The Corpulent Elite and The Roman Rise of Donald Trump

Donald J. Trump is now the president-elect of the United States of America after winning more than 270 Electoral College votes blocking his rival Hillary R. Clinton. Hillary was not only running for president she was vying to be the first woman president of the US. Trump will become the 45th president of the US when he takes office on January 20. The election of Trump seems to be a shocker and an upset for many people. The “polls,” almost the entire US establishment and Deep State and the mainstream media were all projecting a Hillary Clinton win. But it turned out the exact polar opposite. What accounts for Trump’s win in the US elections? We offer a historical analysis.

The first point we will make is this:  America’s current conundrum is a corollary of one self-evident truth. The United States in its present shape is an empire with a democratic mechanism of the election of the Princeps or President. Think of Rome under Augustus Caesar. This is a fact that escapes many educated people. This fact informs our analysis. The US was a proto-empire from 1945 until 1991 when it became an empire following the collapse of its other empire competitor the Soviet Union.

America exercises its empire through its control of the global US dollar based financial system, its system of far flung military bases spread across the globe that allows it to control the vassal states in subtle but sometimes naked ways, and its immense military and technological resources.

But the key fact which many people do not understand is this: the burdens of empire are carried by the ordinary folks of the state. The soldiers who carry the imperial standard, the men and women who die and are wounded in the military campaigns abroad to maintain the empire, the people whose taxes and industrial labor support the burdens of empire, all these people are ordinary people.

No empire is possible without the ordinary masses agreeing to carry the imperial burdens planned and developed by the elite. As long as the plunder and treasure continued to flow into the country which allowed the ordinary people to enjoy the fruits of empire, they would continue to support and carry the burden.  The American populace enjoyed the fruits and spoil of empire from 1945 until the end of the 1990s as imperial tribute and spoils flowed into the heartland of the American empire. This was a period of prosperity for ordinary Americans. The ordinary white American with no college degree could enjoy the fruits of empire and be solid middle class with a house and a car. This was the American dream, the magical thread that held the fabric of the American imperial republic together. It bound the elite and the masses in a shared societal consensus to keep empire, its dollar based system and its global financial fruits. The sacrifices of empire were worth it for the masses.

But when the treasure and resources flow to the populace diminishes and they begin to feel impoverished and no longer beneficiaries of the booty of empire, then they are no longer ready to carry the burdens of empire.  The imperial slogans begin to sound hollow with the American legions and their eagle standards carrying the supposed burning touch of “freedom” and “democracy” to the “grateful” masses around the world.

The deregulation of the financial system started by the Clintons which began the massive concentration of unbridled financial power in the hands of an increasingly out of touch elite drunk with the euphoria of victory in the cold war and unchallenged global power they now held, the globalization started by the American elite  to lower costs and maximize profits for themselves which saw the massive outflow of solid middle class industrial jobs to places like China and India because of lower labor costs and immorally high profit margins.

All of these factors began the destruction of the American middle class. This was compounded by the massive misallocation of financial resources to the military industrial complex concentrated in less than a dozen private mega corporations whose high tech military sector niche was dependent on lower tech industrial output produced by low cost suppliers in Asia and not even by American workers in America’s rusting industrial belt. The result of this is what was described by Michael Moore, the noted film documentarist in the audio of a speech he gave in Ohio the week of October 23 to promote his new film “Michael Moore in TrumpLand:”

MICHAEL MOORE: I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don’t necessarily like him that much, and they don’t necessarily agree with him. They’re not racist or rednecks, they’re actually pretty decent people, and so after talking to a number of them I wanted to write this.

“Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said, “if you close these factories as you’re planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I’m going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody’s going to buy them.”

It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the “Brexit” states.

You live here in Ohio, you know what I’m talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting, and that’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.

