Things to come

The American people have spoken loudly in the presidential elections that took place yesterday, and the entire world is listening.

Not only did the American electorate chose Donald Trump as the next president of the USA, he was also given full control of both houses of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the US Senate, with a Republican majority in both houses. This in turn means that he will be able to get approved in Congress whatever he wants turned into law. It also means that the Judiciary will come under his control, since after the passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia the Supreme Court was left equally divided between a liberal wing and a conservative wing, and this split balance of power inside the US Supreme Court can be easily upset either way by putting in the bench a Justice who will be either a well known liberal or a well known conservative. And we already know the kind of Justice the 45th president of the USA wants to put in the bench. As a matter of fact, considering the ages of the all the Justices now serving in the Supreme Court, it is highly likely that Trump may end up replacing several of them, packing the Court with not just a moderately liberal group of conservatives but perhaps even a group of Justices leaning towards the far right.

In essence, the separation of powers under the US Constitution so carefully forged by the founding fathers has been wiped out. Make no mistake, we are witnessing a major historical shift in the US government, and the repercussions will be felt wide and deep for many generations to come. The system of checks and balances was erased the past November 8th, and it is not a just a brief historical fluke as many would like to believe.

Some far reaching repercussions can be expected almost immediately after Donald Trump takes office. Here is just a few of them:

• Rowe vs. Wade will be overturned. Abortion will be outlawed inside the USA and things will be reverted back to the way they were before 1973 after the landmark decision of Rowe versus Wade. This will outlaw almost any kind of abortion except perhaps in the cases of rape or incest, and will affect profoundly the personal lives of every woman currently living in the USA, including those white college educated women who voted for Donald Trump. His points of view on this issue are well known and have been clearly stated. President Trump will not even need to intervene directly on this issue; all he will have to do is fill the Supreme Court vacancy by nominating some judge who can be sympathetic to the idea of overturning Rowe vs. Wade. Once this is done, the impact will most likely be felt not just by the current generations by the next generations, considering how difficult it is to overturn a Supreme Court decision.


• Obamacare will be scraped. Trump as candidate vowed to do so, and he will have in Congress all the votes he needs to accomplish this. The immediate impact will be felt by the less privileged economic classes, especially those in the working class minorities such as the Afroamericans who stayed home instead of going out to vote in the recent presidential election as they were asked to do by president Obama himself. It will also be felt by many of the blacks who actually voted for Donald Trump. Let us recall that the basic idea behind Obamacare was to provide health insurance protection for all, i.e. every man, woman and child now living in the USA. And if Obamacare is wiped out by a presidential decree backed by a servile Republican Congress, what will replace it? Go figure. The most likely scenario is that things will revert to the way they were before Obamacare was set in motion.


• The “dream” of the dreamers is gone for good. It Trump keeps his word on deporting every undocumented immigrant now on American soil, it is very likely that those undocumented college educated immigrants who were benefited by the Obama executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (better known as DACA) will be kicked out of the USA for good, no exceptions. This was, after all, one of the most solid promises made by Donald Trump when he was a candidate, and will be greatly facilitated by the fact that the personal files and data of all those undocumented immigrants who voluntarily registered to obtain such benefit is now in the hands of the US federal government, the US immigration agents already know where to look for them and find them. If Trump is a man of his word, he will do just as he promised to in his rallies with all those who voted for him. Those “dreamers” who believed the Dream ACT could one day become a reality would be wise to have their luggage ready in case US immigration agents come looking for them.


• Tens of thousands of families in the USA can expect to be broken up for good and forever. This is inevitable, if Donald Trump does good on his promise to punish those who broke the US immigration laws. In his 10-point immigration plan, Trump promised to “immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties” which targets for immediate rollbacks not only the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) mentioned above but also the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA). The latter, DAPA, would have deferred deportation for as many as five million undocumented immigrants, and it would have allowed them to work the U.S. DAPA was immediately challenged by the attorneys general of 26 states, and a Texas court placed a nationwide injunction on the program while the legal challenge proceeded through the courts. The Supreme Court, by deadlocking in a 4-4 tie in the legal challenge on DAPA, effectively upheld the lower court’s decision, which was merely a nationwide injunction putting the program on hold while the legal challenge against DAPA. The final intent is a massive deportation of all undocumented parents of many US legal residents and many US citizens.


