Last week, Donald Trump was addressing a campaign rally in New York state at Syracuse. He told his audience that the current attorney general for New York state, Letitia James, who has held office as the state’s 67th attorney general since 2019 and who is black, was “disgusting” and a “dog”.
Should that kind of language surprise us? In another rally speech in Youngstown, Ohio, the week before, he urged Republican voters in the midterm elections to get out and vote to defeat the Democrats and “shove it up their ass”. Trump has resorted to using the F-word on his Truth Social website to threaten Iran with annihilation.
His bizarre attack on the Nobel committee for denying him the peace prize came in the same fortnight. Failure to make him the peace prize honoree was, he said at Syracuse, “an indelible stain on Norway”, a Nato ally of the United States. The decision was brought about by “radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and actually enemies of civilisation”. Trump ridiculously claimed again to have ended eight wars, telling his audience that he was about to “end or win” two more wars.
You may recall that a previous prize winner from Venezuela, María Corina Machado, former speaker of the Venezuelan national assembly and long-time critic of kidnapped president Nicolás Maduro (who is now languishing in a New York prison), offered Trump her Nobel medal to enhance her chances of leading the restoration of democracy in Caracas. But Trump cast her aside in favour of Maduro’s vice-president, who has agreed to act as a pliant US puppet.
As the consequences of Trump’s war in the Gulf – the interruption of oil supplies resulting in all-time-high prices for US gasoline and diesel – have become apparent across the United States, Trump has begun a flailing, desperate campaign to cut domestic diesel costs by boosting world supply. But he appears to have left this electoral gambit far too late for November 3rd – even without the impact of the activities of the Houthis.
Trump claims to have done a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin – who appears more and more to be his puppet master – to relax Congress’s statutory embargo on Russian diesel exports. His threats earlier this year to seize Russia’s shadow tanker fleet have been forgotten. Now Trump hopes that Russian diesel will flow across the globe in sufficient time to swing votes on November 3rd.
In pursuit of that delusional aim, Trump wants Ukraine to desist from any further attacks on Russia’s oil refining capacity. Kyiv is supposed to let oil sanctions collapse while Putin attempts to annihilate Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The absurdity of that strategy has led Trump to endorse Putin’s demand that Volodymyr Zelenskiy should be replaced as Ukraine’s president for refusing to capitulate to Trump’s demands. Trump then threatened another arms embargo on Ukraine.
Now Trump has resorted to hallucinatory misinformation. He announced last weekend that Russia and Ukraine have agreed to an energy ceasefire. Strangely, neither Putin nor Zelenskiy had heard of this agreement. Asked by a US reporter how he could claim to have brought it about, Trump replied that the two parties had agreed “because I said ‘you agree’”.
The US constitution has been warped and usurped by the Trump clique to an extent that should shock and shame thinking Americans who still revere the ideals of the founding fathers. That a sizeable proportion of them still support the Maga conspiracy worldview is a wonder in itself.
Some commentators warn that Trump may still attempt on some pretext of emergency to cancel the holding of the midterm elections on November 3rd – or seek to set aside any result that denies him control of the houses of Congress from January onwards.
Some Republicans, though, are willing to query the proposed livestreamed public execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the former US army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, and who is a Muslim. Pete Hegseth, self-styled secretary for war in the would-be Nobel peace prize winner’s cabinet, has Trump’s full backing for such a spectacle – hardly surprising for a president who celebrated the American Revolution by staging a cage-fighting show at the White House.
Like all public executions, the livestream will doubtless draw a huge audience online if it proceeds. But the Fort Hood execution has all the macabre attributes and implications of the Roman Colosseum’s spectacles of cruelty. It would also create a potent martyr figure.
Hegseth’s plan echoes the myopic barbarism of Israeli far-right minister for national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is intent on reintroducing hanging – but only for Palestinians. Do none of these people understand that, where barbarism is concerned, what goes around comes around?
Can America yet awaken from its shame?