australia is already culturally American and is already under American control will accelerate this program.
The New American Empire would be much more West Coast, Pacific-oriented empire – in opposition to the old, Atlantic-based version of the 20th Century. In this sense, Australia and Japan would rise in importance at the same time Western Europe begins to decline. The Eastern Front would be secured cheaply and soundly with the domination of Russia and by the natural barrier presented by the desert areas of Central Asia and Siberia.
Posted by: vk | May 16 2020 20:05 utc | 21
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