Donald Trump has been a US president who has revelled in lies and obscenity. As we consider his legacy, his continued crass behaviour should make us ask how such a worthless person got the job in the first place.
On November 23, Donald Trump finally agreed to begin the transition of power, but the way it was announced tells us a lot about him.
Head of the General Services Administration Emily Murphy said in a letter to President-elect Joe Biden that she had determined the transition from the Trump administration could formally begin. She added that she came to her decision “independently” and did not receive pressure from the executive branch. (Murphy referred to Biden as the “apparent election winner” – the opposite of appearance is essence, so her qualification implies that ‘essentially’ Trump won, whatever the final results.
Minutes after Murphy’s letter was first reported, Trump tweeted that he had given her permission to send the letter, but he vowed to continue protesting his own defeat. His campaign team continues to push supporters to back fundraising efforts in a last-ditch bid to beat the election outcome.
So, Trump approves transition without conceding defeat; he permits acts which are made independently of his will. He is a living contradiction: the ultimate post-modern ironist presenting himself as a guardian of traditional Christian values; the ultimate demolisher of law and stable order presenting himself as its unconditional enforcer.
We find the same tension in how Trump relates to conspiracy theories. When he is asked about radical Rightist groups which propagate violence or conspiracy theories, Trump is ready to formally distance himself from the problematic aspects, while praising the group’s general patriotic attitude.
This distance is empty, of course, and is a purely rhetorical device: the group is silently expected to act upon the implicit calls to violence Trump’s speeches are full of – when he constantly attacks alleged Leftist violence, he does it in terms which are divisive and a call to violence in themselves.
A prime example of this was Trump’s answer when he was asked about the violence propagated and practised by the Proud Boys in the first presidential debate. As was reported at the time, “Minutes after Trump told the Proud Boys, a far-right group with members who espouse white supremacism, to ‘stand back and stand by’, on national television… members of the men-only group took to fringe social media sites to celebrate what they considered a ‘historic’ moment for their ideological push against leftists.”
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This is – if I can be pardoned using an expression which is very problematic here – Trump at his best. He does tell them to “stand back” – ie to restrain from violence. But he adds “and stand by” – ie to get ready, but for what? The implication is clear: to practise violence if Trump loses the election.
In Trump, we thus encounter a new variation on the old idea of the emperor’s new clothes. While in the original Hans Christian Andersen version an innocent child’s gaze is needed to publicly proclaim that the emperor is naked, in today’s reign of public obscenity, the emperor himself proudly proclaims he has no clothes. But this very openness functions as a redoubled mystification. How?
In homology with Ernst Kantorowicz’s thesis on the King’s Two Bodies, today’s populist emperor has double clothes. So, while he boasts that he is divested of his personal ‘clothes’ of dignity, he keeps his second clothes, the instruments of his symbolic investiture.
For this reason, what makes Trump’s obscenity perverse is that he is not just lying brazenly, without any constraint – he also directly tells the truth when one would expect him to be embarrassed by it. When, in August 2020, he announced his intention to defund the US post service, there was no need for a complex analysis to prove that he was proposing this to make more difficult postal voting and thus deprive the Democrats of votes: he openly stated this was the case.
Lying means you still recognize implicitly some moral norms, you just violate them in reality. But what happened with Trump in this case is worse than lying: in saying what is literally true, he undoes or suspends the very dimension of truth.
We can also clearly see this in how Trump dealt with QAnon, a far-rightconspiracy theory alleging a secret plot against him and his supporters by a supposed ‘deep state’. This is how ABC reported his reaction: “The White House… defended the President’s embrace of a fringe conspiracy group, with press secretary Kayleigh McEnany saying that he was “talking about his supporters” when he called QAnon followers people who “love the country” and said he appreciates their backing.”
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Trump was careful not to say that he takes the QAnon theory seriously. Instead, he limited himself to only two facts, both of which are true: those who advocate QAnon theories are supporters of him, and they love America. Plus, he added a subjective fact – which is also true – that he appreciates their backing. The question of the factual truth of QAnon didn’t even enter the picture.
We are thus gradually approaching what effectively can be called a post-truth discursive space, a space which oscillates between pre-modern superstition (conspiracy theories) and post-modern cynical scepticism. This is why Trump is not a fascist; he is something maybe even more dangerous.
