No Silver Lining, Just An Opening

Monday, 7 April 2025, 10:32 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

The American and British media are hyper-focused on one small, misogynistic, misanthropic man. But that too is a form of denial. America produced Donald Trump and Americans voted for this putz to be POTUS, not once, not twice in a re-election, but two times, with a competent presidency in-between.

In short, those who say Trump is not America, whether they are Americans or Americanophiles, are deluding themselves. Trump did not appear ex nihilo, removed from socio-political context, and his second election proves he’s no anomaly.

The need to believe Trump is not America attests to the undue influence of American culture has had on much of the world. The American people have been moribund for over 30 years; after eight years of Bush-Cheney, and the Obama and Biden interregnums, the soullessness of the American people is just fully manifesting now.

However, like his attack on the so-called global economic order, Trump’s corrupt presidency could have unintended beneficial effects -- if self-knowing people can step into the vacuum.

First a proviso. I’m not joining the peddlers of hope and optimism during these dark times. It’s essential we face things as they are, which may mean that there is no response except to get to higher ground to escape the tsunami.

To the degree that a positive response is possible, it will depend, not on “collective action” and activism, but on self-knowing and transformation in a sufficient minority of individuals. Protest and resistance are necessary, but hardly sufficient.

The evils being perpetrated by the Trump Administration did not begin with Trump and won’t end with him. We have to understand just what this malevolence is, where it comes from, and what its goals are.

At one level, Trump’s policies are intended to completely destroy any possibility of staying under the 2 degree Celsius catastrophic warming limit, and accelerate the extinction of countless species of fellow creatures. And the blatant cruelty of pulling the rug out from under numerous USAID programs for the poorest, most threatened and marginal peoples in the world is unspeakable.

In short, the unvarnished evil that flows through Trump, his sycophants and the supine Republican Party is the product of a death wish in human consciousness, flowing through the “Christian” deadness of this administration and the American people, whether they call themselves Christians or not.

Clearly however, considering mass murderers like Putin and Netanyahu, evil is not limited to this concentrated expression of darkness in America. It’s just the most globally destructive at present.

Domestically, the Trump phenomenon is the projection of America’s longstanding pathological exteriorization, culminating in a culture of bottomless emptiness, anomie and alienation wrought by unchecked materialistic and consumeristic greed. Projected onto the political and economic sphere, Trumpism can only exacerbate the unaddressed source of its fascistic impulses.

Americans have no language for what ails us, except the language of economics and politics, which are wholly unsuited to address, much less remedy this internal reality. That’s why progressive remedies such as “Abundance” miss the mark by miles, and add to the sickness.

Philosophically, Trump’s jingoistic “declaration of economic independence” is far more destructive than Brexit – Britain’s exit from the European Union. Internationally, through the government the American people voted twice for, America has declared economic war on the world.

Trump and his followers believe that America can exit from the world, wreck the global economy, and come out the “winner” because the USA is so dominant and powerful he can re-write the rules on a whim.

Trumpism is the apotheosis of the American and New Age belief that “the truth is relative,” that it’s a matter of “my truth vs. your truth,” and that we must all “speak our own [separate] truth.” In the same vein it’s the nadir of the “create your own reality” mindset and “I’m manifesting my reality” vibe of the last 30 years.

This is the underlying spiritual vacuity and philosophical idiocy that supports Trump’s delusional promise, as he takes a wrecking ball to the global economy, of “a new Golden Age for America, with millions of new jobs, billions more dollars’ worth of US exports and trillions of dollars in tariff revenues.”

As an economic writer, grounded in reality wrote today, “The richest and most dynamic economy in the world has profited hugely from a global growth-promoting economic order that it created – one of rules-based open trade in goods and services undertaken in dollars…[but] all has been wrecked by the economics of Trump, for whom the idea that trade is a win-win, promoting growth and opportunity, is inconceivable.”

Nevertheless, the idea of “Britain combining with the G7 (excluding the US) and the EU – and, ultimately, Asia – to sustain a rules-based, open global trading and financial system” is a pipe dream. Collapse, however it occurs, is irreversible after it occurs, and the inequitable and unjust American-made world economic system has just collapsed.

An economy not based on exploiting wretched labor conditions in poor countries to provide cheap labor for cheap consumer goods for rich countries (especially the USA, which has a 70% consumer-driven economy), was never sustainable. Trump just hastened its collapse.

Can a new economic system arise from the ashes of the old, obsessively externalizing, materialistic, and consumeristic American “rules based order?”

The prior positive influence of American culture, despite its contributions to the post-war political and economic structure, much less to science and music, is a thing of the past.

But just as people all over the world have become, to one degree or another, Americanized, so too, if this deeply noxious and spiritually enervating and philosophically absurd culture radically changes, it would have a beneficial effect on global consciousness.

Just don’t expect Americans to begin looking within en masse, much less hope for the revolution in consciousness to begin here. The United States is now officially the caboose. Where is the engine of human advancement?

Martin LeFevre

© Scoop Media

Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail