Day after day my readers from the #MAGA crowd keep hoping I’ll be proven wrong about Donald Trump, and day after day all they ever get is more signs that I’m right.
In a new interview on CNBC, President Trump said that he is now open to supporting the infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, the free trade deal whose toxic globalism Trump’s populist 2016 campaign made a key point of criticizing at every opportunity. The president added that he’d only consider signing on to the TPP “if we made a much better deal than we had,” but no matter what Trump’s definition of a “better deal” is the fact that he’d consider signing such a trade agreement under any circumstances is already necessarily a violation of his campaign promises of replacing multilateral trade agreements with one-on-one bilateral deals.
“There’s no way to fix TPP,” Trump said in 2016. “We need bilateral trade deals. We do not need to enter into another massive international agreement that ties us up and binds us down, like TPP does.”
No matter what Trump’s hypothetical new and improved TPP would look like, it would necessarily be another massive international agreement. This would necessarily be yet another broken campaign promise, and Trump’s base will have yet another sign that he has picked up the “false song of globalism” he campaigned against, both militarily and economically. His “bilateral trade deals” were as fake as his non-interventionism.
Bernie Sanders summons team to discuss 2020 https://t.co/QnpHFEOHXapic.twitter.com/oQyjLpgGu1
— POLITICO (@politico) January 25, 2018
At the same time Trump supporters learned that they may be getting the TPP after all, on the other side of the gap Democrats were hearing that Bernie Sanders has gathered a team to talk about the possibility of a 2020 presidential run. This has drawn excitement from progressives all across America, but in some strange way I can’t help but feel more or less the same about both these two stories. As the MAGA crowd slowly loses hope in their savior, the Berners are gaining hope in theirs.
But there is no savior coming. This game doesn’t work that way.
Not that you will see me discouraging people from supporting Sanders if that’s what the 2020 election boils down to. American progressives want the things Sanders says he wants to give them, and the awkward, clunky shuffle towards what the people want is what will ultimately overthrow the oligarchic cancer which has metastasized throughout the nation. Sanders has a lot of problems, most notably his continued collaboration with the warmongering Democratic party and facilitation of the despicable Russiagate psyop, but I could see him playing some role as a tool of the people against the sociopathic elites who are oppressing them.
But that’s what this is all about: a people’s revolution. It will never, ever, ever be about one man or woman who will swoop in and save the day, because no matter how awesome that man or woman is they’ll only ever be just one small person in the face of the vast omnicidal ecocidal threshing machine that is the US power establishment. Neither Bernie nor Trump are in any position to save the world from this machine, and we’ve been seeing this reflected in their actions as they choose the establishment over the people time and time again. But collectively we all can kill it.
Bernie Would’ve Won… And He Wouldn’t Have Been Much Better#BernieWouldHaveWon#BernieSanders#DeepState#Oligarchyhttps://t.co/9xEGWI2U8Q
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 21, 2017
Trump Isn’t Another Hitler. He’s Another Obama.#MAGA#Trump#Democrats#Republicanshttps://t.co/ar5t7dO43i
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 6, 2018
A lot of Berners still maintain the belief that the Democratic establishment sabotaged Sanders’ campaign because they were afraid of him, but that’s simply not true. Bernie is just one man; the establishment was never afraid of Bernie. They were afraid of you. They were afraid of the populist insurgency throwing an unapproved candidate in the path of the Anointed Queen Hillary despite being instructed by the mass media propaganda machine over and over again that they were not permitted to choose him. They were afraid of the people. And they should be.
So sure, support Bernie 2020 if that’s where this journey ends up taking you, but don’t you dare give him your power. Don’t you dare place your faith in him that he will fix everything like Obama’s supporters naively did in 2008 and Trump’s supporters naively did in 2016. Don’t you dare place your faith in him that he will overthrow the oligarchy and restore power to the people, because he won’t. He can’t, no matter how well-intentioned he might be. Only you can do that, in collaboration with your brothers and sisters across the nation.
Don’t trust Bernie. Don’t trust Trump. Use them as tools to the extent that they are useful, but don’t you dare ever make the mistake of believing them to be more than that. They aren’t what’s going to save the world from its problems. You are.
Source: https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/stop-looking-for-saviors-6009aa7528df