With Trump, we see the polar opposite to Stalinism, where the figure of the leader should be kept unblemished at any price. While the Stalinist leader fears that even a minor indecency or indiscretion would destroy his position, our new leaders are ready to go pretty far in renouncing dignity. Trump is famous not in spite of his obscenities, but on account of them.
In the old royal courts, a king often had a clown whose function was to destroy the noble appearance with sarcastic jokes and dirty remarks, thereby confirming – by contrast – the king’s dignity. Trump doesn’t need a clown; he already is his own clown, and no wonder that his acts are sometimes more funny or tasteless than the performances of his comic imitators. The standard situation is thus inverted: Trump is not a dignified person about whom obscene rumors circulate; he is an openly obscene person who wants his obscenity to appear as a mask of his dignity.
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All this, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that his ‘excesses’ are not to be taken seriously. In a rare appearance on the electoral campaign, Melania Trump denounced Biden’s “socialist agenda”. So what about Kamala Harris who is usually perceived as more Leftist than the extremely moderate Biden? Her husband was clear on this point: “She’s a communist. She’s not a socialist. She’s well beyond a socialist. She wants to open up the borders to allow killers and murderers and rapists to pour into our country.” Incidentally, when did open borders become a characteristic of communism?
Biden immediately reacted:“There’s not one single syllable that I’ve ever said that could lead you to believe that I was a socialist or a communist.” Factually true, but this rebuttal misses the point. The dismissal of Biden and Harris as socialist or communist is not simply a rhetorical exaggeration; Trump is not just saying this, even though he knows it to be untrue.
His ‘exaggerations’ are perfect examples of what one should call realism of notions. Notions are not just names, they structure political space and, as such, have actual effects.
Trump’s ‘cognitive mapping’ of the political space is an almost symmetrical reversal of the Stalinist map in which everybody who opposes the party is considered to be part of a fascist plot. In a similar way, from Trump’s standpoint, the liberal centre is disappearing – or, as his friend, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán put it, liberals are just communists with a diploma, which means there are only two true poles: populist nationalists and Communists.
There is a wonderful expression in Serb: “Ne bije al’ ubija u pojam.” Roughly translated, it means, “It doesn’t beat but it kills the concept/notion.” It refers to somebody who, instead of destroying you with direct violence, bombards you with acts which undermine your self-respect so that you end up humiliated, deprived of the very core – or ‘notion’ – of your being.
To ‘kill in a notion’ describes the opposite of the actual destruction (of your empirical reality) in which your ‘notion’ survives in an elevated way (like killing an enemy in such a way that the enemy survives in the minds of thousands as a hero). This is how one should proceed with Hitler and Nazism: not just to destroy him – to get rid of his ‘excesses’ and save the sane core of his project – but to kill him in his notion.
And it’s the same with Trump and his legacy. The true task is not just to defeat him (because there is always the possibility that he will return in 2024), but to ‘kill him in his notion’. To make him visible in all his worthless vanity and inconsistency, but also – and this is the crucial part – to ask how such a worthless person could have become the president of the US. As the German philosopher Hegel would have put it, to kill Trump in his notion means to ‘bring him to his notion’ – ie to allow him to destroy himself by way of just making him appear as what he is.
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The former premier’s Taiwan trip is nothing but a provocation for Beijing to lash out at London, sinking any constructive dialogue
Liz Truss will always be remembered as a disastrous prime minister who spent only a month in office and was outlasted by a head of lettuce.
Her disastrous budget plans sent shudders through the UK economy, eliciting criticism from the British people, MPs and foreign leaders alike. Her ideology-driven political decisions found little sympathy with the public, which repaid her with abysmal approval ratings.
You’d think someone like that would have little credibility as a political adviser, but that apparently isn’t the case. Taiwan, which frequently pays washed-up Western right-wing fanatics to come and visit them as a political stunt, invited Liz Truss to Taipei on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Truss then gave a hawkish speech where she called for an end to all cooperation and dialogue with Beijing and the preparation of Russia-style sanctions in the event of a Taiwan conflict. She also repeated her suggestion of an “Economic NATO” – despite a track record that makes her the last person you’d want to listen to for economic advice.
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Since her brief stay in Downing Street, she has rebranded herself as a full-time anti-China hawk, and now uses her party position and credentials as a former prime minister to try to undermine her successor’s attempts to carefully edge back towards engagement with China. Truss was always a fantasist, a pro-Brexit zealot who embraced a confrontational stance during her time as foreign secretary.
