Trump panic
Forget everything you have seen and heard from and about Trump. That was version 1.0 of Trump, designed to win the Republican primary and win the presidency, starting with an initial consensus in the single digits. Now the update to Trump 2.0 will be loaded, which will have a completely different interface and a different content.
Therefore, the anti-Trump hysteria of the New York liberals, the New York Times and its major commentators such as Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd appears truly out of place – and counterproductive for the institutions themselves. Luigi Zingales is right in admonishing, in the same columns of the NYTimes, the Democrats and the American left not to fall into the same sterile and masochistic obsession that the Italian left has developed for 20 years towards Berlusconi, of whom Trump seems to be the evolution natural.
Trump's a priori refusal, like Berlusconi's, is the deadliest electoral machine to extend Trump's mandate by 4 years. This a priori refusal is the instantaneous glue which in Italy welded Berlusconi's electorate for twenty years and which, in the USA, will weld the one that brought Trump to the White House. Trump's electorate is diverse, heterogeneous and transversal, as only a special historical contingency can determine; an electorate that sticks together more emotionally than politically and that if rejected, despised and mocked, along with its occasional candidate, can clump like gluten in the gut. It is clear that the bloc that elected Trump needs to be tackled in a very different way. In this case, a re-reading of Gramsci would not hurt, since it has also been translated into English.
Team Trump
Trump's eclectic and heterogeneous team of choice also responds to a logic and reveals an intention. Obama's eight years have been, apart from some notable achievements, eight difficult and rather inconclusive years for Americans. The president was personable, his oratory spellbinding, Obama's and the First Lady's righteousness, athleticism, poise, and cult of political correctness covered up the meager results of the Obama team. There was a lot of smoke and less fire. Now Trump wants to give Americans and other nations a clear sign of change and subvert the feeling that Washington is the Vienna of 1910: a lovable and open place to have a couple of rounds of waltzes among very elegant and polite people as the world goes by in rolls. Trump's team must bring an abrasive message to world public opinion: in this film there is no Cary Grant in loafers, but Jack Nicholson with an ax… and there is certainly no shortage of madness.
Trump's picks aren't a bunch of warmongers, oilmen, and Wall Street sharks (as the NYTimes portrays them). They are people immersed in the business world who abhor political correctness for its own sake. They are managers accustomed to conducting very tough negotiations in
rather complex situations. Their "ideal" is very minimalist: to bring home something concretely positive for American life, measurable first of all on a material level.
Somehow the characteristics of this team bring to mind the style and attitude of one of the most active presidents in American history, Lyndon B. Johnson; also mocked by East Coast liberals. Let us not forget that it was Johnson's abrasiveness, rough-and-tumble play bordering on decency, and Texan cattle-market culture that produced some of the most advanced achievements in American history. Johnson's was one of the most fruitful periods at the legislative level and his main merit was to make the goals achieved with those visionary laws irreversible. Then there was Vietman that overshadowed the work of this excellent president from the south, who handed the south over to the Republicans and turned against his own party. One could say, simplifying as much as possible, that Kennedy is to Johnson what Obama is to Trump.
Trump Agenda
If it is true that in the Trump administration we will find the same concreteness and determination as Johnson's, it is even more true that Trump's political agenda will certainly not be Johnson's. It will be Ronald Reagan's. Reagan is perhaps the only port where Trump's rambling boat can land, even if the blond new president also makes no secret of his admiration for Richard Nixon and the Metternickian foreign policy of that administration. Even if foreign policy will be something absolutely ancillary to America's economic, energy and migration policy choices.
We see the touchpoints of the Reagan agenda and what the Trump agenda could be. First of all, elect conservative orthodoxy judges to the supreme court. Many sections of the conservative electorate have chosen Trump with the certainty that judges will be elected who are not willing to compromise on abortion, LGBTQ people, multiculturalism, the protection of citizens of European origin and finally the climate. Let us not forget that it was Ronald Reagan who appointed Anthony Scalia, who died in 2016, as chief judge. Scalia, for 30 years, was the undisputed point of reference for conservatives of all tendencies and one of the most influential judges in the history of court.
Trump, like Reagan did with the space shield program, intends to strengthen the defense system and the armed forces as a whole; a measure he will use as leverage in negotiations with global competitors such as China. Trump's action towards migratory flows and the 11 million illegal immigrants living in the USA will also fall within Reagan's vision of law&order. There will be a sort of Reagonimics revisited and based on the reduction of taxation - also aimed at favoring the repatriation of profits from American companies operating globally (see Apple) - on the reduction of the trade deficit, on the strong dollar, on the deregulation of the economic activity – Trump's infrastructure program will not be in public traction – and finally on economic patriotism – American work for American businesses.
Apocalypse Trump?
Ronald Reagan's presidency, also experienced very badly by the progressive public opinion of the time, left an important footprint in American history like that of Lincoln, Ted and Delano Roosevelt, and the Kennedy-Johnson era. Trump's challenge is to live up to
this agenda, otherwise goodbye mid-term and second term elections. His electorate is very fragile. Trump won't touch something that works for the sake of an ideology he doesn't have. Trump is not Ted Cruz or even Paul Ryan. Despite all the hubbub at Capitilo Hill, the parts of Obamacare that work will remain. Trump shares the maxim of his opposite, Deng Xiaoping: "it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, the important thing is that you catch the mouse".
There will be no apocalypse for the United States and the world, other than that of Trump himself.
