Our dear leader is often compared to or charged with being a con man. The charge is an apposite one. Donald Trump is in essence a second-rate grifter who happened to come along at the right time, namely when huge segments of the American—and indeed, world—populace roiled with indignation, resentment and disaffection. Trump was sly enough to exploit this national condition in ways that empty suits like Marco Rubio and John Kasich never could. The stage was set for Trump’s triumph; it had been for some time. Who set it? It’s a critical question when we consider that Trump is simply an effect, not the cause, of our diseased politics.
There’s lots of blame to go around. Capitalism is a vile system, as everyone knows. Neoliberalism is an especially vile strain of that system, imposing as it does the anti-social principles of austerity, privatization and deregulation onto people on behalf of business. It’s an arrangement, devised in hell, designed to maximize corporate profit at any cost. Among the many casualties of neoliberalism: the environment, labor unions, worker rights and safety, food safety, social spending, equality, justice (economic and ergo social) and democracy (what little we had of it). But don’t worry: the multinationals are doing very well.
Over the last forty-or-so years the divide between the haves and the have-nots has stretched into a chasm. A 2017 study found that the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of America’s wealth, more than the bottom 90 percent combined. The bottom 40 percent of households have an average net worth of -$8,900 (yes, that’s a minus sign). The American 1 percent holds twice as much relative wealth as its counterparts in England, France and Canada, and thrice as much as Finland’s 1 percent. Don’t ever let anyone tell you America isn’t exceptional—it is.
Those harrowing statistics are the upshot of a political system based on bribery. With few exceptions, major national elections are won by candidates with the most expensive campaigns. Donors, not voters, put candidates into office. Lawmakers spend obscene amounts of time and energy soliciting donations; their jobs depend upon it. The more money you donate, the more influence you wield, the more your interests are represented. Thanks to Citizens United (Orwell smiles wryly from the grave), there are no limits to the amount of money corporations can spill into a political campaign via Super PACs. In exchange for their charity, they’re granted the privilege of directing public policy and, for all intents and purposes, writing our laws.
The consequences are so predictable and straightforward that a five-year-old could delineate them. As the corporations turn the screws, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the middle classes watch their incomes flatline and prospects disappear, and hatred of status quo politics, and its custodians (the Schumers and McConnells of the world), approaches fever pitch. Enter the demagogue, or “populist” in modern parlance. He struts in and, with a different look and style, tells people what they want to hear; he speaks plainly and with conviction; he is unconcerned with matters of decorum; he calls a spade a spade; he rails against the established order; he identifies (or invents) problems and offers easy solutions; he promises change. The disaffected masses rally around. Where else can they go?
Hence, Trump. We have every president since Reagan to thank for him. Every one of them enthusiastically embraced the doctrine of profit over people, corporate over social welfare. Needless to say, every one of them pretends—or pretended—that they didn’t, and none would ever concede the central role they played in bringing about today’s social and political crises, which show no signs of abating.
There’s no finer example of this sort of denialism than Barack Obama. Last month he reared his megalomaniacal head to electioneer in the run-up to the midterms, officially endorsing more than 300 Democratic candidates. His speeches, delivered across the country, are fascinating for their delusional and self-referential nature (Obama’s narcissism rivals Trump’s); also for the disconnect between his rhetoric now and his actions in office. Suddenly he’s a progressive again. You’ll recall that he played one on the campaign trail in 2008. Then, and surely this was only by coincidence, he mutated into a corporatist war hawk and remained so for eight years. Now he’s conveniently rediscovered his affinity for working people, reverence for justice and equality, and his aversion to executive overreach. Full circle.
“By the time I left office,” Obama told a crowd in Nevada, “wages were rising, the uninsurance rate was falling, poverty was falling, and that’s what I handed off to the next guy. So when you hear all this talk about economic miracles right now, remember who started it. That’s important to remember.”
Obama is taking credit for today’s “economic miracles.” What a curious thing of which to be proud. As I mentioned, the bottom 40 percent of US households have an average net worth of -$8,900. For well over a third of Americans, their debt is greater than the value of their total possessions. A rum sort of miracle, that. What about wages for working people? They’re consistently going up, right? Right. So is inflation. That means purchasing power stays the same. Real wages, adjusted for inflation, have been stagnant for four decades. Pew Research reports that “in real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago [my emphasis]: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.” Today’s average rate is $22.65. Meanwhile, productivity steadily increases and enormous wealth continues to be generated—and continues to flow upward to the top 1 percent of the population, whence it does not trickle down. Another miracle?
In the same speech Obama remarked: “As Republicans took over Congress, they decided to block everything I tried to do [as president]. Even stuff they used to support.” What, I wonder, is his excuse for his first two years in office, when he had solid majorities in both chambers of Congress and could have done anything he wanted? Obama had the opportunity to civilize our atrocious healthcare system by introducing a single-payer program or, at the very least, one with a public option; he chose to side with the insurance companies. This came as no surprise to anyone paying attention. The insurance companies helped buy him, after all.
Demagogues, Obama went on to explain, “promise to fight for the little guy and then they turn around and are helping corporations and billionaires and the most powerful.” He would know.
Turning to his foreign policy achievements: “Overseas we took out bin Laden. And we wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And we got Iran to halt its nuclear program.”
He left out a few minor details. Bin Laden was murdered in an illegal raid that violated the sovereignty of another state. He had not been put on trial for, let alone found guilty of, masterminding 9/11 or any other terrorist attack (nor had Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen droned by Obama in 2011). Nevertheless, Osama’s assassination secured Obama’s reelection. Regarding Afghanistan, Obama only “wound down” that epic fool’s errand after winding it up with 30,000 more fighters. He pulled out of Iraq according to Bush’s timeline—something the neoconservatives liked to pretend wasn’t true. And while Obama deserves commendation for the Iran nuclear agreement, to say he “got Iran to halt its nuclear program” is rather rich in light of the fact that such a program, if it ever existed, had already been halted in 2003.
To give a more complete picture to the good people of Nevada, Obama might have added: we overthrew Gaddafi and turned Libya into a failed state, where there is now a vibrant slave trade; we escalated the war in Syria by arming, training and funding the “moderate rebels”; we unilaterally bombed seven countries; we helped to consolidate a military coup in Honduras, now one of the most dangerous countries in the world; we failed to shut down the Guantanamo Bay torture center; we illegally spied on an untold number of American citizens; we sold all kinds of military hardware to Saudi Arabia and assisted them in their war of destruction against the people of Yemen; we put no pressure on Israel to end the occupation or cease its settlement activity, and provided it with diplomatic cover as it massacred thousands of Gazans; we initiated a $1 trillion plan to modernize and diversify our nuclear weapons arsenal in violation of the NPT; we killed scores of innocent people around the world with “surgical” drone strikes.
That’s only what I’m able to recall off the top of my head—Obama’s full rap sheet is at least twice as long. As luck would have it, his terrible reign is bookended by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, arguably the worst presidents in American history, and doubtless the most buffoonish. Next to them Obama looks like Lincoln, or at least the burnished historical image we’re given of him. Most on the left have already forgotten, if they ever knew, that Obama was (and is) a moral abomination and progressive charlatan, a disastrous president whose neoliberal policies, along with those of Bill Clinton, sowed the seeds of Trumpism in the dirt that is American politics. Remember that.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
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