And on November 8, Election Day, although they lost their jobs, although they’ve been foreclosed on by the bank, and next came the divorce and now the wife and kids are gone, the car’s been repoed, they haven’t had a real vacation in years, they’re stuck with the shitty Obamacare Bronze Plan where you can’t even get a fucking percocet. They’ve essentially lost everything they had, except one thing — the one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent, and is guaranteed to them by the American constitution: the right to vote.

They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be fucked over and fucked up it doesn’t matter, because it’s equalized on that day – a millionaire has the same number of votes as the person without a job: one.

And there’s more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire class.

So on November 8, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump.

They see that the elite who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after they loved him and created him, and now hate.

Thank you media: the enemy of my enemy is who I’m voting for on November 8.

Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system because it’s your right. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest fuck ever recorded in human history and it will feel good.

For many ordinary Americans, the American empire was no longer delivering the bounty of empire, loss of solid industrial jobs, the disastrous trillion dollar wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the endless foreign wars, the bailing out of Wall Street and the Big Banks too big to fail at the expense of the ordinary folks finally hit home. Why support empire when I get nothing and am screwed?

There is money to spend on trillion dollar wars, trillion dollar programs like the F35 multirole fighter jet, and multibillion dollar warships with much of the basic manufacturing not even done by American workers but by nameless humans working in the sweatshops of Asia for a pittance.

Hilary Rodham Clinton represented all that they detested in the elite, not once did she call even if rhetorically for America to stop its military adventures overseas and focus on rebuilding the middle class. She rather called for more intervention, threatened more wars and a potential confrontation with nuclear armed Russia over Syria. Trump on the other hand even if he does not mean it said, it was time to stop the expensive trillion-dollar disastrous military adventures overseas and spend the money on rebuilding America.

Hilary Clinton and the elite establishment forgot that the people who carry the imperial Eagle of the American standard and the burdens of the American empire are ultimately Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows and not the low price laborers sweating it out in the sweatshop industrial abattoirs of Asia, Latin America and Africa.

It is telling to note the insularity of the Diamond Martini, Pappy Van Winkle bourbon drinking crowd and their aspiring relatively financially well off coattail appendages in the upper middle class. It is also telling to note the hyper educated class as they arrogantly assumed that the proles will swallow the prolefeed fed them by the corporate media stenographers of the power elite and on November 7 anoint their chosen one in yet another democratic ritual to give the aura of popular legitimacy to the elite consensus in the name of Hillary R. Clinton.

It is a telling historical lesson for the Pappy Van Wrinkle and Diamond Martini elite. The day any imperial nation’s elite stop sharing the spoils and fruits of empire with its own populace is the beginning of imperial decline and the loss of legitimacy of the ruling elite. Just as in ancient Rome as the Roman Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow stopped receiving the fruits of empire, they lost their belief in the Roman system and began to support populists who were hated by the Roman elite as their imperial leaders. This just further accelerated the loss of the legitimacy of the Roman elite establishment and led to imperial decline.

If America wants to avoid the same fate, then she must do what Trump said in his victory speech. “I want to tell the world community that while we will always put America’s interests first, we will deal fairly with everyone, with everyone — all people and all other nations. We will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict.”

Will Donald Trump be able to do that and turn America into a post imperial normal country but still a major power in global affairs and not the unsustainable hegemony which she seeks to desperately maintain now and supports with trillions of dollars in military expenditure, overseas bases, ruinous aggressive wars at the expense of her increasingly impoverished Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow and Honey Boo Boo of which 53 percent incidentally went for Trump instead of supporting a fellow woman Hilary Clinton. We will see.

The world has changed; a new global order is being born. New and rising again powers like China and Russia seek to find their place under the sun of global power. Hegemony pursued to its disastrous logical end by a morally and financially corrupt American imperial elite at the expense of its average populace has led to the upending of the political system and the election of the consummate populist Donald J. Trump as the new American president. Will he be the Restitutor Orbis of the American Republic in its profound crisis like Roman emperor Aurelian was in the third century AD or not?

We will see.