AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): Donald Trump once promised the American people: "We're going to win so much that you're going to be tired of winning." But if this situation is called "victory," then America cannot bear even a little more of it.
Field realities show that the United States is retreating economically, losing its international credibility, and witnessing the departure of tourists, workers, and human capital. Even immigration, which has always been the lifeblood of America's economic growth, innovation, and labor force, has reversed course. According to some estimates, the United States is now experiencing net negative migration, meaning the number of people leaving exceeds the number entering.
Instead of prosperity, Americans have received an economy in which corporate profits and stock market indices exert pressure that falls on ordinary households, leading to dwindling savings, increasing debt, and steady erosion of wages by basic living costs.
Instead of global respect, the United States is now seen by allies, investors, and potential visitors alike as an unstable, hostile, unpredictable, and unsafe country.
The promise of ending wars has turned into increased military mobilization, intensified tensions, blank checks for the war machine, and new pretexts for expanding executive power.
The Language of Extra-legal Rulers
Trump has declared, "He who saves his country violates no law." This rhetoric is the language of kings, dictators, and strongmen who believe their intentions place them above the law. This is while experts believe that the U.S. Constitution was written precisely to prevent such a mindset from taking root.
The Conundrum of Trump-Style Victory
The fundamental problem with this type of victory is that its realization requires the defeat of Americans:
- For a police state to win, the Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures) must lose.
- For a surveillance state to win, privacy must lose.
- For the war machine to win, peace must lose.
- For the executive branch to win, the separation of powers must lose.
- For the oligarchs to win, working families must lose.
- For the propaganda machine to win, truth must fade.
- For a bully to win, the U.S. Constitution must lose.
Trump-style victory is, in fact, the latest branding campaign for an old con: convincing people that they are winning while stripping them of their power to govern themselves.
The Real Winners and Losers
The perennial winners are the same: defense contractors, data brokers, private prison operators, surveillance corporations, lobbyists, political fixers, Wall Street speculators, and bureaucratic power centers that feed on fear, crisis, and control. The real losers in this game are the American people.
The Proper Measure of Judgment
The true measure of any administration is not in the loftiness of its claims, nor in the number of enemies it punishes, nor in the multitude of executive orders it signs, nor in its mastery of media headlines. Rather, the true measure is this: Are the people freer? Are their rights more protected? Do they have greater security against government abuse? Do they have more power to hold the powerful accountable? By this measure, America is not winning. It is, in every sense, losing.
The U.S. president can call the current situation victory, his acolytes can call it victory, and the media can mold defeat into victory for the people, but reality is being shaped elsewhere.
**************
End/ 345A
