It has been a little over a month since the wheels of the Trump Administration train rolled on out of the presidential inauguration station on Monday, January 20 this year. It picked up speed very, very quickly in a mad dash towards the destination that had been set for it as presidential executive order after presidential executive order began to be vigorously shovelled from its tender and hurled into its fires in order to rapidly build up steam in its engine.
The very first road kills that were caught in its cowcatcher on the political railroad tracks were the carcasses of the stray animals known as the “illegal immigrants”. The carnage continues to mount, even with lawful residents and U.S. citizens being caught and callously pushed off the rails as the loco pilot continues to push the throttle forward and hard with an arrogant and gleeful smirk upon his face.
As the train rumbles on the tracks — with seasoned and qualified railroad employees being summarily and callously thrown off as unqualified political loyalists begin to, “irresponsibly”, assume and to exercise their new responsibilities — the sounds of laughter, of music, of the stomping of dancing feet, of the clinking of champaign glasses, and of the slurping of caviar can be heard as dark and ominous clouds continue to billow higher and higher and higher into the sky from its smokestacks. Its toxic pollutants are being able to be seen and to be smelled from the north as well as from the east coasts, from the northern border with Canada down to the southern one with Mexico of the continental United States.
Reports continue to come into the news media houses that the noise can be heard, and that the smoke can be seen and smelled, with choking effect, by the peoples of South America, of the Caribbean, of Europe, of the Middle East, of Asia and of Africa. The world has not only been expressing shock and alarm at the spectacle, fearfully pondering its implications, not only for American citizens and for the world, but it is also trying to determine, with pin-point accuracy, what is actually fuelling this monstrous and hideous beast as it had paused, briefly, to allow to get on to it 1,500 federal criminals who joined the ranks of the political hacks, and those of the millionaire and the billionaire oligarchs who were already on board. What are the components of the hi-octane fuel that propels it with so much force that it has created tremors which have compromised the foundations and the pillars of the legislature, of the judiciary, of the various federal agencies that were established, after much careful thought about and, after much research into the varied and voluminous needs of the country and yes, even more fundamentally, of the bedrock of the U.S. Constitution that has, up to now, been able to withstand the ravages of political, economic and cultural tumult and mayhem since it was ratified in 1788, and has been in operation since 1789?
What is causing this diabolical marvel to perform, as it were, as a wrecking ball to the United States federal government? Is it the petty slights of an old, a petulant and a vindictive white man who, seemingly, has always managed to get what he wanted from all of his whining, all of his mocking and all of his insults from the very early days of his childhood, through his many acts of criminality and economic failures on to the present? Is it racism? Is it misogyny? Is it greed? Is it the lust for political power? The answer is, indeed, “yes” to all of those, as they are all part and parcel of the chemical make-up of that which fuels this terrible and destructive locomotive. Much of these ingredients have long been in play within the American political landscape which gave rise to an earlier machine of a similar construction and which used, pretty much, nearly all of the chemical components which is being used by the one currently barrelling down the tracks today.
That earlier machine had seriously upended the political, and the economic landscape of that time — agitating fault lines which caused major plate tech tonic shifts in culture and in race relations. The machine, which was christened “The American Civil War”, which operated for over four years, ending in 1865, had managed to mow down and had gathered on its cowcatcher around 698,000 lives, mostly of Anglo-American heritage. The oligarchic slave plantocracy of that day was responsible for the design and for the implementation of that earlier machine, one that was able to use the naturally occurring chemicals which made up the fuel to create the steam in its combustion chamber. And although that machine of the Confederacy was decommissioned and eventually scrapped at the end of its turbulent and tragic journey, many of the workers on that railway line, who were never held to account in the aftermath of that operation, never gave up on the dream of dismantling the whole system of democracy and replacing it with one which was oligarchic in nature. They secretly held on to and concealed the blueprints, and much of the jagged scrap-metal and of the volatile fuel which they then bequeathed to their children.
In that old business plan of theirs the poor whites would continue to hold their place in rank poverty and in utter ignorance, with drug induced feelings of being equal to “their betters” within the white slave plantocracy, content with an equality of skin colour pigmentation of whiteness, even if that was not the case with respect to their bank accounts and to their material possessions. In other words, it was better to be white, to be poor, to be hungry, to be ignorant and to be disenfranchised than it was to be like a negro slave who was at the very bottom of the social strata. And so, the dream to apply a wrecking ball to the United States federal government never really died. It was always there, hidden deep within the underbelly of American society.
