The Trump Five Percent

When Donald Trump again warms the throne in Washington on Martin Luther King Day, each of the three evils that King worked to abolish will get a major boost: racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.

While Trumplickers post-election propose recruiting abroad certain highly educated potential immigrants (and defunding and further destroying U.S. education -- including by writing racism -- not to mention critical thinking -- out of history books while shaping them in a fundamentally racist vision), they're also pushing for a military campaign to seize and deport the wrong kind of immigrants and refugees, and threatening any cities that dare to protect their residents. While Democratic emperors eagerly fuel genocide, they don't campaign for office on racism. So, there will be attention paid to this one. But consider the next two interlocking evils as well.

The inauguration events themselves will be an open bribery fest for corporations and billionaires wanting military contracts, subsidies, and to ensure that they continue paying lower taxes than the people Trump promises to kidnap and ship overseas. Trump promises Day 1 "executive orders" (aka unconstitutional lawmaking) to maximize climate destruction for profit. This evil is only a matter of degree above that of other presidents or of Congress members. So, work will be needed to call it into the open.

Trump promised peace in Ukraine not after his inauguration but before it. We should do everything possible to make that happen, while recognizing the fundamental problems with what Trump proposes: Trump wants the U.S. to stop buying weapons for Ukraine but wants every other country that has been arming Ukraine to buy vastly more weapons for whatever they choose to do with them; Trumplickers to a man want the U.S. and the other countries to all buy vastly more weapons to aim at China and other targets -- or to give to Israel; military madness is shifting into military wackiness (Trump wants to take over Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Panama, etc.); no one has publicly hinted at the slightest interest in the wishes of the residents of various parts of Ukraine, or in settling the war in a lasting and just manner, or in funding anything other than war, or in supporting demilitarization, the rule of law, or the development of democracy as anything other than a category of war propaganda.

Trump wants to nominate to run his war machine a man who has shouted "Kill all Muslims!" and to use that war machine to further enrich the genocide-profiteering 1 Percent. His xenophobia advances a strong bigotry against the 96 percent of humanity outside the United States -- plus plenty of people within it, who are defined not just as subhuman but as "the enemy within". King's evil triplets are a recipe for fascism, and we've been slow-cooking it for decades.

There is a number that is key to all of this. And it is not a percentage of people, but a percentage of an economy. It is a number recently put forward by Trump, and therefore likely to soon be replaced by a larger and crazier number. Trump is again taking over the world's dominant military. About 70 percent of the foreign military bases on Earth are U.S. bases. Since 1945, the U.S. military has acted in a major or minor way in 74 other nations. Of 230 other countries, the U.S. exports more weaponry than 228 of them combined. Most places with wars manufacture no weapons. Most wars have U.S.-made weapons on at least one side, and often both. Only the U.S. military has devoted various sections to various portions of the Earth (and space), seeking to dominate everyone everywhere. And, in the latest numbers on military spending, of 230 other countries, the U.S. spends more than 227 of them combined. Russia and China spend a combined 21 percent of what the U.S. and its allies spend on war. In per-capita terms, the only higher spender on militarism than the United States is Israel (which includes in its expenditures billions of dollars given it by the U.S. government). As a percentage of government discretionary spending, the U.S. Congress puts 62 percent into militarism.

Weapons dealers and their lackeys do not like to talk about military spending in dollars, or in dollars per capita, or in percentage of government spending (whether limited to discretionary or otherwise). They like to talk about weapons spending as a percentage of an economy measured as gross domestic product, or all the goods and services created in a country. They like this not because instruments of mass murder really are the grossest domestic product, but because numbers like 1 percent and 2 percent sound smaller than numbers like 62 percent; because this measurement allows the pretense that military spending is declining even while it is increased; because this measurement allows comparisons between U.S. military spending and other nations' military spending in which the U.S. isn't off the charts; and because those comparisons are not neutral but always and necessarily pro-war -- ranking nations by how much they spend of their economy on weapons suggests that weapons spending is a public good to be maximized, not a sadistic evil to be abolished, and not even a necessary burden to be adjusted based on supposed threats.

In recent months, Biden was insisting that NATO members spend 2 percent of their GDP on militarism, whereas Trump had upped it to a new demand: 3 percent. Now Trump has announced that it must be 5 percent. It's a well-kept secret, but Trump's supposed opposition to NATO last time around amounted to badgering NATO members into buying more (mostly U.S.-made) weapons. In fact, while Biden bragged about the exact same accomplishment, Trump's badgering produced more military spending increases from NATO members than did Biden's, even though Biden has a Russian invasion of Ukraine to work with. And despite complaining that the U.S. was spending more than its "fair share", Trump also increased U.S. military spending (or commanded Congress to do so) -- just as Obama had done and Biden would do -- and Trump will do yet again if not stopped. After all, not even the United States meets the new 5 percent standard.

The first-term Trump embraced his role as weapons-dealer-in-chief far more publicly than any other U.S. president, holding press conferences to brag about new weapons sales. He also allowed weapons shipments from the United States to Ukraine, something that Obama had refused to do out of fear that it could lead to war with Russia. Trump -- widely reported as a friend or even a servant of the Russian government -- also evicted Russian diplomats, sanctioned Russian officials, put missiles practically on Russia's border, lobbied European nations to drop Russian energy deals, left the Iran agreement, tore up the INF Treaty, rejected Russia's offers on banning weapons in space and banning cyberwar, expanded NATO eastward, added a NATO partner in Colombia, proposed adding Brazil, splurged on more nukes, bombed Russians in Syria, oversaw the largest war rehearsals in Europe in half a century (now outdone), condemned all proposals for a non-NATO European military, and insisted that Europe stick with NATO.

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