Trump’s illusion of commanding America like a private company exposes the hidden power structures and contradictions shaping U.S. diplomacy and global influence
Hara Prasad Das
Those of us who have watched the American presidency in action must have also noticed the spectacular mismatch between words and gestures. That was American diplomacy.
The American Presidents are not truly party functionaries. Nor are they truly the products of popular mandate. Electioneering in America is demagogy on trial. Remember, if you can, the politics of demagogy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. A brutal hint is that no one was right, neither Antony nor Brutus. Yet the play ran away with the glory of drama, the oppositional moral binary, by theorizing the present, be it upon the dead body of Caesar.
Americans are incapable of philosophy and uneasy with ideology. They are masters of current theorization. That Americanism is America’s greatest contribution to the Twentieth Century is, in fact, proof of that.
And remember, the Newsweek invention of Americanism in 2010 was not an invention of Academia or Politics. Nor was it by the American Press. It is the backroom that writes speeches, coins phrases, and, by design, allows a disconnect between gestures and words to persist.
American Presidents don’t run America; the backroom does. Who dwells in the backroom? Let us call it the collective energy of Capital for self-preservation.
The trouble with Trump is that he thinks he runs the ‘American Corporation’. The backroom would soon explode. The Tariff War, until now, was a tool of diplomacy; now it is out in the open as the fiat of the owner of America as a Private Limited Company.
From my days in the UN system in the eighties of the twentieth century and lately in the first decade of the twenty-first Century, I have seen how the fair labour standard became a showcase of diplomatic doublespeak to keep the debating parties warm. GATT delivered nothing much.
The trouble with Trump is that he thinks he, the swashbuckling American hero, can rule the world at will. That is fantasy, the last reel in the spool. Just wait and see how the backroom strikes. The Tariff War would destroy itself, and Trump would be shown the door. In any case, a punitive export tariff regime is good for the domestic market and the strongest push towards a repositioning of productive capacity.
We needed a reprioritization of our industrial products and processes. Thanks, Mr Trump, for the Specter of Capital and, of course, the Spectacle of a failing America!
(The writer is a distinguished poet and has worked at the United Nations. The Views expressed are personal)
I must congratulate Hara Prasad Das for writing a very short and informative article the way America is run by its President Donald Trump. I request him to find out time from his literary pursuit to write on present international relations with reference to the role played by the U.S.