• The US will pull out of most free trade agreements with the rest of the world. First in line will be the North American Free Trade Agreement otherwise known as NAFTA, and the views of Trump regarding NAFTA are well known. However, it is unlikely that there will be a newer version of any kind of free trade agreement, especially with Mexico, since the absolute rule the Mexican president once had over the Mexican Congress in what used to be a single party system is now defunct (the party of Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI, has just scuttled his legislative proposal for the legalization of same sex marriages), and there is even a widespread opposition in Mexico against NAFTA (made well known to the rest of the world with the Zapatista rebellion), an opposition that is shared by many important Mexican entrepreneurs and tycoons, which translates into an impossibility of forging any kind of new free trade deal with Mexico. Make no mistake about it, once NAFTA is gone, it will be gone for good. The only possible replacement of a scraped NAFTA could be through the Trans Pacific Partnership initiative (otherwise known as TPP) now in its final stages. But Trump has already stated his personal views on TPP. As president, Trump can pull the USA out of NAFTA for good and forever without even requiring the approval of Congress. Indeed, Article 2205 of the NAFTA trade agreement makes it clear that the president of the USA can pull out the country off NAFTA unilateraly by only giving an advance written statement confirming the pullout to Mexico and Canada six months ahead of time. Besides pulling the USA out of NAFTA, Trump can start imposing heavy tariffs upon products manufactured by US companies that have relocated to Mexico, tariffs so huge that there will be no economic incentive for them to remain in Mexico or to leave the USA and go to Mexico. In theory this would help bring back many US companies and would help save jobs in the USA, helping American workers at manufacturing facilities such as Carrier, where the workers there are fully expecting Donald Trump to make good on the promise he made to them. If he does not keep the promise he made to them, it is most certain that they will end up being very very sad with a lot of tears in their eyes and with their hearts broken. There is just one catch in the issue of imposing stiff tariffs to just one country. Mexico can resort to the World Trade Organization (WTO), of which the USA is a member nation. Under the WTO rules, the USA cannot simply impose tariffs individually upon any nation it so chooses. It has to do it on an equal basis to all other nations. To resolve these issues, the WTO has a Dispute Settlement Body entrusted with making decisions on trade disputes between countries, and it even has an Appellate Body. Further complicating things for Mister Trump is the fact that one of the WTO judges is a Mexican by the name of Ricardo Ramírez Hernández. If Trump does not wish to abide by the rulings of the WTO, he can decide to pull the USA entirely out of the WTO, sending a message to the rest of the world that the USA does not need the rest of the world at all. But in such an event, it can be anticipated that there would be an equivalent reply, with the rest of the world deciding it does not need the USA either, thus putting millions of US export depending jobs at stake. This sort of thing has taken place several times in the past elsewhere, it is the kind of thing that has given rise to what are known as trade wars. If that happens, it could end up raising inside the USA the phantasm of a new economic slump just as the country was beginning to come out of the Great Recession. But Donald Trump is convinced that he knows what he is doing, better than anybody else, so in the end he will be the one who will make the decisions and thus carry a great social economic experiment taking the entire USA for a ride just as President Reagan did with Reaganomics. Bottom line: if Trump is true to his word and keeps all his promises, there will be no free trade deals with the rest of the world. The official posture of the US government could end up being that the USA does not need the rest of the world to grow and prosper, a point of view that could find a stern reply from a plethora of nations arriving at the same conclusion, that the rest of the world does not need the USA to grow and prosper either. In essence, it could all end  up being a return to the isolationism school of thought that has shaped US foreign policies since its birth.


• Stiff tariffs will be imposed on countries such as China now flooding the USA with cheap goods. This is another thing Trump has promised to do as president, and many of his supporters, especially those living in the Rust Belt, will follow very closely since it is the sole reason many of them voted for him. He has talked about imposing a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the United States. With a Republican Congress in which the Democrats have no voice on this issue, this can be done a few days after Trump becomes president. There is just one slight inconvenience he did not mention to his followers. Almost immediately after such a stiff tariff is applied against Chinese imports, there will be an almost immediate and sharp jump on the prices of many goods now sold inside the USA. Anybody who finds this hard to believe should take a close look at the labels of many manufactured goods now sold in places like BestBuy and Walmart, where he/she will find “Made in China” on the label. Just add 45 per cent to the cost of any Chinese manufactured item now sold in the USA retail stores, and it will be easy to figure out what the cost will end up being. The US consumer, and especially all those who voted for Trump (there will be no exceptions here!) will have to pay for this. And what about buying similar goods made in the USA? Well, all those US goods, considering the wages that will have to be paid to unionized workers, may end up costing the same or perhaps even more than the Chinese goods smacked with the 45 per cent Trump tariff. We are talking here about a decrease in the US standard of living likely to be felt almost immediately once this Trump promise becomes a reality.


