The Cooperative Society Newsletter
January 2020, Issue 20
by E.G. Nadeau
In January 2017, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States.
At the same time, with much less fanfare, The Cooperative Society Project launched its first bimonthly newsletter by making a set of predictions about the Trump presidency, entitled Trumpus Rex: A Damage Assessment.
Ordinarily, our newsletter addresses major international problems and trends, and doesn’t focus on individual political actors. But we made an exception in January 2017, because we feared that soon-to-be-President Trump would trample on many of the goals promoted in the second edition of our recently published book – The Cooperative Society: The Next Stage of Human History.
Sure enough. He has. In many ways surpassing our most pessimistic predictions. Not only that, he has:
- Achieved levels of jaw-dropping incompetence and perfidy that we had not even imagined. For example, making approximately 16,000 “false or misleading claims” while in office.[1]
- Become only the third president in the history of the United States to be impeached.[2]
- Ordered the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian general that has resulted in a major destabilization of the international political arena.[3]
Here’s an excerpt from our January 2017 article:
For those of you who have not yet read The Cooperative Society, you should be aware that the book and our website are not intended as sources for short-term political predictions. Instead, they look at long-term trends – on a worldwide scale – toward or away from greater cooperation, concentrated economic power and wealth, conflict, democracy, quality of life, and a sustainable environment. In that context, we examine the potential impact of the Trump Administration on the seven variables analyzed in the book and how it may affect movement toward or away from a more cooperative society.
We concluded that five out of the seven trends reviewed in the article would be negatively impacted by the Trump presidency. They have been. In fact, all seven trends have suffered, although Trump did sign off on an increase in funding to a U.S. international co-op development program. Much of the damage has been on a world scale, not just in the United States. (If you’d like, please review the 2017 article to check out our predictions.)
Here’s a quick review of some of the most egregious “cooperative society” setbacks this administration has precipitated:
- A cruel and bigoted migration “policy” especially targeting Muslims and Hispanics that has, among other things, separated children from their families, and subjected asylum seekers and other migrants to inhumane living conditions.[4]
- The “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” Trump’s signature piece of legislation, that has primarily been a financial boon to large corporations and the wealthy. [5]
- The withdrawal of the United States – the world’s largest per- capita carbon emitter – from the Paris Climate Agreement, thus greatly increasing the likelihood that the planet’s surface temperature will reach catastrophic levels in the next 30 years.[6]
As the 2017 article perversely concluded:
The divisiveness engendered during the presidential campaign and personified by Trump may lead over the next few years to a revitalized spirit of cooperation among the majority of the U.S. electorate as Trump’s contradictory and overblown promises go unfulfilled.
Let’s make that a 2020 New Year’s resolution.
[1] Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump has made 15,413 false or misleading claims over 1,055 days,” Washington Post, Dec. 16, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/16/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/
[2] Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Laura Bronner, “Our Poll Finds A Majority of Americans Think the Evidence Supports Trump’s Removal,” FiveThirtyEight, Jan 3, 2020, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/our-poll-finds-a-majority-of-americans-think-the-evidence-supports-trumps-removal/
[3] Ankit Panda, “Iran Has Not Abandoned the Nuclear Deal,” The New Republic, January 7, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/156140/iran-not-abandoned-nuclear-deal
[4] “A Crime Against Humanity,” Resolution of the American Federation of Teachers, 2018, https://www.aft.org/resolution/crime-against-humanity
[5] Jesse Drucker and Jim Tankersley, “How Big Companies Won New Tax Breaks from the Trump Administration, New York Times, Dec. 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/business/trump-tax-cuts-beat-gilti.html
[6] Stacy Feldman and Marianne Lavelle, “Donald Trump’s Record on Climate Change,” Inside Climate News, Dec 19, 2019 https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19122019/trump-climate-policy-record-rollback-fossil-energy-history-candidate-profile