After four years of banana republic crazy, the United States has a government once more. It now has a foreign policy, even though the Biden administration will have its hands full with its domestic agenda.
Under President Joe Biden, America is finally doing what’s right: it put terrorists in the Middle East on notice, both freebooters in Syria and Iraq and in the governments in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The release of the intelligence report on Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s involvement in the brutal 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi signals the end of the crony politics of the Trump era and the return of America as an honest broker.
And then there is Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Washington has now taken a leadership role in imposing a series of sanctions on Russia for the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a prohibited chemical weapon. The sanctions are mild and won’t make too much of a difference, but it was a clear indication that the U.S. government is back in power in Washington. It is the America that won the Cold War and, to use a Russian phrase, mozhem povtorit’ — it can do so again.
The difference between the Reagan/Bush years and today is that the Biden government will have to fight two Cold Wars — one abroad against Russia and one at home, against Trumpism.
Last week’s Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, gathering in Orlando, Florida closely resembled a congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Three decades after the death of communism and the collapse of the USSR, the true Soviet heirs are not just Putin and his United Russia Party but Trump has his Republicans. And not only because Texas Senator Ted Cruz, having grown a patchy beard and a large gut, seems ready to win a Fidel Castro impersonator contest.
There are other similarities as well. The CPSU was ostensibly driven by ideology but ever since Vladimir Lenin got his way in 1917 and persuaded the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Provisional Government in St. Petersburg, it became a party fully subservient to its leader. Communism became what a succession of top party leaders said it was, so that by the time it came to an end, the Soviet system had very little to do with Marxism, and didn’t even resemble anything of what Lenin had in mind.
Just like Lenin in 1917, Donald Trump was an accidental winner in the presidential election (inaugurated in 2017, to make the resemblance clearer), but much like Lenin, his victory enabled him to completely subjugate his party and quash all dissent.
Today’s GOP call themselves conservatives but it is a party of Trump in which conservatism is what Trump says it is, not what traditional conservatives ever used to be. Free trade, fiscal probity, competence in government, family values, support for democracy and freedom around the world, loyalty to America’s Western allies, opposition to Russia, intolerance of corruption, and everything else promptly went by the wayside.
Appropriately enough, CPAC erected a statue of Donald Trump the way the CPSU used to build statues to Stalin while he was still alive.
Trump’s party is made up of true believers but its top brass — men like the aforementioned Cruz and many others — are like the Politburo apparatchiks of old: hard, cynical, ruthless men who sing praises to the Dear Leader but are only interested in their own careers.
In the 2020 election, the Republican Party had no election platform, essentially admitting that all it had was its leader. Nor did CPAC proposed any substantive program during its gathering. The only thing that animated the delegates was talk of a stolen or rigged election and hatred of democracy. Republicans at the state level are busy pushing legislation to limit voter participation and suppress “undesirable” votes. They are calling the federal bill to protect voting rights a power grab by the Democrats.
If you know your Soviet history, it will sound familiar. Soviet Union held regular elections but those elections were complete and utter sham. The only time the Bolsheviks allowed the people to vote freely was early on, when the country elected the Constituent Assembly in 1918. The Bolsheviks didn’t like the result and simply dissolved the elected body. Trumpists similarly tried to annul the results of the 2020 election both in courts and at the Capitol.
While Trumpism has no program and no real accomplishments, Trump and his party have borrowed a page from the Soviet propaganda manual and are touting his administration’s nonexistent achievements. The economy was the greatest in history, Americans were the richest they had ever been, and respect for the United States around the world had been at the highest level ever. All that was a blatant lie worthy of the Soviet-era Pravda.
There was an old joke about the Soviet kid listening to the propaganda radio about happy children in the Soviet Union, how well they are fed and educated. The kid starts to cry and demands to be taken to the Soviet Union.
Any American listening to Trump brag about his four years could similarly wish he could live in that wonderful America Trump built.
And, just like the Soviet of old and Putin today, Trumpism hates America the way it is currently constituted and constantly attacks it with its lies and distortions. That probably wouldn’t have mattered but for the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol — the Trumpist equivalent of the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks.
The party of Trump is a buffoon party, much like the Soviet Union was a buffoon state. But both are a danger nonetheless. Jan. 6, 2021, was God’s gift to Biden. Trumpism has shown its hand and revealed itself as America’s enemy, no different from communism. Biden has sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and he needs to take his duties seriously: contain Putin’s Russia and bring the full power of the United States upon Trumpism.
