Gray Rhino: Donald Trump’s John Brown Moment

Former President Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 charges all stemming from his alleged paying of hush money for a one-night stand with a former porn actress Stormy Daniels is rocking the 2024 US presidential election race. However, Trump has made clear he is not withdrawing from the contest and the flood of financial as well as passionate support from his enormous popular Heartland base has increased rather than decreased because of it.

All of Trump’s scores of millions of supposedly well-educated though in truth pitifully limited and ignorant opponents still make the mistake of confusing the man with the movement.

They still fantasize that if you eliminate an eternally discredited Trump, then the magic, mythical peace, and stability, the cozy fantasy memory of an America that never was but that they have always imagined it to be – what President Warren Harding memorably christened “normalcy” will mythically be restored.

It is never going to be.

Trump’s conviction on those 34 charges in a New York court is a Gray Rhino event. But there will be plenty of Black Swans stampeding after it.

A Gray Rhino is defined as a slowly emerging, obvious threat that is ignored or minimized by decision makers. It eventually becomes a catastrophic event that was in fact expected and anticipated but still took everyone by surprise and set off a host of unexpected consequences.

Black Swan events are defined by the Lebanese American financial analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb as consequential occurrences that are almost impossible to predict, yet after the fact seems to have been inevitable.

Taleb points out that these events can prove highly disruptive to the stock market, where investors spend millions trying to predict unpredictable events.

Why is Trump’s conviction on minor sleaze charges so consequential? We now know that revered US presidents have often engaged in sexual escapades on a ludicrous and embarrassing scale while in office.

John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton were all widely known, reviled and even admired at the time for their alleged omnivorous appetites for attractive young women while in office. Grover Cleveland was known to have fathered an illegitimate son whom he treated shamefully during the election campaign of 1884. A Washington editor who tried to expose Thomas Jefferson’s long time sexual liaison with his slave Sally Hemmings by whom he fathered many children was found dead in a Georgetown canal outside Washington, DC.

I predicted in my companion 2015 books “Cycles of Change,” a political history of the United States from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama and its sequel “Gathering Storm: The Coming Seventh Era of American History and the Coming Crises That Will Lead to It “(Both Amazon/Kindle 2015), that the United States has entered a well-over-a-decade-long period of crises which could see its total destruction. And even if the nation survives, it will be more transformed than at any time since World War II and the Great Depression, and before that, the era of the 1861-65 Civil War.

Since the Civil War killed 850,000 people – almost all of them young men – on both sides out of a total population at the time of only 30 million – that was no small thing. A comparable fission today would kill at least 8.5 million people, probably far more.

And all this was before the factors of a thermonuclear superpower being convulsed by instability after alienating and alarming its mean peer rivals Russia and China is taken into account.

I also spelled out in both these books that the enormous issues in American society opened in the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era of the 1960s had now brought the country to a divide of culture, religion, economics and philosophy – not merely politics – unseen since the 80-year-long divisions that led to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.

Indeed, the conviction of Donald Trump eerily parallels the previous most notorious trial in US History – the conviction of slavery-hating activist John Brown in a Virginia Court in 1859 for trying to set off a slave rebellion across the Antebellum South.

Brown had previously been a figure of infinitely less consequence than Trump. He had been an extremist, creepy, shady combination of fake, self-styled prophet, religious lunatic, con artist and spectacularly unsuccessful failed businessman – a combination depressing common across American society to this day. His so-called slave rebellion fizzled out more spectacularly and ineptly than any forgotten crackpot in a Heartland American shack.

However, in his execution, Brown achieved the mythical status he truly craved. Like the execution of the seven leaders of the Irish Easter Rising against the British Empire in 1916, the myth of martyrdom that followed set off a firestorm of hatred, resentment, rebellion, and revolution that forever transformed the entire nation and the world.

Trump, by contrast, has already been a figure of immense impact and consequence in the American consciousness for more than 40 years. Yet his real abilities and achievements continue to be totally denied by his opponents.