The Republican presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were well aware of these undercurrents and of how they had helped to shape the economic powers that existed on Wall Street. How were they to run a government that would, generally speaking, attend to the needs of all Americans, mostly that of poor whites, with very little thought for Blacks, without having to cower at the feet of big business who thought otherwise? Those who held the purse strings, they knew, would also hold the reins of Government. And so, what could they have used to buy the people’s independence from the power and the influence that were wielded by the oligarchs? Abraham Lincoln and his Administration soon realised that the collection of taxes from “we the people” was the country’s ticket out — that which could keep the populace free from the selfish clutches of the neo-oligarchs of the slave plantocracy of the Old South. Those taxes had helped to fund many of the much needed policies and programmes that the country benefitted from after the Civil War. It was those taxes which gave life to the ideas of political liberal progressivism which was evident in the Theodore Roosevelt and the Dwight Eisenhower administrations.
Federal taxes had become a huge impediment to the long-term schemes of big business and this sparked their anger against Federal taxes, against the independence and the power of the Government and its ability to lift poor whites out of the dust of social and economic privation, and from the shackles of ignorance. Before Eisenhower could continue, to some degree, what Lincoln and Roosevelt had started, another locomotive was put on the tracks which saw the implementation of all sorts of government programmes being put into place, at every stop on its journey, since the great economic collapse which began in the United States in 1929 and which ended during World War II in 1941. The loco driver was a relative of Theodore Roosevelt — one who was on the other side of the political spectrum, a Democrat — one by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was during his Administration, with its New Deal policies and programmes, which increased the hatred of the oligarchs as never before, and which had put into high gear plans to dismantle what they called “big government”.
The mantras that they used to hypnotize the country, especially appealing to poor whites, was that “big government was bad”, was that liberalism, which was conceived to help poor whites (not so much poor blacks) was “socialism”, and that taxes were the tools of the ungodly and enemies of the State. Franklin Roosevelt had put into place regulations on corporate interests, using the Keynesian economic approach to the U.S. economy, as the “captains of industry” had proven, from the economic downturns which led up to The Great Depression, that they could not be trusted to police themselves. The oligarchs branded their philosophy as “conservatism”, which they saw as the panacea that was needed to combat all of the ills that were created by “liberalism”. They were not interested in the statistics which were derived from exhaustive social science and economic research which could be used to shape government policies and to establish practical and effective approaches to the problems which were plaguing the American society. “Conservative” think tanks were created in order to battle those which were created by the “liberals” who were attempting to use academics and experts in their political, national agendas towards solving problems and bettering the lives of all Americans. The oligarchs derisively called such professionals “technocrats”.
The conservatives were all about politics as usual, with its pork barrel agendas and with its tribalism, and so any of the policies and the programmes which were based upon reason were branded as unreasonable and as destructive to the country. Evangelical religious dogma, which espoused the need for a “culture war” came much later to that party. Then entered President Ronald Reagan who the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation (the same think tank now working with the Trump Administration with their Project 2025 blueprint for government), was waiting for in order to put their earlier plans towards the dismantling of the United States federal government into action. The Reagan Administration had done much to damage and to weaken the Government, but, as far as many conservatives were concerned, it had not done quite enough to weaken the Government and so, in many respects, it was seen as a great disappointment. Reagan was not conservative enough for them. Is it any wonder that with the Trump train, which has been moving so swiftly on the tracks, that the name Ronald Reagan is not being mentioned much in their speeches or any at all — either within the Congress of the United States or within the Executive branch?
The plan has always been to demolish the federal government of the United States and to drive the country down a path of oligarchy. Everything else in their arsenal — including racism — have all been incidental. This is what created the locomotive that the world is now seeing on the train tracks of political opportunism. This is the main composition of its propellant. And it might take drastic actions that are on the same level as those that were used to stop the train of the slave plantocracy by Lincoln in order to stop this one. It is still “early days”. Let us see what will happen. But, let all of us remember that the train on the tracks is moving very, very fast. I close this essay with the words of a man who has been much talked about and much revered by American Evangelicals for the stance that he had taken against Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime, and against those in the German church who had helped to bring him to power. What say the Evangelicals who helped to bring President Trump to power, in similar fashion, of the Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged for his moral stance against Nazi totalitarianism and bigotry? What say they of the following warning that he issued to the German people? What would he think of their actions in this sad affair? Bonhoeffer said:
“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction. “
