How Trump is transforming US into an enemy of freedom and democracy
On Wednesday, at a conference of disability rights groups in Chicago, former US President Joe Biden broke what seems like a long public silence, since Donald Trump’s inauguration back in January.
In as fiery a speech as he could muster – for he seemed physically and vocally frail, although mentally sharp enough – Biden attacked the new administration for its assault on the US social security system, and then he ended by doing what most American presidents have always done, talking about the United States as a unique exercise in nation-building, based not on geography, ethnicity or religion, but on the set of values enshrined in its constitution, particularly on the ideal that all men – and women, he added – are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights.
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Hide AdThis US origin story is much disputed, of course, and rightly so. The United States is a nation founded not only on the fine words that are so insistently etched on all the great buildings of its capital, but on the seizure of land from its native people by brute force and genocide, and on the chattel slavery of black Africans that helped build the early wealth of the South.


This Jekyll and Hyde nation
Yet the power of the words is great; and even the fiercest critics of US racism and hypocrisy, such as Martin Luther King, have allowed themselves to dream of the day when the nation would “live out the meaning of its creed” – an ideal that has long been a beacon of freedom to many oppressed peoples across the world, and one driven deep into our hearts and minds by the sheer explosive brilliance of US popular culture, throughout most of the 20th century.
So it is difficult to overstate the scale of the shock involved in the coming of the second Trump administration, which seems to have abandoned the ideals of the US Constitution almost entirely, and to be content to represent only the other aspect of this Jekyll and Hyde nation – the cruel, land-grabbing side, run by men who have no interest in anyone’s freedom but their own.
And where they do still claim to be advocates for freedom – notably in Vice-President JD Vance’s recent lectures on freedom of speech – their selectivity and double standards raise questions about whether they really understand the meaning of the phrase at all. Both Vance, and Trump’s billionaire backer Elon Musk, for example, have muscled into UK debates around the banning of anti-abortion campaigners from the areas around entrances to clinics.
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Yet at the same time, the Trump administration has engaged in a brutal silencing campaign against university students and staff who have staged demonstrations against Israel’s campaign of slaughter in Gaza. And now, they are taking action against the universities themselves, which have been pressurised to remove staff who allowed or defended the demonstrations, and are now, having largely complied with those demands, being subjected to fresh instructions – essentially that, in return for federal funds, they submit all their staffing decisions and teaching programmes to scrutiny by a kind of political commissar, appointed by the Trump administration.
All this is to say nothing of Trump’s blatant contempt for the very idea of media freedom and diversity. He has already, notoriously, excluded the Associated Press from White House briefings because it would not echo his ridiculous decision to try to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
He constantly attacks media figures who question his policies, suggesting they should be sacked or silenced. And he has now – as a recent powerful edition of the Daily Show pointed out – started to mock and attack journalists who ask fact-based questions about what he himself said last week, while praising those who don’t ask questions at all, but simply hail his greatness.
Brutal attitudes to human rights
No one with even a passing knowledge of history, in other words, can fail to observe that these are the actions and attitudes of an authoritarian monarch at best, and at worst of an outright fascist, friendly with leaders like Putin and Netanyahu because he fundamentally agrees not only with their land-grabbing policies, but with the brutal attitudes to human rights and dignity that underpin them.
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Hide AdYet so far, the institutional resistance to Trump’s authoritarian revolution, in the United States, has been surprisingly thin; indeed at the moment, it looks as if nothing in all the vast and complex political structure of the United States – not a judicial system which cannot enforce its decisions, nor the state or city governments, nor even ancient independent institutions with substantial private resources – is in a position to stand against Trump for long.
In the face of all this, it seems to me that the rest of the world therefore faces a two-fold task. The first is to try to adapt quickly to the shock of America’s sudden transformation from an imperfect but powerful ally, to a likely enemy, at least for now, in any real battle for freedom and democracy.
An exhausting, often futile struggle
Then secondly, as the academic and former Greek politician Yanis Varoufakis put it in a powerful interview this week, those of us in Europe and elsewhere who still enjoy some space to defend the freedoms that make progressive change possible should now be fighting for them as never before; arguing, arguing, and arguing again against the seductive power of blatant lies, rank disinformation, and analyses that lead nowhere but to hatred and conflict.
It is an exhausting struggle, of course, and often futile. Yet alongside the need to act on climate change, it is perhaps the most important task of our generation, faced as we are not only with a blizzard of lies promoted by some of the most powerful individuals on Earth, but also with the cult of destruction to which those lies lead, now rolling not only through the rubble of Gaza and Ukraine, but through the whole institutional infrastructure of the United States, which once called itself the ‘land of the free’.
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