Donald Trump’s Women and Global Trade

Donald Trump is the master of playing blame games. He is keener than any politician anywhere in modern memory to deflect from his own failings and shortcomings by opening up ever new avenues of distraction.

Alas, his battle cry “Crooked Hillary” – Trump’s key slogan from the 2016 campaign and the epitome of misogyny – is getting very tired.

Abandoned by the key women in his life

Much worse, as it stands, Trump is being abandoned by the key women in his life. His favorite daughter Ivanka is no longer his darling, now that he is getting under ever more prosecutorial pressure.

His wife Melania, for her part, is showing signs of severe spousal indignation. Surprisingly to many, she is refreshingly independent in her thinking, as evidenced most recently on the gun control issue.

Then there is the resignation of Hope Hicks. The dashing young woman, officially the White House Communications Director, has gone through affairs with key Trump men in quick succession – beginning with former (married) Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and then on to former (twice divorced) Trump White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter.

Washington is also rife with talk about the former model doing more for Donald Trump than just iron his pants on the campaign trail.

Such trivia aside, this would all rank between entertaining and absurd, if the consequences of what still goes for “U.S. policymaking” and indeed the entire world weren’t so serious.

The outside world as the new whipping boy

Now that neither questioning former President Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship nor “Crooked” Hillary can be blamed that effectively anymore, Trump and his coterie of frustrated old men need a new whipping boy to compensate for the de facto loss of their favorite piñatas.

That’s where the world outside enters into the equation. That is the real political context in which the indiscriminate imposition of those steel tariffs is significant.

To rebuild their political Viagra, Trump and his advisors have now chosen to blame the world outside. They always need someone else to blame – not just to get themselves excited, but also to systematically divert their supporters’ attention from one little fact: Under Trump, the billionaire class is getting away with financial murder by hollowing out America’s “Treasury” in the pursuit of yet more shameless self-enrichment.

Blaming other countries for American woes plays directly into many lower-class white Americans’ sense of isolationism. It also detracts from the very real culpability and acts of betrayal that truly hollow out the United States: The hyper-rich of the United States, not foreigners, helped themselves to virtually all the wealth the country has generated in recent decades.

And the domestic gazillionaires aren’t being held responsible. Little wonder: Through the mechanism of campaign finance, they literally own the politicians of both parties.