Italy is laughing at America. It’s going to end well for Mussolini.
Filled with ego and cow meat, Donald Trump unsurprisingly has a boner for authoritarian regimes like China and Dubai, lauding their great building projects and national resolve. That’s not surprising since like many of his fellow “job creators,” Beefsteak Charlie fails to acknowledge that a lot of that development is accomplished through oppressive labor practices and environmental disregard. The suggestion is that America is being left behind because U.S. workers have rights and because we have some regulations that prevent corporations from ceaselessly polluting. (China, of course, has the world’s highest cancer rate.) It’s similar to a degree to the 1930s, when other buffoonish American businessmen congratulated Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy for their “will” to be great and the ways they would keep workers disciplined. (Michael Ignatieff just wrote something about that ).
“On stage, Trump praises his Dubai. He is effusive—and sincere. Trump is one sort of Westerner who loves the UAE. They find here a throwback to colonialism’s heyday. No matter how much you’ve shat the bed at home, here your whiteness will get you a job, money, servants from the Global South. Help is so affordable when migrant workers make $200 a month. In police states, there is little crime.
‘The world has so many problems and so many failures, and you come here and it’s so beautiful,’ Trump says. ‘Why can’t we have that in New York?'”
“I have many people from China that I do business with, they laugh at us. They– they feel we’re fools. And almost being led by fools. And they can’t believe what they’re getting away with. You know, they’re getting away with absolute murder. They’re making the products that we used to make in this country, they’re making ’em.”
My corpse was hung upside down on a meat hook from the roof of an Esso gas station.
Tags: Donald Trump