Unforeseen

Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.

– James Madison, Federalist Papers #10

Although it’s difficult to say that the prescient Founders of this country did not forewarn us that men of factious tempers,” corrupt and sinister might show up and take over an electoral democracy, even a republic with representative government, it’s hard to imagine they could have imagined President Donald J. Trump.  It’s clear now that Trump has quite easily blown through our Constitutional defenses and, in doing so, along the way picked up an army of admirers. In the Ring of Constitutional Justice, we have yet to land a knockout punch. We find ourselves with fewer and fewer means to put down this one man’s attack.

Perhaps if we now had the strength of the Big Seven of our Founding Fathers among us to launch a counterattack? But those who have come forward, thus far, would, I conjecture, not declared independence or organized to write a Constitution. Regardless of what camp your tribe is in, it’s clear to all that Donald J. Trump is turning everything toward his own self-admiration, which means every standing order of things will be shattered, and he’s getting away with it.

This, certainly, from any insightful hermeneutics, was unforeseen.

In an article titled, “Politicians the Founders Warned You About,” Neil Fulton describes four political archetypes: the partisan, the demagogue, the ambitious and the tyrant. (UC Constitutional Quarterly, 2024) Through faction and division, the partisan puts party loyalty over the common good. Through agitation and appeal to mob instincts, the demagogue misrepresents and distorts the truth, while the will to power ambitious are “those for whom personal ends consistently define and dictate the public means. And, lastly, “the tyrant is a politician who abuses or seeks to abuse their power to unduly restrain liberty, punish or harm others, or cement their own power.”

Trump is all of these minus the partisan. He’s not any kind of Republican but simply a party of one, himself. We can see his reckless “doubling down” strategies when holding a losing hand do not in any way bolster his fellow Republicans’ chances in the coming Congressional elections. He has treated the Republican Party as a tool, a confederacy of dunces useful in neutralizing Democratic challenge and rejection.

What those who have bent themselves to Trump’s will foresee as their future after Trump cannot be clearly foreseen. Although it is difficult to foresee that a Republican who put allegiance to Trump before allegiance to the general welfare could run for president in 2028, ready to swear to the presidential oath of allegiance to country, this is not an unforeseeable possibility, given both the moral bankruptcy of all Trump’s appointees and the moral apathy of the 70 million who voted for him in 2024.

Everything President Trump has done wasn’t foreseen because what he is himself, only slightly recognizable as a fellow human, remains totally unexpected in his words and actions as a president. In short, we haven’t seen this alien mutation before holding court in the Oval Office.

 In a way, his appearance in a society of spin and spectacle, a winner-take-all, zero-sum economics grounded in unenlightened self-interest, should have been foreseen. Personal DIY determinations of truth, and a mockery of egalitarianism, mutual aid and the common good were in the air before Trump appeared. He is then what we should have expected and at the same time almost inconceivable, unforeseeable.  He is both at the apogee of what the U.S. has become – I doubt if the Founding Fathers would recognize what has come of their work  — and at the same time, ironically, what we are surprised to see, a result unforeseen. Could it be we are exceptional only because we birthed Trump?

This is troubling and tragic.

The story of the unforeseen in our lifetimes has its awesome moments, not on what we have on the Trump level, perhaps but interesting. Interesting, I think, because we question “Should we have known?”

9/11 wasn’t foreseen, but January 6^th was? MAGA’s appearance could not have been foreseen. Or if signs of how a campaign since Reaganomics was causing slow immiseration of many, should Occupy Wall St and MAGA been foreseen? If Karl Marx foresaw a growing instability in society caused by capitalism’s exploitation of workers and the power of capital eroding the common good, should the divided, unstable state of the U.S. politically and economically be described as unforeseen? Is where we are now explicable in some other terms, by some other criteria? Was it foreseeable that Neo-liberal presumptions regarding Market Rule and the attacks on government as wasteful and inefficient would lead to a president who would run a chainsaw through a government that had the power to hold him in check? Was it foreseeable that private entrepreneurial enterprise would promote private wealth and not the General welfare as stipulated in the Constitution and thus leave us as an oligarchy? Was it then foreseeable that the personal wealth of a presidential candidate and wealth as a decider in presidential elections would result when an egalitarian republic becomes an oligarchy? And then as a result of that, should it have been foreseeable that a president unchecked by the government he swore to uphold would mock the honesty of elections and thus the use of having them at all?

An eventuality Reaganites and Neoliberals didn’t foresee was survival in the American Mass Psyche of racist response going all the way to Nazi and White Supremacy ardor. That every Black movement from ML King to Black Lives Matter would lead to strengthening a white supremacy movement was not foreseeable before President Trump, or foreseeable only earlier in the Jim Crow days.  Similarly, the Democratic Party’s dropping the Labor vs. Capital fight and taking up diversity, equity and identity issues of a minority of voters proved to be an abandonment of an increasingly dysphoric and immiserated majority of American voters.