• America must brace itself for a de-industrialization process. Trump promised to create many jobs inside the USA. But there is a hard fact that has already been pointed out in this blog. A lot of the jobs lost by the average blue collar worker in the USA have not been lost due to those jobs being exported to places like China and Mexico, but rather to the growing use of automation and robotics, something that was stated here in a previous entry. The only way to revert this trend is to actually ban or impede the use of automation and robotics in US manufacturing plants. But this is precisely the kind of thing that allowed America to remain competitive! Never mind. It can still be done, forcing US companies to turn their backs on their use of technology, thus making America lose its technological leadership in the process and pricing its products out of the world market. This would really be something to see and witness.


• Things may be about to become much harder for America in the Middle East. Just when ISIS is in retreat in Iraq with the strategic city of Mosul about to be retaken by the Iraqui troops, the American people have elected a president with an anti-Muslim rhetoric who has promised to bomb almost everything in Iraq and Syria and even take away their oil in the region. This is precisely the kind of US government threat that ISIS was begging for and will love to use in its propaganda, and even if ISIS is crushed it may be anticipated that there will be new waves of crazed Muslim kamikazes poised to fight against what Muslims in the region call the Great Satan. As bad as things are right now in the Middle East, they could become far worse when Trump takes over the Oval Office and just by doing so he unifies all the Muslim countries in the Middle East (including long time standing US allies such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar) in a common cause against America. In order to meet the challenge, and no longer with any allies in the area except Israel, the deployment of US ground troops on Middle Eastern soil seems unavoidable, and it could require reinstating the draft in order to fight Trump's wars on the other side of the world, with body bags returning to the US just as they did during the Vietnam era.


• Ukraine to be left defenseless in the name of improved USA-Russia diplomatic relations. Donald Trump has made no secret of his great admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin whom he has called a presidential role model, with whom he expects to establish a great friendship, and this admiration and gesture of a great future friendship is equally corresponded, and in fact it began even before the November 8th presidential election took place, so much so that the Russian government was repeatedly accused of meddling in US internal political affairs with the leaks of thousands of private emails thought to be damaging against presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a slew of emails supposedly procured by Russian hackers working for the Russian government, an important factor that may have been decisive in a close election, something for which no doubt Donald Trump will forever be extremely grateful to president Vladimir Putin, all of which foreshadows a great future alliance and friendship between the USA and Russia. But this mellowing of diplomatic tensions between both countries will have to come at a price. Indeed, right now in Ukraine there are a lot of worried faces of people who can only see ahead a scenario of gloom and doom, people who are convinced that they have been stabbed in the back and betrayed by the American voters, especially those voters from the rural areas. It is imperative at this point to recall how the current USA-Russia diplomatic tensions came about. It all started when the former pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted on 22 February 2014 (less than three years ago) by the Ukrainian parliament that voted to remove him from his post. After his ousting, talks began in the Ukrainian parliament about joining the European Union and even joining NATO, thus bringing one of the most important remnants of the Cold War straight at the strategic border between Ukraine and Russia. In response, Putin ordered an all-out military invasion of Crimea, and backed up with elite Russian troops and sophisticated Russian weaponry (such as the missiles that brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17) an internal uprise in Ukraine that is still going on, spearheaded by Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists. Many analysts firmly believe that Russia did not carry out a full scale invasion of Ukraine because of very stern warnings given by president Obama. But with president Obama gone, and with Donald Trump ushering a new era of friendship and cooperation with Russia, the main door is being left open for that Russian invasion of Ukraine to be carried out. In essence, Ukraine and the Ukrainians have been left hanging in the balance by the American voters. But even more important, much more important, the future of NATO itself is in jeopardy as soon as the US presidency falls into the hands of a man who has already expressed sharp critics against the NATO alliance. The future of a military alliance as vast and complex and NATO seems gloomy at best when its most important member will be a nation headed by a pro-Russian and unpredictable man such as Donald Trump. There is a saying which goes like this: “You can't have your cake and eat it too” (in this case, Vladimir Putin is the cake). President Trump simply and plainly cannot expect to have a great friendship with the Russian president whom he admires, without being willing and ready to sacrifice Ukraine completely, to the full extent of the word, if need be. Indeed, the abandonment of Ukraine has already started. It started 8th November 2016. Ukrainians are right now in disbelief, and most of them expect the worse yet to come, recalling from the history books the Munich Agreement with which the Prime Minister of England, Neville Chamberlain agreed to the handing over to Nazi Germany of portions of Czechoslovakia along the country's borders mainly inhabited by German speakers, for which a new territorial designation “Sudetenland” was coined, all in the name of avoiding a new world war, which ended up taking place anyway.