However, as you can imagine, all you need to do to reinvent yourself these days is to become a China basher. It doesn’t matter how much of a joke you otherwise might be. Hence, the UK media made sure that her stay and words in Taiwan were given widespread coverage without the context of her political failures. The UK government has already distanced itself from her trip – a fact that Beijing should take careful notice of (and no doubt has).
The British Conservative Party has always been rife with that sort of factionalism. While the opposition Labour Party tends to hard-line suppress the more ideological wing of its MPs (hence the purge of the left-wing Corbynite faction), Tory ideologues have long held power as a “disruptive” force on the government itself, undermining its foreign policy. It’s a fracture which emerged during the Margaret Thatcher era, where following the breakdown of the “post-war consensus” of economic pragmatism, ideology gained ascendency in the party and soon manifested into Euroscepticism.
This tug of war lasted 30 years, making it harder for Conservative prime ministers to maintain a working relationship with the EU, and eventually culminating in Brexit itself. Once that was out of the way, these ideologues found a new target: China. While Truss has opportunistically jumped on this bandwagon, former arch-Brexiter Iain Duncan Smith had already made himself the UK’s Sinophobe-in-chief. Their common goal is simply to undermine stable ties with Beijing and provoke conflict by spurring on backbench rebellions, making them a challenge for the government to handle.
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Consequently, while Truss may be a national laughingstock thanks to her disastrous tenure as prime minister, this new role she is taking on enables her to cause disruption on this issue. Taiwan, of course, knows this, because its entire foreign policy is premised on trying to undermine the ties of other countries’ relationships with Beijing by spending large amounts of money on inviting figures such as Truss. The timing of the trip was deliberate, coming immediately after the British foreign secretary’s engagement with a senior Chinese official following the coronation of King Charles III.
Taipei hopes that Beijing’s backlash over the Truss visit will target the UK government as a whole and punish the country. China has a record for being abrasive like this, having done so with the Czech Republic in the past and not winning any friends there as a result. If Truss is therefore allowed to dictate the flow of UK-China relations, she wins. Besides her, the UK has never been provocative on Taiwan at a senior level such as with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit last year for the US.
Thus, rather than causing a crisis, China should wait until the upcoming Taiwan elections take place and hope that the more pro-China Kuomintang Party (KMT), which once governed the whole country, will take power and stabilize cross-strait ties again. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) thrives off creating crises, as does the US with its military deployments, and amidst it all there is no intention for cool heads to prevail. While Pelosi was a blatant violation and huge provocation of the One China policy and US commitment to it, the Truss trip is an opportunistic PR stunt by a washed-up has-been who almost ran her country into the ground in a month. Ignore, move on and forget.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of TSFT.
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The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is looking at ways to address the most pressing global issues without being a disruptive influence
The upcoming Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit promises to be a watershed moment in the bloc’s history, coming amid unprecedented global challenges and new, emergent tensions.
While the SCO Foreign Ministers meeting, which took place on May 4 and 5, was tasked with preparing the agenda for the July 3-4 summit in New Delhi, there is still much work to do to ensure that India’s chairmanship will be a success.
The West has broken virtually all links with Russia because of the Ukraine conflict. Western sanctions against Russia are unprecedented in scope, carrying significant ramifications also for the developing world, including the economic disruptions caused by the weaponization of the US dollar. The European security architecture is in tatters. For the West to seek Russia’s strategic defeat while the country possesses formidable military and material resources makes no sense. Risking a potential nuclear conflict in particular is totally irresponsible.
The European Union has lost its already limited capacity to play an independent role, especially with Germany losing clout and Brussels appropriating more power. The doors of dialogue and diplomacy are being kept closed as NATO seeks military advantage over Russia, and uses Ukraine as a proxy.
At the other end of Eurasia, US-China tensions are rising over Taiwan, regional maritime disputes, strengthening of US-centered regional alliances and NATO overtures to Japan and South Korea. The US and the EU are warning China against supplying lethal arms to Russia under pain of sanctions, even as they seek China’s support in persuading Russia to end its military intervention in Ukraine, and this in the background of the high-level dialogue between the US and China having virtually broken down.
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Both Russia and China, the principal pillars of the SCO, are at loggerheads with the West to different degrees, and the summit agenda will inevitably reflect this reality. The SCO represents a building block of multipolarity within the global system at the political, economic and security levels, a goal reiterated at the Foreign Ministers’ meeting.
