President Trump: Hope Beyond Hoping?
‘Can we not have a moment when we say, “Okay, this is what we wanted back then; this is what we hoped for; this is what we went to bed praying for!'? Can we not now say, “Okay, let it unfold!"?
If not this, then what?
‘[Václav] Havel talked about hope, and he made this point very clearly: that hope is not about facts or circumstance, but is a quantity that resides within the heart of the human person, and the problem is that you don’t need to do much to keep that flame alive, but neither do you need much to put it out.’
Back on UPThinking Finance®, with Emerson Fersch from Utah, USA, just a few days before the second inauguration as US President of Donald Trump, an event that seems to open up as many new divisions in the world’s population as it has created old ones in the past decade.
Since his election for the second time would seem to turn the White House over the coming four years into the Last Chance Saloon, those who insist that we agree — at the very beginning — to the permanent surrender of our hopes are the ones claiming to be more intelligent, and by extension more moral in their outlooks, than those who insist on trying still to find a way of reclaiming the reality we seem to remember as having existed before. Yet, when politely asked to elaborate on their proposed alternative(s), they seem to repeat the same answer to every question: everything is controlled.
There are many words I might have rummaged out to described Donald Trump, but ‘controlled’ isn’t one of them. That doesn’t mean he definitively isn’t; what it means is that there remains something more to be learned about him, something to be observed, something to be understood, some reserved potential that might hold out even more surprises than he’s already given us. This is why I refuse to leave the table and join those with smug smiles in the corner, waiting for the dark denouement. It’s way too early for that, just a few days into his second presidency.
Whenever I find myself speaking nowadays publicly about Donald Trump, I become more and more conscious that what I am trying to express is primarily neither political nor sociological. It is a little bit cultural, to be sure, but overwhelmingly a matter of existential perception. Either the world is real or the world has never been, is not and never (or never again) will be real. More than any other internationally recognisable figure, Donald Trump embodies this dilemma. When I appear to become impatient or annoyed with responses to him that seem designed to block off the possibility of his making the world better, this is the reason. What I defend in these situations is not ‘Donald Trump, the man’ but the question as to whether he could become the instrument of humanity’s reclaiming of its world from the would-be tyrants who are trying to steal it. On the answer to that question — yes or no? — rests everything we have ever thought to matter about the collective lives of humanity expressed politically, usually in seemingly banal questions about tax bands and tariffs — but much deeper down also, in questions as to whether or not the world can even any longer be regarded as real. When he stood on those platforms in Kentucky or Pennsylvania, was this man sincerely seeking to be elected as President of the United State or was he standing there as someone whose whole existence, because controlled by unseen dark actors, is directed at fooling people into believing that by voting for him they will be entering into a transaction with meaningful implications for their ways of life and their children’s happiness? When, on his election, he made promises to make America ‘great’ (again), did he know or believe that this is something that lies within his power, or was he saying this purely to carry out his masters’ instructions, knowing that the fate of America, just like the fate of every other nation in the world, is really in the hands of others — dark, malevolent actors who have told him that he will be permitted to function and behave in the ‘role’ of President of the United States, but also that he (while being extended considerable latitude for exhibitionism and flourishes) will be shot dead if he crosses any of the red lines on the list provided.
This is what it comes down to, the deepest meaning of Trump’s second presidency: is the world real and, if not, what then? Those who have believed in him through the times when he had almost no chance of winning have divided now into those who see him as the personification of victory (theirs too!) over the darkest forces they intuit to exist in the world, and those who, perhaps because he has won — which they believe is only because he has been permitted to by the dark actors — he represents the final proof that the world has never been, is not, and never will be what we have imagined it to be.