• Opening up of diplomatic relations between the USA and Cuba comes to a screeching halt, with the clock being set back to a time when Cuba was considered to be a full blown out enemy of the USA. The historical thawing of diplomatic relations between the USA and Cuba that was begun in December 2014, ending a 54-year stretch of hostility between both nations, and was formalized in March 2016 when president Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to visit Cuba, is now finished. Kaput! This thawing of relations started entirely under the initiative of president Obama with the intervening help of the Vatican as a mediator, and became a recognition that the previous policies of isolating Cuba had not accomplished anything except making the lives of the Cuban people miserable. Cuban-Americans whose vote as Hispanics in Florida was crucial to give Trump the victory he needed there enabling him to carry the electoral votes of Florida and thus assuring him the presidency were swayed and convinced by his message and now fully expect him to keep his word in case he wants their vote again in 2020 to get re-elected. They fully expect from him at the very least the closing of the US Embassy in Cuba that was reopened under orders from president Obama over a year ago, and most certainly expect a full enforcement of the commercial embargo against Cuba as dictated by the Helms-Burton Act whose main intention was to force the Cuban economy into bankruptcy and force the Cubans to rebel against their own government overthrowing the communist regime set up more than half a century ago by Fidel Castro. Add to this the demands of the many in the Cuban-American community in Miami of making tourist travel to Cuba extremely hard to make and scuttling the plans of American companies such as Visa and Mastercard to start operations in Cuba which otherwise would be making it easier to travel to Cuba and invest in Cuba. But it is a fact that the policies of economic blockade have failed. as both the Cuban government and the Cuban people learned to endure the hardships that came along with this US-imposed economic blockade. With the opening up of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the USA, it was becoming increasingly harder for the Cuban government to put the blame on the USA for all the woes of Cuba, which is precisely one of the things that president Obama was trying to achieve. The forced isolation of Cuba scheme had failed for half a century in trying to force the Cuban government to abandon completely its Marxist-inspired ideology and dogmas, and oddly enough after president Obama took the bold decision to switch gears, a change in attitude actually began to take place at the top of the Cuban government akin to the abandonment of radical Marxist ideology after president Nixon also took the bold decision to open up relations with the Chinese who now have a free market economy under the rule of an almost symbolic communist government. But this will almost certainly not happen in Cuba if Trump follows up on his promise to the Cuban-Americans of reverting the opening up that was carried out under Barack Obama. If so, not only will the Cuban government be able to blame again the USA for all its woes, but it may very well garner the support of many Cubans who will end up viewing America once again as their enemy. There remains the possibility of a full scale American military invasion of Cuba under orders given by president Donald Trump, the commander in chief of the US Army, with every intention of overthrowing the Cuban regime and replacing it with a new one, avoiding the Bay of Pigs fiasco when president Kennedy failed to deliver on his promise to give backup aerial support to the invasion of Cuba. The new invasion of Cuba would not merely be a repeat of the past failed CIA attempts, it would be a major military invasion ordered by president Trump, with the full backup and support of the Cuban-American community mainly in Miami, in little Havana. The only catch is that, if this is carried out into full fruition, the American people may end up paying a high price for the invasion, both in the number of casualties and in the economic cost of carrying out such an attack. It is no wonder that president Bill Clinton did not even consider any kind of military retaliation after the 1996 shootdown of Brothers to the Rescue aircraft (they were on their way from the USA to Cuba to drop propaganda leaflets in Havana when the Cuban airplanes shot them down), and the only kind of retaliation taken was the signing of the Helms-Burton Act. Likewise, the Commander-in-Chief hero of the Gulf War, president George H. W. Bush, who also ordered the US invasion of Panama, refrained himself from ordering a US invasion of Cuba to overthrow the Cuban regime by military means. Even president Reagan himself, who had the popularity to order a full scale US military invasion of Cuba as he did in Grenada, refrained himself from ordering an invasion of Cuba, heeding the advice of his cabinet in the sense that Cuba was not Grenada, and if such a thing was done in the case of Cuba the USA would end up paying a very high price, and thus president Reagan ended up confining himself to simply ordering a tightening of the US embargo of Cuba. But Donald Trump has always done as he pleases without considering the possible consequences, this is precisely one of the things that got him the presidency. And furthermore, he is unpredictable, so this is an event that could take place. It might be added that, if under the direct orders of president Donald Trump there is a US-military invasion of Cuba with orders to overthrow the current Cuban regime at all cost, those Cuban Americans who now serve in the US military will not waver for a single moment at the idea of killing Cubans, which in turn means that the hybrid known as Cuban-American in reality does not exist. In a military showdown, someone can be a Cuban or an American, but he cannot be both. There is no such thing as a Cuban American, there is no such thing as a person with a dual nationality, a fiction that many American citizens of Cuban descent still believe. It usually takes a war to define loyalties, and an invasion of Cuba ordered by president Trump may be all that is required for Cuban Americans to strip themselves of the hyphen and start calling themselves for good what they really are, American citizens, hispanics who by the way supported Donald Trump in his quest of the US presidency. In the meantime, Cubans now living in Cuba are deeply worried showing faces of despair, for in the end, any hardening of USA against Cuba at the behest or president Trump will end up being paid by the Cuban people themselves, something that will not produce many sympathizers of Donald Trump in Cuba in case he decides to act one way or another against the Cuban government and even decides to put troops on the ground in Cuba. And what about Radio Martí? That's a good question. And what about Guantanamo bay? That's another good question harboring some bizarre ideas. With someone as unpredictable as Donald Trump, go figure.

