What really is Donald Trump?

Today Donald Trump arrives in the UK for a state visit. On the Andrew Marr programme yesterday the US Ambassador announced that our NHS should be ‘up for grabs’ in a future trade deal between the UK and US. There have been many theories of what Donald Trump is all about. The shadow-side of American culture manifest? An over-inflated ego manipulated by Steve Bannon into a role he never wanted? An insurgent for the o&d and banking industries? Here’s mine.

When DT was first elected I felt a sense of horror much like most people I know. How did that happen? How did we go from the nice, well-spoken, humanist Obama to someone who couldn’t string a sentence together beyond playground language? I judged. Immediately on what I saw on the surface. And I switched off every possible broadcast about him for quite some time.

But I’m deeply interested in how we design and create a regenerative world; how the large systems that run our degenerative economy work and can be shifted towards a more positive tomorrow. And Trump is attacking some of those systems and breaking them down. So I have to be interested in what he’s doing and how he’s doing it.

So here’s my theory and it’s quite simple. Others have already thought of it but as he’s on my turf today — so to speak — I’m putting mine down on metaphorical paper.

Donald Trump is a front man for an outright rebellion against the system I will call ‘business-as-usual’ (BAU). Even though he’s part of it and he grew up and made his millions in it. His goal is to disrupt and break the main structures of BAU to enable another structure to replace it.

What could that be? It could only be a structure that shores up the power of the fossil fuel energy companies and Wall Street banking system who see the potential for their continued dominance under threat by a weakening (collapsing?) BAU system that might just sacrifice fossil fuels to save themselves. In other words it’s a battle between the existing establishment and a breakaway establishment group that wants to shore up its power even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence and growing social advocacy that it has to go.

This breakaway group is not a group that wants to take us towards a regenerative future. That’s not the purpose of its attack on the system. It’s simply to create an impotent vacuum which it can fill — ideally through the ‘will of the people’. To do that it has to discredit and destroy the existing system.

Attacking systemic Leverage Points

There are a number of different leverage points in which you can disrupt a system. One of the world’s best systems thinkers Donella Meadows, identified around 12 different options back in 1999 in Leverage Points: Places To Intevene In A System. I’ve gone back through them over the weekend to see if I can map Trump’s actions against them.

Sixth on Donella’s list of places to intervene in a system is the Structure of Information Flows. The fifth on the list is Changing The Rules. A good example of a positive intervention on both these points is Mikhail Gorbachev opening information flows through glasnost, and changing the economic rules through perestroika. It effectively brought the old Soviet structure down.

One of the first things probably anyone noticed about Trump is his outright battle with one of the key pillars of the US state — the media. From his early campaigning days, he has sought to consistently discredit mainstream media from CNN to The Washington Post. From ridiculing journalists in front of him at press conferences, to refusing to hold press conferences, to barring anyone who criticised him or asked difficult questions from press conferences, to managing his own communications — mainly through Twitter. That hasn’t changed.

He very rapidly changed the rules for how a President of the US should behave as far as the media was concerned. He bypassed them by tweeting directly to the public. He bypassed them by holding — and continuing to hold — public rallies in which his rhetoric arrived unmanipulated other than by himself, to his key audience.

Whether or not Trump invented the idea of ‘fake news’ himself is debatable, it has served him incredibly well as a message to further discredit traditional news organisations, and to create wider uncertainty and seeds of complete distrust in the general public against all forms of authority — the state system.

Rules are high leverage points. Whoever has power over the rules has real power. Trump’s consistent signing of executive orders is a careful demonstration and wielding of power that probably ought not to be in the hands of any single person. One of the reasons Trump has aimed for control of the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution, is because it is the highest power in the land when it comes to rules. It makes the rules that govern the rules.

Trump is equally interested in changing the rules for world trade. If we consider the WTO as an organisation whose rules were designed by corporations for the benefit of corporations, you can understand why free trade agreements like NAFTA would be a target for Trump. In a very short space of time, he pulled down one of the key pieces of architecture that governed the rules of trade between the US, Canada and Mexico. In order to make new rules of his own.

This was swiftly followed by a withdrawal from the Paris Climate Treaty of 2015. On which industries does the climate treaty have the most impact? Yes, of course fossil fuels. And the financial institutions that have invested and continue to invest, huge sums of money into the industry.

