The Readers’ Digest was a thoroughly cozy American middlebrow magazine for which someone ran a contest to pick the blandest imaginable headline. The winning entry: “Canada: Our Friendly Neighbour To The North”. Most Canadians live within easy distance of the border and ever since 1812, when there was a war, there have been no bad vibes that the general public might be aware of. And, anyway, the war was against the British.

So, when Donald Trump went to Quebec City in June 2018 and blasted Justin Trudeau, the oh-so-nice Canadian PM, observers in both countries were taken aback. But then the next day, when flying to the UK, as the Government, the one in a “special relationship” with the US, was looking shaky, Trump tweeted his regard for his “old friend” Boris Johnson, the person who had that day resigned from Theresa May’s Cabinet. Boris would make a good PM, Trump opined, but the Mayor of London was doing a horrible job.

Trump then mentioned, yet again, how much he was looking forward to meeting up, in July, with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Who, of course, was a KGB agent in the former Soviet Union, which would not have endeared him to previous Presidents. The present Commander in Chief reserves his hostility to the spies he presides over. They, he has told us, are “Nazis”.  

Domestic Agenda Escaping Attention

Later, after he was freed from having to meet ostensible American allies in the G7 and NATO, came that secret meeting in Helsinki when the US President announced that, in stark contrast to Trudeau and May, and the Pope, and the media, (“the enemy of the people”) and the CIA and the FBI, Vladimir, like the tyrants in North Korea, Turkey and the Philippines, was blameless. It was all very unusual. How much of this behaviour is to cover up criminal stuff and how much is occasioned by the Trumpian ego is yet uncertain. But, in the meantime, it needs to be remembered that the man’s domestic agenda is escaping attention.  

Trump has nominated a replacement for the retired Anthony Kennedy to become the ninth Supreme Court judge. In America the composition of the Supreme Court is a big deal because it is the final arbiter as to what is constitutional and what the Government can and can’t do. The judiciary is the third element of the much touted “separation of powers”, the other two being the executive – Trump – and the legislative – and that’s Trump again.

The President has been busy signing his Executive Orders, whether that’s to take children and babies from their parents or, the next week, to order that they be returned (but too late. In the meantime, the babies have been lost). In the Congress, made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the two US versions of Parliament, the Republicans, Trump’s mates (for now anyway) have majorities.

The idea is that Congress can act as a counter to arbitrary executive power, but the GOP (Grand Old Party, as the Republicans are known) politicians there are not doing anything to curb Trump’s excesses because they are scared to. The Republicans, who used to be the party of old money and the country club, are now routinely dubbed Trump’s Party. They think that if they stand up to the orange-tinted bully, the “base” will punish them at the November 2018 midterm elections.

Stacking The Court

That background explains why the choice of Supreme Court justices is so important. Trump has picked Brett Kavanaugh, a youngish candidate with extreme Rightwing views, so that the Court can give him the decisions he needs. Justice Kennedy was always said to be a swing vote. There were four judges said to be “liberal” and four said to be “conservative”. Kennedy supposedly could go either way, so by replacing him with a true-blue reactionary, the conservatives’ majority would be guaranteed.

In reality, Kennedy was as entrenched on the Right as his four mates except that he did not look like voting to overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that allowed women the choice to have an abortion. In this he was acting as a conservative Republican was until recently expected to act. They are, after all, the Party whose defining ethic is personal freedom. They are the ones who used to scold the “nanny State”, their rhetoric full of exhortations to get the State out of the bedrooms of America. And all that.

Women’s rights to control their own bodies will certainly be attacked, everyone agrees, though there is disagreement about how direct that attack will be. This is called being “pro-life”. On the question of gun control, however, there is no room for doubt. The Supreme Court will block any attempt to restrict the right of crazed young men to get themselves automatic assault weapons and gun down hundreds at concerts, schools and Afro-American churches. This too presumably is to be “pro-life”, because not many people would want to say that they were pro-death.

The right to bear arms is guaranteed by the Constitution. When America declared independence, it was 1776 and the enemy was the British Army. Hardy colonists, proud of their new freedom, distrusted the very idea of a standing army and if King George’s men attacked, the settlers needed the ability to resist with their muskets. So, the framers spoke of the need for a “well-ordered militia”, a citizens’ resistance force. Somehow, contemporary politicians and lawyers can interpret this as being the right for crazies to massacre American children, a view that Trump’s relentless assaults on truth and trust is aiding and abetting.

So, when he spoke at his unveiling as the Trumpian choice, Brett Kavanaugh, spoke of his belief that the role of a judge was to “interpret” the Constitution’s framers’ intentions and not to “make” law. This is a signal that he will be a safe pair of hands. Mythology has it that making law is what Clintonian liberals do, with their affirmative actions to remove barriers holding back historically disadvantaged groups. The Supreme Court is more into the historically advantaged and the worldview of the 18th Century.

