The world is reeling with the news that the US has re-elected Donald Trump as president.
Over 71 million Americans have just said they want to put the superficial citrus-tanned billionaire, fascist, and fraudster over a Black woman in the Oval Office.
That is, the US just showed once more what an utter racist, misogynistic, white supremacist shithole it is. Not that it’s anything new for the axis of imperial plunder and terror.
Welcome to the US 2024, where two self-serving white male nepo-babies can climb to the highest office. A country where the president is a literal convicted felon and rapist. And yet, why is anyone surprised?
Trump re-election: return of the baby blimp anyone?
This is of course, the same whiny little Trump-baby who threw his toys out of the pram after the last election. The former and now re-elected president has indictment charges still hanging over his head over his post-election paddy. Specifically, these are charges for attempting to subvert the election results. Of course, his puerile disinformation campaign culminated in the January 2021 Capitol coup.
Trump was set to go on trial in March, but managed to delay it. Then, in July, the Supreme Court ruled that he had presidential immunity from prosecution for acts committed while in office. However, prosecutors filed revised indictment charges, broadly along the same lines in August. However, his trial hasn’t happened yet. Now he’s president, will it? The juries out – but we’re willing to bet he’ll now get the administration’s justice department to drop the case.
Did we mention he’s also facing charges for squirreling away classified documents at his residence in Mar-a-Lago?
Since the US failed to throw Trump out with the bath water, he can now follow through on his threat to throw out special counsel Jack Smith who’s bringing both the cases too. In October, Trump boasted in a radio interview that:
Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy … I would fire him within two seconds
So that’s that then.
A US first: a convicted felon in the Oval Office
However, he is already a convicted felon for other dodgy dealings. Most notably, in May, a New York court found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records.
It was over hush money he’d bunged to porn star Stormy Daniels.
However, Trump was set to face sentencing on 26 November. Now, at minimum, the sex pest’s new rise to the office of power will probably delay his sentencing until after his presidency. More likely, he’ll find a way to quash this too.
Another trial that judges will now have to delay? The Georgia election interference case. This revolves around Trump and his right-wing MAGA-mugs spreading lies about voter fraud in the state. Did he plot to send fake electors to Washington as well? Yes, he did. He and his 18 allies face charges for criminal enterprise over this.
Again though, the slippery billionaire bullshitter won’t be getting his comeuppance on this anytime soon. At least, not now he’s head honcho of this democratic farce once more.
Make it make sense. Trump – a convicted felon and pending indictment charges from trying to overturn the results of the previous election – could stand for president. Now he is president, he’ll make damn sure he won’t be facing justice for any of it.
A sexual predator for president
If being a fraudster and flag-shagging fascist felon weren’t enough to make you president, clearly being a literal rapist clinches it.
In May 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abusing columnist E. Jean Carroll, and fined him $5m.
And following this in August 2023, a judge ruled in a defamation trial that Carroll’s allegations Trump had raped her, were “substantially true”. In short, he’s a rapist – which tracks from the “grab em’ by the pussy” president.
But of course, where there’s the misogynistic man-baby, there’s sexual assault allegations in spades. In fact, 26 women have come forward with disgusting accounts of Trump’s sexual misconduct.
This includes his first wife, Ivana, who also made rape allegations in their divorce deposition and a former business partner who described his attempted rape.
The message Trump’s return to the Oval Office sends is that powerful men can get away with it. Women already know this and live this reality every day. However, now over 71 million Americans have told survivors of sexual assault that male violence against women and girls doesn’t matter to them.
System is set up by, and for, privileged white pricks like Trump
On the same day the electorate hit the booths, California voted to pass ‘Proposition 36’ which repealed a progressive abolitionary law. Proposition 47 had redirected funds away from the prison industrial complex and into drug and mental health treatment programmes, and homelessness prevention. But in passing Proposition 36, California is ‘trumping’ up criminal charges for drug possession and small theft. It will now also gut these community-based care programmes.
So, in the same country that just basically said a rich white male rapist and convicted criminal can be president, one state has simultaneously voted to lock up more poor, marginalised people crooked capitalists are exploiting. In fact, it was union-busting, wage thieving corporations like Walmart that sponsored the proposition. Say no more.
And speaking of exploitation, California looks like it might also have voted to continue the carceral practice of “involuntary servitude“. That is, forcing incarcerated people into mandatory work placements rather and eating up the time they could otherwise use for things that help their rehabilitation. It’s state-sanctioned slavery by any other name.
None of this is unrelated. The ‘Yes to Proposition 36’ campaign gave $1m to the Republicans a week before the election. Oh, and incarcerated people can’t vote by the way. Trump though? He can and (clearly) did put a cross in the box for his own smug Sunny D-stained mug. All while the US disenfranchises 4.4 million people with felony convictions.
This is the US writ large. Its criminal justice system, its constitution, its democratic machinery are all intrinsic vestiges of its colonial, racist slave past. The structural violence against women, and poor, disabled, Black, and Brown communities is a feature, not a flaw. Not by chance, but by design.
You don’t really have to wonder how so many US citizens could vote from Trump in this context. It’s because this patriarchal, white supremacist system was made to elevate his white, male, cishet ass. Protecting him from accountability is a function of this – and now, that’s precisely what it will do.
Feature image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.