The reaction to Trump’s May 30 conviction in a New York court reflects the totally different perceptions of reality that his passionate supporters and hate-crazed opponents have.

The day after Trump’s conviction, the market value of his current main holding company Trump Media slumped by 5% on Wall Street, though since the company was capitalized at $8.67 billion, not too much should be made of that.

Yet at the very same time, Wall Street billionaires were flocking in droves to support Trump, a Trend confirmed by Bloomberg News whose owner, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was a bitter political foe of Trump. And up to $40 million has already flooded into Trump’s campaign coffers since the guilt verdict from his grassroots supporters. Clearly, this is not what Trump’s accusers anticipated or expected.

The emotional reaction of both followers and foes was equally divisive and crazed.

Across the United States, liberal progressives crowed that Trump’s conviction meant he could never be a credible candidate to be reelected as president of the United States for a second time after previously losing office.

Only one person in US history has ever achieved that – the otherwise conformist and in his own day certainly scandalous – as the acknowledged father of an illegitimate son whom he despised – Democratic President Grover Cleveland, president from 1885 to1889 and from 1893 to 1897.

But the meek, cautious and conformist Cleveland was a highly ineffectual president and in economic policy reassuring but useless. He led the United States into its worst and longest peacetime depression in its history to that point, a crisis only dissipated by his to-this-day-underestimated mainstream Republican successor William McKinley from 1897 to 1901.

Within hours of Trumps conviction, my email was being deluged by historical claims of victory, not merely from the usual millions of teeming crackpots that modern American society generates so effortlessly and copiously, but by herds of respected, successful, sober educated middle-class and professionals in many fields. “VICTORY VICTORY VICTORY VICTORY” one New York City-based liberal commentator entitled her thoughtful analysis. It consisted of simply repeating that same single word. The need for a true sacral liturgy was pitifully exposed.

This was just the latest example of what the legendary pioneer psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung – disciple, friend and later bitter rival of Sigmund Freud, called a psychic storm – a wave of unreason over the most obscure and often ridiculous events that convulses societies around the world at period intervals for no apparent reason.

One   example was the virtual civil war that convulsed the Byzantine Empire over whether Jesus the Christ was of the same substance of God the Father or only of simular substance, whether he was (in Greek) “Homoousian” or “Homoiousian.”. Because of the crucial importance of the precise spelling in the Greek alphabet on the theological terms being disputed, the great 18th century rationalist English historian Edward Gibbon called it a century of dispute over a diphthong.

Today we see a similar hysteria of what I have termed TDS – Trump Derangement Syndrome. This began as soon as Trump, a high-profile New York construction magnate and trash popular television megastar, came down the escalator of this stronghold skyscraper corporate headquarters Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan on June 14, 2015 and announced he would be running for the Republican presidential nomination of the United States.

To his liberal-internationalist, middle class, college educated opponents and critics across the nation, the idea that Trump could possibly win was as inconceivable as the sky turning red, a giant star falling from the heavens or the Red Sea parting.

Yet enormous natural catastrophes, terrifying epidemics and world wars do indeed happen. They are Black Swan events, as Taleb recognized.

Trump’s 2016 election campaign proved to be one of those. Strongly aided by Barack Obama’s miserable domestic economic record, repressive energy policies, elitist arrogance (when he had in truth nothing to be arrogant about) and open-border, open trade policies which Obama had neither the courage nor the brains to question or amend), Trump won a decisive victory over the supposed Sure Thing Odds-On favorite candidate, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton was truly woefully inept. But this time Trump faces an even more incompetent, failed and despised figure.

Joe Biden was indeed shaped by his own ambition, tactically cunning, stupidity, conformity, age, corruption and mediocrity to be the ultimate “end of an age” figure who brings his own ancien regime down with a world-convulsing crash into eternal and unsalvageable ruin.