Although it was accepted as a given that the last Court would always vote 5-4, it was simultaneously said that the rulings were made on legal grounds by the country’s best lawyers. Of course, that has not been the case. The judges rule on blatantly political grounds. It’s always possible to unearth some precedent to justify their biases. The Court is likely to move even further to the Right with the two oldest justices being “liberals”. It’s quite on the cards that Trump, who has already picked two of the nine, will be able to add to his total. That will likely lock in a reactionary court for decades.

Playing The God Card

It’s not just women, concertgoers, Afro-American worshippers and school children who will be apprehensive. The Court has ruled that a business is legally justified to refuse service to anyone whom they dislike on religious grounds. So far that has involved same-sex couples, but gay people won’t be the only ones to offend. You can’t deny religious beliefs on the basis of logic or law, faith by definition being a private matter that society has no right to deny.

An obvious example is to do with race and ethnicity. Some of Christendom’s largest sects have only recently come to give lip service to the prevailing view that black people were not made by God as inferior to white people. What will happen when some fundamentalist refuses to serve someone on the basis that God has always told him not to accept racially offensive people? Will the Supreme Court, in thrall to their blatantly racist President, reverse its ruling that discrimination is a right? On what basis? Not likely.

As the Taliban and ISIS have found, if you’ve got God in your corner you can go for an early knockout, confident the forces of evil will be overcome. One of Trump’s contenders for the Court gig let it be known that, Islamically, her religion took precedence over other matters when she was thinking about legal decisions.

And in the week that Kavanaugh was nominated, Trump’s environment boss, Scott Pruitt, resigned, probably because Trump’s advisers managed to get the boss to see that Pruitt was about to create mayhem for them. So, Pruitt played the God card. Appointed because he was a zealot in undoing environmental safeguards to allow his friends in coal and gas to shake off any restraints, Pruitt had issues with personal morality and integrity.

He was facing 14 violations’ charges, most of which were to do with getting his staff to promote his personal interests and find a lucrative job for his wife. One charge suggesting that he might have wider issues with mental health was that he had got a staffer to take a mattress from a Trump hotel. In his resignation letter to Trump, Pruitt wrote that Providence had decreed that Trump reign and Providence had placed him at Trump’s right hand.

Friends And Enemies. Who Is Which?

Invoke the deity and flatter the Trump and you can’t go wrong. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has his own personal religion so he had to rely on flattery and doing a deal, which might be the best way of all to ease your way into The Donald’s slimy grasp. Trump was “honoured” to spend time with the Korean despot because he could sell the meeting as a deal. Nothing specific was decided, and the future of the Korean peninsula is as shaky as it was before the two met, but Trump won’t stop crowing about his supposed success.

That’s because the man can’t resist doing his deals, any deals. If he can stand in front of the cameras and declare that he has alone brought peace to Korea, he has the ability to convince himself that his words are true. And part of the reason he insults all the leaders who are supposed to be his friends is the obverse motive: as well as being representatives of the coalitions he seeks to destroy, they are rivals for his audience’s attention.

When Kavanaugh was picked some Democrats pointed out that he was on record as holding that a sitting President could not be charged with a crime. So, it could be that Trump wanted him in place as an aid to prevent a future impeachment vote. It’s similarly been argued that the President’s habit of exploiting a constitutional ability to pardon criminals is being used to free his mates – obviously true – but it’s also to let it be known that fellow conspirators could refuse to offer damaging evidence as, if they were to be convicted of contempt, the boss will pardon them.

With Trump being so successful in forging the separation of powers into a demagogic Trumpian dictatorship, Congress’ ability to impeach might be the last remaining impediment to this. It’s all about his needs, and if the Republicans retain a Congressional majority after the midterms, it could get even more nasty.

Violent, Debased & Anti-Social Ignorance

Trump has only recently been against the right to abortion, just as he has only recently become a Republican. His present attitude is his bargain with the fundamentalist Christian Right. If he does their bidding on moral issues they will vote for him. It is unlikely that he has any religious views himself. He has no moral or ethical - let alone spiritual - standards at all. His only apparent need is to do or say whatever gets him attention - or money - that day.

Trump is now more popular than he was six months ago, so six more years of Trumpery could be America’s fate. In the post-truth environment that he is trumpeting, anything’s possible. His most potent weapon is his ferocious attack on trust, which in recent decades had been waged more mildly by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

According to the Pew Research Center, in 1964 77% of Americans trusted the federal Government. By 2017 18% did. Don’t think that number reflects any increased skepticism, based on rational analysis, about American capitalism. It’s the opposite: it is the measure of a violent, debased and anti-social ignorance. If their guy says it, that’s enough. Trump’s “base” is a cult, for whom facts mean nothing.