Some unpacking of the Unforeseen:

The demagogue genius of this president immediately settled on race hatred in order to gather a flock to him. The New York Times posted this: The 598 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List in 2019. Trump II has added to the list with Haitians eating their dogs and Somalis as “garbage” from a “Hellhole” country. What is interesting here is that “trickle down” economics, still holding on, did not foresee the way issues of passion, not reason, could explosively affect Market Rule goals. Also interesting is the Democratic Party’s not being able to foresee that its cultural identity DEI politics would feed the rhetoric of prejudice and hate, bringing Trump the presidency a second time as he filled the vacuum Democrats had abandoned.

So adamant was the party of Reagan that globalized free trade was a congenital possession and therefore the tariff stupidity of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 was as extinct as the dinosaur that when President Trump II on his first day in office launched a 25% tariff on the U.S.’s two biggest trading partners, Canada and Mexico, astonished Reaganite and Neoliberal Republicans were told to get with the program of a popularly elected president. And they did. No transgression by Trump of former sacred Conservative economic principles was stopped in either chamber of Congress, both held by a Republican majority. Whatever arguments the Chicago School of Economics had launched against restrictions on globalized free trade went silent before the arbitrary will of a president who, like Caesar pointing out to the Roman Senate his legions enforcing his will, extorted what he now called RINOs. He used his MAGA mob as leverage to bend Congress to his will. Not subtle. There have been casualties and so Republicans have fallen in line.

Was there any Republican before Trump who thought that their identity would be cancelled and recalibrated as the party of the MAGA, as Trump’s myrmidons?

A political party whose sole criterion of success is maximization of profits to shareholders and increasing return on investment had been effective in this for about 20% of the population right up to Trump’s first term. And continuing now. Trump corralled to his side enough of the discarded 80% to win two presidential elections. The complacent financial satisfaction of the 20% investor /dividend wealth class so far under Trump’s rule makes them compliant. Whether they could foresee his mafioso tactics and the blatant extent of Trump’s monetizing his presidency in violation of the emoluments clause is of small importance when the Mephistophelian contract nurtures, increases and protects wealth. The dark inhumanity of oligarchic rule lies here, in this.

The existential threat the wealth class has never been Trump, but instead a feared wave of socialism churned by Bernie Sanders’ electoral victories (sabotaged by Democrats) and most recently by Mamdani’s win in New York. The wealth class is acutely sensitive to such socialist awakenings. They are all foreseen by them.

The entrenched wealth power order that has been allowed to form within the roulette wheel logic of Market Rule campaigns for unitary executive power because unitary power is controllable power. Having one individual governable by those to whom that individual is indebted is, in a Market Rule view, much preferable to dealing with the shared power structure of a Constitutional democracy. That Trump has proven to be a messy object of control yet remains, apparently, less messy than the messiness of Congress, especially the 435 members of the House. The calculation of the oligarchists is this: The impossibilities of herding cats vs. the difficulties of leashing a sick mind.

Is another Trump presidency impossible to foresee simply because he is a historical anomaly among 47 presidencies? Those Republicans who might run in 2028 seem ready to keep the oligarchy going. Democrats may join them, as they have in the past. What a return to will be the kind of politics that everyone was used to before Trump. It wasn’t golden but it was sane and predictable for the most part. This is comforting after this time, where a flooded mind floods the zone of reality, now in our AI world, more difficult to find than ever before. AI will most likely generate a Trump simulacrum that will follow us day and night. Very foreseeable.

The question that the EU has is whether the passionate populist cadre that brought Trump to power will survive and thus infect and destabilize the next U.S. presidency. Interestingly, root causes nurturing Trump, which the EU needs to be convinced have been remedied, are neither Market Rule oligarchic driven or Leftist ideological dissent. White Supremacist? Nativist? Christian Nationalist? Manosphere? Authoritarian? Or simply cultish, Trump the new Jim Jones? Is there any spin and spectacle populism that is not subsumed over time or dies out totally forgotten? It is not now foreseeable whether Trump is rootless, or whether there are forces that brought him to us.

The wealth class has foreseen a socialist threat to that wealth since Eugene Debs accepted 1908 Socialist Party presidential nomination saying: “ I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself, but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands upon thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life.”

That threat to the wealth class is felt in Zohran Mamdani’s words in 2025: “Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.”

Although the party of wealth accumulation foresees a threat in a socialist economy and also in human-accelerated global warming, on a balance sheet, the greater threat to a Wealth/Power sector (West and East Coast) is national/international instability, one President Trump is now, for what can only be seen as pathological reasons, working manically to create. Because Reagan’s warning that the Federal government is our biggest problem, Republicans have sat back as Trump’s wrecking ball madman, Elon Musk, tore through the bureaucratic underlayment upon which what the Constitution set to law can be enacted. Less government the better say a wealth class knowing that it is only this government power that can check their Market Rule, a Rule nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.

Mindboggling, dumbfounding are Trump’s threats on multiple fronts. Despite the argument that Greenland ownership is a matter of national security, how many foresaw a president demanding it be given to him, like the Nobel Peace prize? Is it hard to foresee that NATO, in compliance with its own charter, cannot allow Trump to seize a sovereign state possession, a member of NATO? What rational mind foresaw the need to force Canada into U.S statehood? Or foresaw the necessity of a Delta Force jacking of one South American despot?

