Jamil F. Khan | Donald Trump is an accurate reflection of the USA, its politics and its society

It has been 254 days since Donald Trump returned to the presidency of the United States. In the run-up to his election, many believed that he would not be elected, as he had been once before.

Upon his re-election, in disbelief, many Americans resorted to soothing themselves with the idea that he is an aberration in American politics and that he does not reflect who or what the USA is.

This statement rests on a history of supposedly sterling leadership and stateliness displayed by past US presidents and their administrations, with many yearning to return to a previous golden era in American politics, which led global politics with dignity and eloquence.

This mythical golden era sits within different historical timeframes for different people, depending on what they value in the performance of political theatre. All of these contestations and protests belie a hard truth that Americans largely refuse to face: Donald Trump is an accurate reflection of the USA, its politics and its society.

There has never been a golden era of US politics that did not comeat an immense cost to the rest of the world. This cost is something that even those protesting their own embarrassment at Donald Trump’s ineloquence have been willing to live with.

This preoccupation with appearances of stateliness has endorsed the progression of a deadly, war-fuelled, anti-human state machine, which finds its most grotesque, bold-faced expression in the perfect American citizen, deeply devoted to the values of the USA, which have always been adversarial. Where adversaries did not exist, they were created to justify the fear that the US system controls its population with.

Pete Hegseth, the current US Secretary of Defense, secondarily known as the Secretary of War under one of numerous executive orders issued by Trump to restructure the government, recently made a speech lauding a return to a war department led by white, Christian, heterosexual men.

He concealed this statement by calling it a return to merit-based hiring policies, proclaiming the end of wokeness in the military. If such a department is to exist, it is most appropriately led by white men to execute the destructive aims of the USA and its eternal creation of enemies.

Though I don’t think that anybody should want to participate in the maintenance of state-sanctioned mass murder, this statement reflects a wider contempt for human difference.

A recent statistic reveals that the USA has been at war for 222 of 239 years since 1776. That is 93% of its history. During this time, generations of Americans have lived comfortably with the idea that America is the greatest nation in the world, with a deep sense of pride for their nation, which they identified with strongly.

Knowing that their military activity across the world has killed millions has hardly swayed a majority’s collective conscience, but instead instilled more pride in the nation. If looking beyond their borders was too much to ask, Americans have always had enough examples to measure the greatness of the USA all around them.

Founded on genocide, enriched by slavery, structured by segregation, hypnotised by capitalism, shamed by homelessness, and muzzled by diplomacy.

The very clear, enduring human rights violations that American society is defined by have alsoproven to be a price worth paying for most Americans. So, it begs the question: How is Donald Trump not who is America is?

The lust for power and trigger-happy foreign policy that has mandated every US president has filtered down into the sensibilities of ordinary people, not just in the country, but across the world. The impunity that the US state has managed to whitewash through diplomacy and propaganda has become aspirational to many.

This factors into the perception of the US as the greatest nation on earth.

Greatness here refers to the ability to perpetrate unfettered violence, being able to try and acquit yourself of crimes and to threaten more violent consequences for anyone who dares to challenge you.

This type of sensibility is a latent aspiration of many people whose imaginations of freedom come down to a romanticisation of violence without consequence.

It is, after all, easier to simply trample the corpses of the masses on the way to power than todo the deep work of becoming a better human being. The backlash of this administration is, in part, a refusal of that work of attaining humanity.

While we might claim that this is irrelevant to us, as South Africa battles its own problems, it is important to understand how it is all connected. Beyond the actual connections between South African history and US history, there is a more insidious influence of American politics we must interrogate.

Sold to the world as a utopia to be envied, the US shapes our sense of the world because of how imposing its global influence is. Its ideas and actions filter into our aspirations and beliefs, especially when nobody seems to be able to stand up to them.

The insistence of some that this is not who America is delays the reckoning with its horrific influence on social relations at every level.

There are, of course, Americans who genuinely do not share these values, but they have always been antithetical to what the US state hasalways been.

They have been enemies of a settler colonial state that maintains its power through the destruction of life. The problem that Americans are grappling with is the loss of institutional will to manage public relations effectively enough to allow them to live comfortably with brutality.

The end of the US empire is a necessity in moving to a more just world, and ironically for them, answering the call of wokeness, initiated by the act of waking up to reality, is what Americans owe themselves and the world.

Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.