While the other SCO members have robust links to both Russia and China, their connections with India are not as strong, despite mutual goodwill and shared interests. This is largely due to a lack of contiguity and direct access to Central Asia. With Iran and Belarus joining as full members, the SCO will achieve greater Eurasian depth. Both of these countries have been politically and economically targeted by the West. The SCO Foreign Ministers meeting also agreed on May 5 to grant dialogue partner status to Kuwait, the Maldives, Myanmar and the UAE, in addition to the nine existing dialogue partners. The growing interest demonstrates the appeal of the SCO as a grouping of non-Western countries that provide an alternative platform for nations to pursue their interests outside the Western-dominated international system.
Association with the SCO increases their margin to maneuver, primarily at the political and economic levels. Diplomatic support, hedging against Western sanctions, access to non-Western development banks, benefits from connectivity projects and infrastructure development, cooperation against terrorism, extremism and separatism, are obvious advantages.
India has taken its current presidency of the SCO seriously, organizing and hosting more than 100 meetings and events, including 15 ministerial level meetings. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has also stressed the great importance for India of developing multifaceted cooperation. He introduced the term ‘SECURE’ SCO on the basis of Security, Economic Development, Connectivity, Unity, Respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity, and Environmental protection.
As SCO Chair, India initiated an unprecedented engagement with the organization’s Observers and Dialogue Partners by inviting them to participate in more than 14 socio-cultural events. Many of the events hosted by India occurred for the first time in the framework of the SCO, such as the Millet Food Festival, Film Festival, Cultural Festival, the Tourism Mart, and Conference on Shared Buddhist Heritage.
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Jaishankar noted that as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and geopolitical upheavals, global supply chains had been disrupted, leading to a serious impact on delivering energy, food, and fertilizers to developing nations. He viewed these challenges as an opportunity for SCO members to address them collaboratively, noting that with more than 40% of the world’s population within the SCO, its collective decisions would surely have a global impact.
Additionally, Jaishankar highlighted the unabated menace of terrorism, and that combating it was one of the original mandates of the SCO. He drew attention to the unfolding situation in Afghanistan where the immediate priorities included providing humanitarian assistance, ensuring a truly inclusive and representative government, combating terrorism and drug trafficking and preserving the rights of women, children and minorities. This was echoed by the Chinese foreign minister.
India expressed its willingness to share its expertise and experience in the field of startups having helped cultivate over 70,000, more than 100 of which were ‘unicorns’. Last year, it proposed the creation of a Startups and Innovation working groups as well as one focused on traditional medicines, and the SCO meeting approved plans to operationalize these initiatives.
India believes that the SCO should look at reform and modernization to keep the organization relevant in a rapidly transforming world, and noted that discussions on these issues had already commenced. It also sought support for its long-standing demand to make English the SCO’s third official language, as this would enable a deeper engagement with English-speaking members and would take the SCO’s work to a global audience.
India also proposed the New Delhi Declaration as an SCO Summit Declaration at the meeting, as well as four other thematic joint statements on cooperation in de-radicalization strategies, promotion of millets, sustainable lifestyles to address climate change and digital transformation. India sought support for a timely finalization of these documents for approval at the SCO Summit.
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According to Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, all participating parties considered the SCO as an important platform for joint combat against terrorism, separatism, drug trafficking, as well as cyber crimes. All favored more cooperation in such fields as transportation, energy, finance, investment, trade, the digital economy, regional connectivity, deeper cultural and people-to-people exchanges, environmental protection, climate change, sustainable development, and SCO’s strengthened cooperation with the United Nations and BRICS countries.
The meeting also offered the gathered foreign ministers an opportunity for intense bilateral meetings. For example, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov met his Chinese counterpart to discuss the implementation of agreements reached between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in March.
The SCO continues to enlarge its footprint, widen its agenda, and carve out a non-Western space in the international system, but some key points of friction remain between members especially China and India. The two countries are currently embroiled in a border dispute that has yet to be settled. Additionally, India stands in opposition to China’s Belt and Road Initiative due to India’s concerns about connected sovereignty issues.
The other, less important fault line, is India-Pakistan relations. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bhutto Zardari did not help matters by making indirect jibes at India during his speech at the SCO meeting and further criticism of New Delhi in his interviews to the media. His comments elicited a sharp response by the Indian Foreign Minister, but only after the SCO meeting was completed. Pakistan is currently in the throes of a major internal crisis, which may affect its participation in the SCO summit. However, India-Pakistan differences are not germane to the SCO’s growing stature. Far more important is the Russia-India-China triangle.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of TSFT.
