Within this very large anti-Trump camp, we all have different stories about how we felt on that night/day. For many, the defining emotion was shock that this could happen in the United States. For a great many others, it was grief at seeing long-held knowledge about the depth of US racism and misogyny so vividly confirmed. For others, the feeling was one of loss at watching the first female candidate for United States president lose her chance to become a role model for their children. Still others were flooded with feelings of rage that such a compromised candidate was ever put forward against Trump in the first place. And for millions inside the US and out, the primary emotion was fear—a raw bodily knowledge that Trump’s presidency would act as a catalyst to unleash extreme acts of racism, violence, and oppression. Many people experienced a mixture of these emotions, and more.
And many also understood that this election result was not only about one man in one country. Trump is but one strand of a seemingly global contagion. We are seeing a surge of authoritarian, xenophobic, far-right politics—from Marine Le Pen in France, to Narendra Modi in India, to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, to the UK Independence Party, to Recep Tayyip Erdo?an in Turkey and all of their counterparts (some explicitly neo-fascist) threatening to take power around the world.
The reason I am sharing my own experience of election day/night in Sydney is that I can’t shake the feeling that there is something important to learn from the way Trump’s win was able to cut short our conversation, how it severed plans for a forward-looking agenda without so much as a debate. It was perfectly understandable that we all felt that way on election day. But if we accept the premise that, from here on in, the battles are all defense, all about holding our ground against Trump-style regressive attacks, then we will end up in a very dangerous place indeed. Because the ground we were on before Trump was elected is the ground that produced Trump. Ground many of us understood to constitute a social and ecological emergency, even without this latest round of setbacks.
Of course the attacks coming from Trump and his kindred demagogues around the world need resisting fiercely. But we cannot spend the next four years only playing defense. The crises are all so urgent, they won’t allow us that lost time. On one issue I know a fair amount about, climate change, humanity has a finite window in which to act, after which protecting anything like a stable climate becomes impossible. And as we’ll see in Chapter 4, that window is closing fast.
So we need, somehow, to fight defense and offense simultaneously—to resist the attacks of the present day and to find space to build the future we need. To say no and yes at the same time.
But before we can get to what we want instead of Trump and all that he and his administration represent, we need to take an unflinching look at where we are and how we got here, as well as how things will likely get a lot worse in the short term. And, with respect to the latter, be advised: the doom is pretty persuasive. But we can’t let it be debilitating. Mapping this territory is tough, but it’s the only way to avoid repeating past mistakes and arrive at lasting solutions.
Not a Transition, but a Corporate Coup
What Donald Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires represents is a simple fact: the people who already possess an absolutely obscene share of the planet’s wealth, and whose share grows greater year after year—the latest figure from Oxfam shows eight men are worth as much as half the world—are determined to grab still more.
According to NBC News in December 2016, Trump’s picks for cabinet appointments had a staggering combined net worth of $14.5 billion (not including “special adviser” Carl Icahn, who’s worth more than $15 billion on his own). Moreover, the key figures who populate Trump’s cabinet are more than just a representative sample of the ultrarich. To an alarming extent, he has collected a team of individuals who made their personal fortunes by knowingly causing harm to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, and to the planet itself, often in the midst of crisis. It almost appears to be some sort of job requirement.
There’s junk banker Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary, once chairman and lead investor in “foreclosure machine” OneWest, which kicked tens of thousands of people out of their homes after the 2008 financial collapse. There’s Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, the largest private oil company in the world. The company he headed bankrolled and amplified junk climate science for decades, and lobbied fiercely, behind the scenes, against meaningful international climate action, all while figuring out how Exxon could profit from a warming world. And there are also military and surveillance contractors and paid lobbyists who make up a staggering number of Trump’s defense and Homeland Security appointments.
We Were on a Roll
It can be easy to forget, but before Trump’s election upset, regular people were standing up to battle injustices represented by many of these very industries and political forces, and they were starting to win. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly powerful presidential campaign, though ultimately unsuccessful, had Wall Street fearing for its bonuses and had won significant changes to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name were forcing a national debate about systemic anti-Black racism and militarized policing, and had helped win a phase-out of private prisons and reductions in the number of incarcerated Americans. By 2016, no major sporting or cultural event—from the Oscars to the Super Bowl—could take place without some recognition of how the conversation about race and state violence had changed. Women’s movements were turning sexual violence into a front-page issue, shining a spotlight on “rape culture,” changing the conversation about high-profile men accused of sexual crimes like Bill Cosby, and helping force the ouster of Roger Ailes from the top job at Fox News, where he was accused of sexually harassing more than two dozen women (allegations he denies).
The climate movement was also on a roll, winning victory after victory against oil pipelines, natural gas fracking, and Arctic drilling, very often with resurgent Indigenous communities in the lead. And more victories were on the way: the climate accord negotiated in Paris in 2015 contained commitments to keep temperatures at a level that would require trillions of dollars’ worth of extremely profitable fossil fuel assets to stay in the ground. For a company like ExxonMobil, a realization of those goals was an existential threat.
And as the meeting I attended in Sydney suggested, there was a growing understanding, in the United States and beyond, that the pressing task ahead was to connect the dots among these movements in order to build a common agenda, and with it a winning progressive coalition—one grounded in an ethic of deep social inclusion and planetary care.
The Trump administration, far from being the story of one dangerous and outrageous figure, should be understood partly in this context—as a ferocious backlash against the rising power of overlapping social and political movements demanding a more just and safer world. Rather than risk the possibility of further progress (and further lost profits), this gang of predatory lenders, planet-destabilizing polluters, war and “security” profiteers joined forces to take over the government and protect their ill-gotten wealth. After decades of seeing the public sphere privatized in bits and pieces, Trump and his appointees have now seized control of the government itself. The takeover is complete.
Granting the Corporate Wish List