The problem with waiting for a national and international threat to the stability of the capitalist enterprise needs to do business and protect itself is that crashes are sudden; destruction may or not be retrievable in any calculated time frame. For instance, if Trump gets his way with control of the Federal Reserve, will its decisions go the way of international distrust as has the same distrust of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence?

I find it difficult to see how the Democratic Party did not foresee that leaning into Market Rule, going down a fantasy third way, would not disenfranchise, in the sense of having a political party representing them, 80% of Americans. Clinton’s “work not welfare” and “the era of big government is over” were followed by Obama’s allowing Wall Street to plan the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession that the practices of Wall Street had created. Biden’s legislation reawakened fears of a New Deal-like presidency. President Biden’s legislative agenda, particularly the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and CHIPS and Science Act, harkened back to the New Deal through large-scale federal investments in public works, clean energy, manufacturing, and social programs, aiming to rebuild America, create jobs, and address systemic challenges, often framed as a modern approach to public investment and economic security. Few could foresee the mental collapse Biden exhibited in his first debate with Trump, but what was clearly foreseen was the threat created by his returning his party to the politics of promoting the general welfare.

Perhaps the biggest failure of the Democratic Party has been not to foresee consequences of abandoning the politics of promoting the general welfare, which means addressing the problems and struggles of that percentage of the population whose support will enable you to win elections. Relief was not forthcoming for this group for 16 years of Democratic rule. A snake oil salesmen came along and made the sale.

This grifter didn’t foresee that Attorney General Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel would jump on the band wagon for release of the Epstein files, oblivious of the fact that it was their boss Trump who had reasons not to want the release of those files. This is comical. Not comical at all is Trump’s wickedness in not foreseeing or just not caring what would be dire results by dissolving USAID, appointing a crank anti-vaxxer as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and stripping millions of health care by denying ACA extensions. My suspicion that Trump does foresee the terrible consequences of his acts, the pain, suffering and death caused, means that our president is first a textbook sociopath before we can describe him as anything else.

 “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

“I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”

One wonders if the 70 million who voted for Trump II saw in him this ardent Christian spirit? As so many who now speak worshipfully of Trump display Christ’s cross, it appears no contradiction or blasphemy is seen here. Who could have foreseen such a stage primed for Jonathan Swift?

Unforeseeable certainly is the appearance and display of a post-truth devolution of thought in a world grounded in Enlightenment rational and empirical methods, and the enhancements of the Scientific Method. The ways in which the appearance of Trump was unforeseen are linked to the collapse of the ways in which rationality and realism discarded error from truth, validating ways of knowing and universally acknowledged understanding. Trump’s startling distortion of reasoning found a home within a cultural irrationalism of simulacra, a hyperreality in which capitalism had itself found a profit-making home.

Within this hyperreality, where the unforeseen finds a home, the zone having been flooded online and offline way before it became a political tactic, a difference between representation and reality, between word and world has dissolved so that accusations and assertions are sufficient to make the case. People of a certain look are declared illegals, declarations sufficient to detain them. Government workers are jettisoned simply by declaring them crooked and dishonest. That due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is now under Trump’s rule, replaced by the sole sufficiency of accusation; you are incriminated by expression alone. Any unidentified person in a boat in drug trafficking waters is guilty of threatening U.S. national security and will be summarily blown out of the water.  The logic of the day is that you can be shot and killed and afterwards, without evidence, be called a domestic terrorist.

All of this was unforeseen in a world, certainly not perfect but not insane, before Trump.

+++

On Tuesday, Trump veered off at a press conference and began to weave a reminiscence of Creedmoor, a psychiatric center he called an “insane asylum.”  Creedmoor.

In the summer of 1960, I worked at the Jamaica, New York Post Office on 164^th St, and I recall “throwing” mail with a Creedmoor address and asking about it. “It’s an asylum.” Trump remembered the huge building with many barred windows and mused about the inmates who “You know, weren’t getting out.” He took a pot shot at policies that released the “insane” who were now roaming the streets (surely, in Blue States!) homeless. I made no sense of Trump’s errant musings about Creedmoor until “Pumps” Sullivan, Jennifer Welch’s co-host on the YouTube I’ve Had It podcast (IHIP), suggested that Trump’s rambling about an asylum for the mentally disturbed was either a signal to himself or to us that he sensed he belonged in a place like that.

Perhaps the daily diagnosis of his mental state (James Carville: “He’s just fucking crazy”) has gotten through to Trump himself, and that prominent 17-story building – Creedmoor –with countless barred windows, an icon of a dark fixation, is what he foresees as how he ends.  This is a compelling level of the unforeseen, what is present yet not to be made visual. What, for instance, makes MAGA live on, or has brought Donald J. Trump on our stage, may remain unforeseen in this way.

The post Unforeseen appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joseph Natoli.