How Trump might win reelection with the continued help of the Democrats

It’s difficult to see how President Trump could be reelected if he stays on his current path, pushing capitalism to excess (leaving no billionaire behind). After all, it was his lurch to the left which got him the presidency, as many of the Rust Belt working class believed the Democrats had abandoned them.

Polling shows that, although Trump is popular among Republicans, he has little support from independents, his Achilles heel. In American elections, the “two parties” voters generally cancel each other out, the successful candidate being the one who scares up the independent vote. But there is one way Trump can win the whole ball of wax, thanks to the Democrats.

Will the Dems again help Trump win?

The Democrats are hard at work undermining the message of their own left to stand for something higher than corporate greed at any cost to the public interest. Indeed, the mainstream press are warning Democrats who don’t get this message not to shift leftward.

It is the primary job of corporate media to ensure that the government serves the plutocrats and their transnational corporations. In their entrenched orthodoxy, it is heresy to suggest that so much as a dime more of the treasury should go to the American people, who get less for their taxes than any other people on earth, as the plutocrats feed like buzzards on the treasury.

And so, as the deceit continues, media warnings are trumpeted to the Democrats that should they choose, as their presidential candidate, one who suggests that Americans enjoy health care like people in other industrialized nations, or that the rich should pay taxes at least at the rate of the working class, or that the profitable wars and overseas bases should be shut down, or any number of other popular public interest moves, they will lose the election.

Should Democrats ignore this corporate media threat, the entire mainstream press will move against them, 24/7, in an all-out effort to fulfill the prophesy that a leftist can’t win. Democrats also will have their funding cut off from the defense cheats, polluters, banksters and other criminals who control campaign financing in our “free and open” elections.

Knowing this, those who run the Democratic Party are on their knees, eagerly kissing butt and groveling for the campaign funding. They ignore the popular causes that could make them more admired than Republicans.

The eternal goal for the ruling plutocrats and their corporate media is to have two candidates willing to sell out the working class, a Democrat and a Republican, put forward with a stern warning that third party candidates can’t win.

The most recent Democratic election disaster as history repeating

Recall that when Bernie Sanders attempted to move even slightly to the left, calling for basic human rights in providing Medicare for all, the Democrats moved against him. The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, cheated on behalf of the corporate candidate, Hillary Clinton, and when she was caught at this and replaced by another Democratic leader, Donna Brazile also cheated Bernie. Bernie’s opposition came clearly from the Democratic Party more than from the Republicans.

This is happening again, as Democrats meet to work out how they will defeat anyone who stands for anything higher than horse manure, pulling the party toward the interests of big donors who also finance the Republicans (why the government never really changes).

The surviving left-most candidate of the Democratic Party always backs the corporate Democrat in the end, that is how the system is rigged. Jesse Jackson did it in 1984 and 1988. Dennis Kucinich did it in 2004 and 2008. Bernie Sanders did it last time. Next time it looks like it may be Elizabeth Warren who will throw her support to the winning corporate candidate, too late for progressives to organize behind another candidate.

Repealing Obamacare—step one in a Trump reelection

Many working class voters embraced presidential candidate Trump for his promise to repeal Obamacare. Obamacare was always a delusion, as it threatened the working class that they would be fined for not being able to afford health care. Some paid the fine. Others suffered under one of the lower insurance packages in which they couldn’t use their “health care” because they couldn’t afford to pay the deductibles and co-pays (but they avoided the fine). This gave Obama the opportunity to say more people were insured, without pointing out that many do not realistically have health care, since they can’t afford to use it.

Obamacare was previously a Republican plan to allow corporations to get tax dollars for providing the pretense of health care. It was Romneycare under the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Before that it was a design of the Heritage Foundation, a corporate-funded “think tank” created to find ways to sell out the public interest to wealthy investors.

Before that Obamacare was Nixoncare, as President Nixon proposed it to the Congress. But in those days the Democrats had a bit more spine, having recently passed Medicare, and wanting to extend it to all citizens, so, controlling Congress, Democrats refused to consider Nixoncare, the first draft of Obamacare.