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Rome is considering leaving the Belt and Road Initiative in a move which will place virtue signaling to other Western states above its own interests
Italy’s membership of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is up for renewal at the end of this year, and Western media outlets are speculating that Rome may choose to leave the pact.
Italy became the first and only G7 nation to join China’s multi-billion-dollar infrastructure vision, signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) just before a tidal wave of anti-China sentiment was unleashed on the world. Indeed, the country’s leadership was in a very different place then, with Italy being led by Giuseppe Conte of the Five Star Movement, whose populism faulted the Euro-Atlantic establishment for decimating the Italian economy through the 2008 debt crisis and the brutal austerity measures which followed. It is little wonder that Italy had decided to look eastwards.
Even 15 years on from the events of 2008, Italy’s economy still has not fully recovered. It was worth $2.4 trillion at the end of that year, but is only at $2.1 trillion now, and barely growing at all. New and concurrent economic crises have taken a toll. Italy’s current leadership no longer believes all roads lead to Rome, let alone to China’s modern-day Silk Road – rather, they lead to Washington. As pressure on the country has grown, its successive leaders, Mario Draghi and Giorgia Meloni, have sought to reset its foreign policy back to transatlantic-oriented goals, ending its rebellion against the establishment and thus contemplating quitting China’s grand initiative.
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Oddly enough, the truth remains that it is the EU and US that stand as the biggest threat to Italy’s prosperity, not China. While dumping the BRI will receive plaudits from the US-dominated commentary circles in these countries, the reality is that they offer no alternative, no plans, and no incentives to make Italy a wealthier country. It is the “sick man” of the G7, an advanced economy that has increasingly lost its competitiveness, but also one that has been thrust into decline by being a southern EU country and a net loser of Eurozone policies.
It is precisely because of the economic upheavals that the country has faced over the past 15 years and widespread political dissatisfaction, that radical and populist politics have gained ground. China was rightfully seen as an alternative, a country that could rapidly expand Italy’s exports and invest in crumbling public infrastructure. However, this has quickly become politically incorrect. Italy’s leaders argue that BRI participation has been a waste of time. However, the reality is that when Eurocrat Mario Draghi came to office, he sought to reset Italy’s foreign policy and began using new “golden powers” to veto and cancel Chinese investments in Italy on a large scale. In 2021 alone, he blocked three Chinese takeovers, including a seed and vegetable producer.
Following Draghi, Giorgia Meloni, despite her outward populism, has been even more prone to pledging Rome’s loyalty to the transatlantic cause, having decided to become vocal in support of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and even visit Kiev. At this stage, it is very little surprise that her country is contemplating canceling participation in the BRI, something which can score political points and help dispel doubts about her loyalty to Brussels and Washington. Predictably, the mainstream media narrative readily depicts the BRI in predatory and malign terms, ignoring the obvious empirical truth that it is the EU that has saddled Italy with a national debt larger than its GDP, and not China. Of course, there is no alternative scheme or plan for Italy on offer should it leave the BRI, meaning it is cutting its nose off to spite its face.
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By forfeiting its BRI membership, Italy will undoubtedly lose the opportunity to massively enhance its trade competitiveness, namely by opting out of projects such as Chinese-owned ports and railway links. As an example of this, Greece, to the southeast, has positioned itself as a “gateway to Europe” through Chinese ownership of Pireaus port and its connecting railways, which allows cargo to go up through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, into the port and then across Europe. Italy could have competed for a share of this, but it has chosen not to, and it’s not like it will be selling anything additional to the US with its protectionist “America first” policies, is it?
In doing so, Italy has chosen to stop being a leader pursuing its own path in the world to better strengthen its global clout, but instead to be a follower, to play second fiddle to the transatlantic establishment which doesn’t see it as a particularly prominent partner to begin with. Italy joined the BRI precisely because it was sick of being a “rule taker” from Brussels, in a similar vein to what Greece has experienced. Now it appears happy again to hold up the political orthodoxy of the elitist, US-led G7. In doing so, it can kiss goodbye any hopes of becoming a powerful and influential country again anytime soon. Italy is admired mostly for its past, as opposed to what it offers to the world presently, and if its current leadership has its way, that will likely remain the case.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of TSFT.
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