Just the crazy ramblings of a Mexican blogger, you might say? Please remember that Donald Trump is about to become an almost absolute ruler, with no checks and balances to set limits on him. He is on the verge of receiving absolute power, and Lord Acton warned us about the terrible consequences of power in the hands and on the brain of any man, especially a man about to become an American Caesar poised to receive and exercise absolute power. Furthermore, historian George Santayana warned previous generations of Americans and the entire world about the risks and dangers of forgetting hard won lessons from the past (he wrote in The Life of Reason, 1905, his famous phrase: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”), hard won lessons that were overlooked and forgotten in an election where the American electorate decided to hand over absolute power to a man as unpredictable as Donald Trump, putting in his hands the nuclear codes. Let us hope that the American people, just as the German people nowadays, do not see the day when they may regret handing over such a vast amount of power to someone as unpredictable as Donald Trump. However, and unfortunately, many analysts and editorialists are already stating the the Trump presidency is a tragedy in the making, or better said, a US social tragedy in the making. The drama is about to play out, and it could end up as bad or even worse than the drama that played out in Germany when the Nazis seized power, considering that the Nazis were not able to develop in time a nuclear bomb.

There is always the possibility that Trump may recant on some of his clearly laid out promises, but it is very likely that if he does so he will be held accountable by his tens of thousands of followers who used to go to his rallies, and would almost certainly be punished by them in the next Congressional elections where he could start losing control of one House of Congress and thereafter the remaining one, leaving him in a no better position than the position president Obama found himself when he was unable to get anything done by a Republican controlled Congress.

The above is just for starters. The Trump wall conceived to put a great divide separating forever the USA and Mexico and the Trump threat that Mexico will pay entirely for the building of that wall by resorting to any means the Commander in Chief of the US Army will have at his disposal has not even been mentioned here. There are other consequences of Trump taking over the presidency of the USA. The reader might already foresee some of them.