Emerson Fersch’s introduction:
How do we reinvigorate a global resistance that seems to have lost its way? In this thought-provoking episode of UPThinking Finance®, John Waters reflects on the challenges facing modern movements for change. Drawing comparisons to the unity and purpose of past revolutions, like the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Waters questions why today’s resistance struggles to attract artists, intellectuals, and the broader public. He argues that fear, gatekeeping, and fragmentation have stifled the creative voices essential for meaningful progress. Waters offers a hopeful perspective, urging us to reclaim faith in humanity's potential for redemption and change. By fostering unity, humility, and purpose, he believes we can inspire the global resistance to serve its true goal—benefitting humanity, not power or profit. This reflection is a call to action, reminding us that hope and belief in a better world remain the most powerful tools for change.
‘The Velvet Revolution is the moment we’re moving towards, imaginatively. That’s the only way forward in my view, in all our countries: that we basically say to those in power: ‘Enough! Go! In the name of God, go!’
‘The only point of any endeavour, whether it be political, philosophical, scientific, medical or otherwise, has to be to make life better for humanity.’
‘It just seems to me there’s a kind of recreational negativity at play here, which doesn’t really want this to be over, or something. But I would say this: if the Combine, Predator Class, Illuminati, whatever, look at the moment and listen to the rhetoric that’s mostly happening now, and listen to it very carefully, they’re going to be very pleased, because this is exactly what they’ve been trying to do to the world for the last few years.’
‘I want to just get on with life and use the apparatus that I was born with and which I’ve used all my life to try to understand the world. I don’t want to be living my life according to some prophecies that Nostradamus made centuries ago! I want to use my eyes, my ear(s), my heart, to look at people and understand what I can understand about them, and then place whatever level of trust and hope I wish to in them, without being constantly barracked and name-called, and have these people repeating to me the same mantras, over and over again, as if I haven’t heard them, as if I haven’t said them sometime, at some point, myself!’
‘Theres nothing over-anybody’s-heads about talking about [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn], one of the great heroes of the modern world. So “Cop on!” is my answer to that!’
‘I don’t like the word “intellectual”; I don’t like the word “intellectualism”. That’s not what I am. I come from a pretty ordinary background. I didn’t go to college. I didn’t do any of that stuff. I just read a few books, which I thought everybody else had done as well.’
‘[The Resistance] really seems to be a battle all of its own, for some kind of supremacy, or notice, or attention. It’s kind of like a competition, rather than being a combination of energies.’
‘Faith and redemption are tightly linked. Faith in the possibility is what enables redemption to take hold. The weird thing is that there’s an awful lot of people that I’m talking about here who would lay claim to being Christians and having a very strong religious belief. But it seems to me that what they cling to in religion is the apocalyptic rather than the redemptive. And it’s almost that they can’t wait to be vindicated, can’t wait for the Last Day, when they’ll be going around saying “Told ya so! Told ya so!” I don’t want that. I want to live, Emerson, I want my child to live. I want my grandchild to live. I want hope.’
‘The Resistance has fallen into a way of being — as a Resistance — that is almost hermetically sealed from the problem, or hermetically sealed from the constituency that it should be addressing. It’s adopted this kind of inward-looking, “we-know-everything”, “we’re sticking our heads above the parapets” perspective, [as if] that’s enough. There doesn’t seem to me to be any attempt to evangelise, any attempt — to put it bluntly — to be attractive to the people who aren’t aware, for all the kinds of reasons that I write about every week, that I try to drill into. I’m not saying I’m the only one who can do it, or the only one who does it, but I just think it definitely needs to be done. The conditions we deal with have never occurred before, as far as I know, in the human spectrum, and it seems to me that the Resistance, in a certain sense, is behaving as if that is not the case, and that they are fighting this war in a way that you might have fought a previous attempt to overturn a tyranny.’
‘Time moves on and I feel a great sympathy for a lot of people who were trapped by the cunning and confidence-trickery that was applied to our cultures in that time [of Covid]. There’s no point in being angry with those people because they just fell into the trap. And our job is to get them out of it. Our job is to reach them and explain how this happened. And that’s what I’m trying to do.’
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