Trump’s winning shift

Trump has shown himself to be a maverick among Republicans from the start. In opposing trade agreements he gained the support of many desperate working class voters in the Rust Belt, while alienating himself to establishment Republicans, ensuring his win.

What if President Trump embraced Bernie’s Medicare for all, the easiest to explain and least expensive public health care system to implement? It cuts out the investment class and the 7- and 8-figure salaries of corporate executives. It cuts out billions of dollars in bureaucracy, mostly in billing which is the biggest part of the current system’s bureaucratic waste.

No, it wouldn’t be nearly as good as health care in other major industrialized nations, but for the first time, many working class poor would have health care, and their economic load would be lightened. After everyone got basic Medicare, the task would be to push to make it better.

The way to package it for Republicans in Congress, is for Trump to point out that American corporations will no longer have to pay health care for their employees and will be more competitive in international trade. The nation would save hundreds of billions of dollars on health care, and Trump would gain working class votes.

Indeed, Trump has supported single payer health care in the past.

The Intercept recently ran a piece, titled “Health Care Lobbyists Secretly Secure Democrats’ Opposition to ‘Medicare for all’ Internal documents show,” to describe what the Democrats are doing to undermine any attempt at providing health care for the masses.

Those who say Republicans would not back such a plan are not looking at the current situation, in which Trump pushes tariffs opposed by nearly all Republicans, and gets away with it because Republicans fear him. Trump recently said he destroys the careers of Republicans who say bad things about him, and many Republicans believe it to be true.

Rebuilding the infrastructure

When running for office, President Trump promised to rebuild the infrastructure. Our infrastructure badly needs trillions of dollars of investment. Such a project could create good living-wage jobs for millions of people lasting for decades. This could make Trump a hero of many in the working class, tens of millions of whom now work at part time jobs or jobs earning less than a living wage.

But with deficits being what they are and reluctance in Congress to spend money for this, it will be difficult to find support for it without a funding source.

There is only one place to get sufficient funding for this, and that is defense. Unfortunately, Trump increased defense spending, at ridiculously high levels, providing big capital gains for the descendents of robber barons at public expense, so this will require one of Trump’s famous flip flops.

Trump needs to say “What I meant by increasing defense spending is to increase help at the Veteran’s Administration and pay for our military.” Then Trump would go about shutting down the thing President Eisenhower warned us about, the military/industrial complex.

After all, in the last presidential campaign defense contractors contributed to Hillary Clinton’s campaign 2-1 over that of Trump, so what does he have to lose? And the old phrase “Only Nixon can go to China” applies, as only Republicans could ever get away with realistic cutting of defense spending.

Trump’s warming to President Putin is encouraging, we need to stop creating enemies for the military/industrial complex. If we don’t have a military/industrial complex, there is no need to fight all these wars, since their purpose is clearly to provide profits to the plutocrats as the wars create large numbers of terrorists.

So to find the money Trump needs to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, we stop making the hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary weapons systems. We close all of the 800+ overseas military bases.

We declare victory (the masses love to hear that we won) in all of the wars and bring the troops home, all of them. This results in enough savings to take care of rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and providing health care for all, with enough left over to balance the budget if Republicans really care about such a thing.

Conclusion

The American people show in polling that they don’t want war, do want government health care, and like having living-wage jobs rather than minimum wage jobs and part-time work with which tens of millions now struggle. If one of the two corporate political parties broke from the corrupt campaign funders and supported these issues, they would win over the vast majority of voters.

The egomaniacal President Trump appears to be apathetic to the needs and wants of the people, so should he do this left turn it would be for his own pomposity in seeking reelection.

Should the Democrats run a corporate Dem, as is expected (corporate media are currently pushing Joe Biden), Trump can appeal to the working class voters and run to the left of the Dems, causing them to crash and burn at an even faster pace than the corporate Hillary Clinton disaster.

It may be unlikely that the imbecilic Trump will follow the path laid out in this column, but should he choose to do so, leaders of the Democratic Party have no clue about how to handle this probability, and on this path Trump would almost certainly be reelected. Should this happen, I will blame the Democrats, they deserve it.

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.