Dirk Hartford: Trump's second coming - A golden dawn for the few, a dark descent for the many

Key topics:Wall Street, Big Tech, and AI barons are the real winners of the new American order.Executive power is being weaponised to crush dissent and rewrite the Constitution by stealth.If this trajectory holds, elections will be theatre and civil war a certainty..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Dirk Hartford.After nine months of Trump's gestation as US President, let's consider what American democracy has birthed this time around. And in doing so let's, to use a stock market analogy, let the trends be our friends.Is it the dawn of a golden age, as Trump would have it? Or is it the dusk of that citadel of democracy on the world stage as it slides into the darkness and despair of civil war?Well, it's both/and. There is no doubt that for the oligarchs, the tech bros, the techno-feudalists, and whatever else you want to call the richest people in the US and on the planet, it is the dawn of their golden age.Trump is of, by and for these people, and he is dedicated to embellishing their gilded cage with ever more gold and riches in everything he does. Witness, for example, how he bent over backwards to facilitate the massive and extraordinary investment into AI data centres that are holding up the US economy right now.Stumped for what he has done for the poor or working class in the US in his first nine months? Ask Chat GPT, and even this super intelligence struggles to come up with anything and qualifies what it hesitatingly proffers in any event..Read more:. ‘Big Short’ investor Steve Eisman bullish on AI, big tech.Trump is the most revolutionary phenomenon to have happened in the past 80 years worldwide and the most revolutionary ever in the US. It is a top-down revolution, for sure, but a revolution nonetheless. He is upending literally everything, and the poor and working people are on the receiving end.Trump's first stint as President was the dress rehearsal. After the subsequent election was “stolen” from him, he and his disparate MAGA base in the Republican Party got down to serious work and planning. Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point, and Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News are just some of them. Not to mention his shock troops in extreme right organisations like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who led the assault on the White House, that other dress rehearsal, in 2021.When Trump assumed power nine months ago, he hit the ground running. He and his key ideologues in MAGA knew exactly what they were doing. They have continued to implement their programme to uproot and upend the “deep state” and all its associated ideological baggage at a blistering pace right up till now. Do whatever needs to be done, no matter what the Constitution says, come hell or high water is their subtext.Elon Musk’s DOGE was the initial battering ram and a plethora of ongoing Executive Orders (several hundred already) to remove any obstacles in their path. Oh, and massively expand, empower and finance ICE to deal with unwanted immigrants and deplorables generally.Not to forget sending in the army to those pesky blue states, an ongoing endeavour, to fight falling crime rates and make streets safe again from the likes of the amorphous and insignificant Antifa, which is now a terrorist organisation. All anti-Trump activists could be Antifa soon.Simultaneously, on the International front, Trump trumped seven or eight wars, including the intractable Gaza for the time being, in his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize.All this while launching a global trade war via tariffs - usually a prelude to more serious war-war - and a massive strike on Iran in partnership with Israel in their quest to rearrange politics and power in the Middle East as a whole sans the Palestinians.He fought for his pal, the criminal ex-President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, by putting pressure and higher tariffs on the elected government of Lula da Silva. He implored the Israeli Knesset to have charges dropped against his brother-in-arms, President Benjamin Netanyahu.He intervened to rescue beleaguered Afrikaner refugees from the clutches of Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema while expelling thousands of his own refugees to hellhole places like prisons in El Salvador. Lately, he's been taking out so-called Venezuelan drug dealers - narco terrorists - with no proof whatsoever while surrounding the country with a show of military force.And when his extreme right capitalist libertarian friend—Argentina's President Milei, whom he and Musk had extolled as something of a role model for global leadership—found himself in deep water at home, he bailed him out with tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars. He had already closed entirely any and all US institutional organisations devoted to trying to assist both Americans and people in need in countries all over the world.All this and much, much more in the space of nine months—and it is continuing apace. There should be no doubt that if this trend continues, Trump will vanquish the “deep state” and remake it in his own image before his term is finished. There will be no free and fair elections by then. There will be, and already is, a rule by an autocrat with all the central levers of power firmly in his and MAGA’s hands by then.So far, he has met with no real opposition to speak of. The Democratic Party and others on the centre left are like rabbits caught in the headlights—dumbfounded and paralysed, unable even to begin to organise a fightback of any substance.That has come belatedly from ordinary Americans themselves, with about 7 million people participating in the No Kings marches across the country recently. This is the first shot across the bow of a significant majority of the populace that polls are showing are fed up with Trump..Read more:.Trump is wrong to weaponise aid to South Africa: Melanie Verwoerd.It will have to get a lot less celebratory and a lot more focused if the opposition to Trump is to begin to make any serious headwayThe only real chink in Trump’s armour remains the Epstein files. If the full extent of his (and others') involvement with Epstein is ever revealed, it could well split his MAGA base. And that could turn the growing tide of opposition to Trump into a tidal wave.Otherwise, America is heading to hell for ordinary people. The Trump regime is going to use a combination of brute force and advanced technology, and “fake news” to subdue Americans. Think Orwell's 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.America, the most armed people on the planet, is heading inexorably to civil war. Those are the words of Steve Bannon - the ideologue in chief of the MAGA movement. And he should know.

Dirk Hartford: Trump's second coming - A golden dawn for the few, a dark descent for the many

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