{"id":5989,"date":"2024-07-15T14:33:38","date_gmt":"2024-07-15T12:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=5989"},"modified":"2024-07-15T14:33:38","modified_gmt":"2024-07-15T12:33:38","slug":"trump-assassination-ear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2024-07-15\/trump-assassination-ear\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump got a bloodied ear. US ‘political violence’ poses a far bigger danger to the rest of us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biden and Trump are two rotten figureheads of a rotting empire. Ignore the tribal rhetoric: neither poses an existential threat. But the system behind them does<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\"\"\n

The outpouring of opinions on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump mostly offers little insight or honesty \u2013 apart from the all-too-obvious concern that the shooting of the former president is likely to make the United States even more of a tinderbox than it is already.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason for this. The responses \u2013 whether from Trump supporters or Trump opponents \u2013 are all embedded in the same ideology of political tribalism that provoked the gunman. Neither side is capable of self-reflection because the US system is designed to avoid such self-reflection.<\/p>\n

Despite what the political class wants you to believe, \u201cpolitical violence\u201d is as American as apple pie. The US global empire was built on political violence, or the threat of it, most especially after the Second World War. Just ask the people of Vietnam, Serbia, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Gaza.<\/p>\n

The difference now is that Washington\u2019s imperial grip is all too clearly weakening.<\/p>\n

President Joe Biden is not alone in refusing to recognise this fact. He recently told ABC News\u2019 George Stephanopoulos: \u201cI\u2019m running the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

But US elites are rapidly finding that the world is no longer prepared to submit.<\/p>\n

Washington\u2019s international military arm, Nato, is being run into the ground by Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Washington\u2019s key military client state in the oil-rich Middle East, Israel, is being flooded with US weaponry to destroy Gaza. But in the midst of a genocide, Israel is exposing how weak it is. Hamas has not been defeated. In fact, it has been strengthened. And greater cooperation is being encouraged among those opposed to Israel\u2019s regional hegemony.<\/p>\n

Current domestic US politics can only be properly understood through the prism of the gradual decline of US influence abroad. The building of alternative international power formations, such as BRICS, is weakening Washington\u2019s military and economic reach.<\/p>\n

Adding to its woes, Washington\u2019s ideological hegemony is crumbling too. Transnational capitalism \u2013 headquartered in the US \u2013 has no answers to the environmental fall-out from the endless resource extraction required to feed the appetite for wasteful, mass consumption it has to cultivate to generate greater profits for a corporate elite.<\/p>\n

As the plundering of the planet\u2019s finite resources gets harder, especially as corporations continue to stoke our hunger for material excess, other states are less willing to sit back and let the US take its pound of flesh.<\/p>\n

The result is a growing political and economic instability that is hard to miss.<\/p>\n

Muddled posturing<\/h3>\n

In the US, there have been two political impulses in response.<\/p>\n

The first \u2013 illustrated by the Biden camp, backed by most of the US establishment media and three-letter agencies such as the CIA and NSA \u2013 is to double down on a failed strategy and continue seeking \u201cglobal full-spectrum dominance\u201d.<\/p>\n

That means raising the stakes by showing uppity rivals, most especially Russia and China, that any defiance will be punished. It means endlessly expanding wars, with the inherent risk of increasing the chances of triggering a nuclear confrontation.<\/p>\n

The other, more muddled response is illustrated by the Trump camp. If the US can no longer effectively impose its will abroad, rather than risk repeated humiliation, it should withdraw into a more isolationist posture, even while stepping up the imperial rhetoric.<\/p>\n

Part of the reason for Trump\u2019s muddled posturing, of course, is down to his narcissistic personality. He bigs himself up, even as he prefers to be master of the small domain he knows best. Caesar Trump has an instinctive aversion to global structures like Nato and the United Nations where he must share the limelight.<\/p>\n

And part of the reason is that Trump can\u2019t truly control the domestic terrain either. He depends on deeper power structures \u2013 such as the three-letter agencies \u2013 that would become pale shadows of themselves were they to agree to shrink US influence on the world stage. They need to push him out of his comfort zone.<\/p>\n

Outrage machine<\/h3>\n

The US political system \u2013 whether Democrat or Republican \u2013 all too obviously has no answers to the deepening crises faced at home or abroad. Which is why the choice for US voters is between Biden and Trump, two rotten figureheads of a rotting imperial system of power.<\/p>\n

And because the US system has no solutions, it has to redirect ordinary people\u2019s attention to internal wars. Voters \u2013 or those who still trust the system enough to vote \u2013 must be persuaded to invest their energies in tribal feuding. The rhetoric of division grows, one in which the other candidate poses an existential threat and has to be stopped at all costs.<\/p>\n

The truth is that each candidate \u2013 and the camps that stand behind them \u2013 is feeding this outrage machine. Biden is responsible for the assassination attempt on Trump, says one camp. Trump is guilty of inflaming the January 6 riots at the Congress, says the other.<\/p>\n

At least it would be consistent to conclude either that both are responsible, or that neither is, rather than apply one standard to your tribe\u2019s preferred presidential candidate and a different standard to the opposition tribe\u2019s candidate. That is hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

But the most useful conclusion we can draw is to understand that Biden and Trump are symptoms, not causes, of a diseased body politic. Neither Biden nor Trump pose an existential threat by themselves. But a declining US economic power, backed up by the largest military machine the world has ever known, determined to stop its decline at all costs, does pose just such a threat.<\/p>\n

Biden and Trump are symbols. One, a lifelong creature of the billionaire donor class, is now deep in the grip of Parkinson\u2019s. The other, a rapacious businessman committed only to his own aggrandisement, can\u2019t distinguish between reality and reality TV.<\/p>\n

No one should take seriously the claim that either is capable of running the world.<\/p>\n

What they are is symbols \u2013 of a US in crisis. Which, given the US addiction to its imperial pretensions, is a crisis for all of humanity. Trump got a bloodied ear. The rest of us have far more at stake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Biden and Trump are two rotten figureheads of a rotting empire. Ignore the tribal rhetoric: neither poses an existential threat. But the system behind them does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5990,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,62],"class_list":{"0":"post-5989","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-capitalism","9":"tag-us-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5991,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5989\/revisions\/5991"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}