Biden was elected as the oldest president in history. His many mis-comments and faux pas in public are now uncountable There are widespread suspicions that he – like Hillary Clinton in 2016 and presidents before them needs amphetamines or other “uppers” to have brief periods of apparent coherence and superficial consciousness if not exactly dynamism when he is wheeled out in public.

Yet just as the Republicans are stuck with the almost equally old, demagoguing and fiery Trump, so the only apparently credible national candidate the Democrats can produce is the soon to be 82-year-old Biden.

The job of Chief Executive of the United States is widely recognized to be almost unimaginably difficult because of the enormous combination of sacral, ceremonial and charismatic values and expectations piled up on it as well as the huge concentration of executive power that has literally worked previous incumbents to death in the Oval Office during or right after they left it, the most notable being James Polk, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

Yet despite his age and the pressures upon him from every side, Trump remains formidably charismatic and energetic on the campaign trail. And he remains energized and enraged by the contempt, political sabotage and hatred poured on him relentlessly during his presidential term from 2017 to 2021.

Trump was blocked on every side from trying to restrain let alone dismantle the US military-industrial- intelligence mega state of unlimited corruption and intrigue. He also ironically appointed a string of fire breathing illiterates and incompetents as his chief diplomatic and military officials – with the honorable exception of his first secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

However, Trump’s economic record was actually quite successful,

Given Biden’s senility and ineptitude it is perfectly feasible that Trump will legitimately win the November election – provided he and the United States both survive until then.

It is also feasible that amid a flood of disgusted third party and stay at home defectors from the two antiquated main US political party organizations, Biden may scrape home to reelection.

What is grimly certain is that even if either of those two apparently most probable outcomes still occur, the result will not be accepted by a minimum of 60 million people and probably twice as many on the loser’s side.

Biden, let us remember, was elected in 2020 as a moderate, dull and restrained, highly experienced candidate to produce stability, competence and unity.

As anyone who bothered to actually look at Biden’s more than 40 years record in US national politics, there was never any evidence to support any of those ludicrous assumptions. But elected he duly was. And now he has already led the United States into its worst energy and inflation looming crisis in more than 45 years. Now he also appears literally hellbent on provoking simultaneously full-scale war that could all too easily go thermonuclear with Russia, and simultaneously with China and Iran too.

A more overwhelming record of criminal incompetence and sheer derangement cannot be imagined. Yet the entire so-called liberal intellectual professional classes across the United States – and a large number of old free market, American-Imperialist relics from the Ronald Reagan era would rather embrace Biden rather than Trump.

Even the death by natural causes of either or both candidates would bring no relief. For it is certain that the darkest conspiracies concerning the elimination of either of them from the national scene would proliferate with lethal speed and passions immediately.

And given what is now public domain knowledge about the questions and complications surrounding the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Nobel Peace Prize-winning legendary civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960s, there is ample precedent for the conspiracy-mongers to fall back on.

Ironically, a new generation of candidates loathed and rejected – to their own credit – by both the absurd and corrupt old Republican and Democratic Party establishments – are now emerging.

Former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, current Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and independent Robert Kennedy, son of the assassinated senator and nephew of the assassinated president – could all prove capable of creating a new unifying and defining national consensus taking the country in long overdue different, less confrontational and more domestically focused directions.

But right now, the dead hand of the old appalling and ludicrous political orthodoxies on every side – what the great Irish poet Wiilliam Butler Yeats called the dead hand of “MacDonagh’s bony thumb” blocks their emergence as effective national leaders – at least so far.

All these developments ensure that Trump’s conviction on the endless hush money charges will not end the mortal crisis shaking 21st century America but will only exacerbate it.

For Trump is a symptom rather than a cause, and an expression of long accumulating betrayals, frustrations, failures and rage. He has been a safety valve of hope. Eliminate him or expel him from the national political scene as the doomed Democrats are obsessed with doing and they only guarantee their own destruction and all they hold dear.

The giant vengeful spirit of John Brown stalked the blood-saturated battlefields of the US Civil War. 160 years later, the spirit of a martyred or silenced Donald Trump will prove no less implacable.