Why did Trump win the election? Because successive presidents weakened America

I celebrated my 79th birthday over a week ago, leaving 78 to Donald Trump as he tried to see if he could remodel the world exclusively in the interests of the United States. 

Meanwhile I went about my rather more limited vista of trying to get government to grasp poverty by the scruff of the neck as it eats up 40% of state monies, and build a Ministry of Poverty Prevention. But my sandcastle, in comparison with Trump’s seismic rearranging of the tectonic plates of world trade, will prove equally difficult to achieve. Both us oldsters, it would seem, are biting off more than we can chew. Of course, Trump seems to forget that the US has only become the big and powerful dominating economy over the past 80 years because of the world. 

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If the world didn’t exist then America may well have been a sweet little rural backwater where the legacy of its removal of the country’s Indigenous folk, and its dependency on African slave labour, would have been its biggest problems. 

But hell no. Late in the day as the world moved from the 19th to the 20th century, the US grabbed the Philippines and meddled in the Caribbean with the Spanish – etc – and generally cast off its reticence to get involved imperially in the world. Having just completed the Panama Canal, the world was coming to America; and America was coming to the world. 

The First World War brought America to Europe en masse to fight its war, from which it came out a dominant player and a place of quick wealth through its enormous industrial base and speculative economic capitalism. A decade after the war its investment frenzy toppled the economic belief system, in a way not dissimilar to the little boy commenting that rather than new clothes, the emperor was bollock-naked. The 1929 Wall Street crash didn’t just screw America into a mass depression, it screwed the world because America was the world, in terms of finance. And the world was America, entwined in its global reach. 

Every time I have a birthday I am reminded of history and its incredible currency in our everyday lives. Three days and one year before my birth, the Russians liberated Auschwitz, on the 27 January. We commemorate the Holocaust on that day because of the horrendous spectacle the young Russian soldiers encountered when they discovered the murdered and liberated the hardly-living survivors of Nazi ideology.

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Now 80 years later we seem to still live the legacy of that war, with Russia’s obsession with its border lands – hence the Ukraine war – and Israel leaving a mountain of dead Palestinians in its obsession with its own security. Can we ever escape that war, the one that ended when I was minus one? Of course, Trump is not the first to trumpet the need for America to take care of its own interests first. After the war that finally made America the proud possessor of half the world’s wealth, America’s interests caused it to invest vast amounts of its taxpayers’ money in quelling rebellion and anti-capitalism. 

Through the Marshall Plan it helped Europe to its feet and made sure that Joe Stalin did not make his way to the English Channel. It squashed regimes, like Iran’s in 1953, and helped install the Shah of Persia into absolute power, on behalf of US interests. It fiddled and undermined democracy in South and Central America and supported dictators who favoured US interests. 

It meddled in a world that Trump now wishes to rearrange and make supplicant once again, as if it’s still the postwar world. And of course, Russia wishes its former glory postwar days back again. So what happened the year before Trump and I were born still echoes and rumbles on to the detriment of world peace and order. 

Unfortunately for Trump, 79 in July, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The rust-belt job-exporting regimes of Clinton, Bush and Obama, dancing to Wall Street’s tune of exporting manufacturing to China so that profits could be increased, is impossible to unravel. The weakening of the US manufacturing base helped produce two major phenomena: it produced the billionaires and enriched Wall Street immeasurably. And it produced the malcontents in the ‘flyover states’ who lost their security, prosperity and community through job exportation, and who voted en masse for Trump. 

Trump’s triumph is the product of the weakening of everyday America by successive American presidents. China won Trump’s election for him by gobbling up America’s jobs and creating the left behind mentality. 

My sandcastle was launched on 29 January in the House of Lords in the form of my bill to create a Ministry of Poverty Prevention. An ongoing debate with the powers that be about poverty as their biggest spending item, a corrupter of their budgets that undermines their good intentions. Teachers want to teach but poverty creeps into the classroom and limits their ability to do their job. Doctors and nurses want to repair people back to health, but with 50% of patients in food poverty it’s virtually impossible. Police officers want to make you safe in your home and on the streets but are stymied by crime-producing poverty. 

No government department’s budgets are safe from the invidious power of poverty to pervert all human relations and limit their potential. None of us are safe from poverty; either because we’re in it or because it destroys our common wellbeing. 

As for that other oldster Donald Trump, he may find himself hoisted by his own petard in trying to punish the world for not putting America first. Perhaps we should review the situation when he’s having his 79th birthday. Six months is a long time in world-changing politics.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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