Fourth on Donella’s list is The Power to Add, Change, Evolve of Self-Organise System Structure. The ability to self organise is the strongest form of systemic resilience. If you can disrupt that resilience, you gain a significant amount of power. Constant evolution of possibilities is rooted in a self-organising system. Diversity is its strength. In terms of human culture, that means the repository of all thinking, ideas, knowledge, creativity and experimentation. If you can override that collective intelligence with a narrative so strong and actions so pervasive that you supress the system’s ability to continually reimagine and reinvent itself, you’re the ‘winner’. This is why you see strong, aggressive narratives from extreme left or right groups. This is why you saw the Nazi’s persuading people to burn books — it’s a symbolic rejection of any other world view but the one to be propagated. I venture to suggest that the evidence of Trump’s push against traditional media, the dismissive and derogatory nature of his commentary against any of the ‘State’s’ institutions that threaten his power, are all evidence of his power to interfere with the system’s nature.

As Donella says ‘Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning. Cuts back resilience……a system that scorns and shuts down innovation is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.’

Now we’re getting to the top 3. Firstly The Goal of The System. What is a systemic goal? Survival, resilience, evolution, differentiation — all of these can be systemic goals. The goal of the ‘business-as-usual’ system is arguably quite simple — to bring the world under the control of corporations. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist or believe in the Illuminati to notice that economic and financial systems are designed to do that. Or that the political system has been hijacked through the lobbying industry to support that goal.

But what if one major constituent within that system felt that the system itself was no longer going to support or protect it? That it might be sacrificed on the alter of keeping the system going, or stopping a rebellion of a different kind? Would it then attack itself in the way a mutant virus or cancer tries to destroy and extinguish a human life? So the goal of Trump’s system or rebellion, is to destroy the goal of the existing establisment system and replace it with its own.

Changing the players in a system — i.e. moving from one political party to the next has very little effect on the system if the system itself doesn’t change. The exception to this rule is when you change the person at the top and the person at the top articulates a new goal. Drain the swamp. Make America Great Again. And that new goal is so compellingly crafted as to take advantage of a cultural vacuum and moment in time that it brings millions with it. Adolf Hitler did it.

Counting up to No 2. The Mindset (worldview) Out of Which The System Arises. If you have ever studied developmental psychology or read Fred Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations, you may be familiar with the term ‘orange’. It’s peculiarly appropriate in the case of Trump. Our current system is dominated by the econmic mindset or thought that constant growth is good. Even ‘greed is good’ for those of you who can remeber Gordon Gecko in the 1980s. It is supported by a belief that nature is here to serve and therefore to be subjugated by, humanity. And that competition — the market — is the force which governs how things are done around here. It drives a headlong rush to ‘own’ the world’s resources, to beat the next guy and to gather the ‘scarce’ resources under your control. It dominates education, social experience, business and politics.

If you can change a mindset — a paradigm — its game over. Of course changing mindsets is perhaps the hardest of all parts of a system to change. Yet it can be done. It can happen in a heartbeat in terms of the timespan of human history. It happened in the Renaissance when Martin Luther nailed NinetyFive Theses to a chapel door in Wittenberg; when Copernicus showed the Roman Catholic Church (the BAU of the day) that the earth was not at the centre of the heavens and Gallileo followed suit. When Anne Boleyn challenged the established hierarchy that said a commoner could never become Queen, even though she later lost her head.

If you are sensitive to change, there is a groundswell growing. A new renaissance rising. A regenerative rising. A moment in time where enough people whose world view is so significantly different from the dominant force that a systemic change could happen. If we can feel it, so can others.

It combines the regenerative energy movement, the climate change collective, the growing success of social enterprise and collectives at a local level. It is seen through Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, and the rapid growth of groups interested in regenerative economics. It is represented by groups looking at bioregionalism, movements like Transition Towns. It has been growing for some decades, quietly, insistently.

Neither the existing system nor Trump’s rebellion want things to change. But it seems clear to me that Trump and his other right-wing colleagues — from Steve Bannon to Nigel Farage — no longer believe the existing establishment system can protect them from change.

I believe their overall strategy and narrative is designed to galvanize a movement that ‘trumps’ — really the allegories are ridiculous — the growing regenerative renaissance of the human spirit that chooses to repair and renew our precious planet.

So what’s No 1? The Power to Transcend Paradigms. What does that mean? To just simply let go as Buddhist faith suggests. To realise that all mindsets, all paradigms are not real. To embrace uncertainty and un-knowingness. To accept that certainty allegedly allows you to operate with total freedom and radical empowerment. Donella suggested almost 30 years ago that this is the space in which people change worlds or disappear and are shot (that’s a very short paraphrase). I wish I were in it. I’m not. I can feel it, I know it’s there but today I’m very much in the mindset that what I will make my little point by writing down everything I think and feel about Trump.

He may be laughable but he’s also at the head of a very dangerous snake which threatens to turn my country into a factory for Trumpism. Whether that looks like chlorinated chicken, a crippled commercialised NHS, an experimentation zone for geo-engineering, genetic modification, increased vivisection or simple hate and visceral greed.

Many others from George Monbiot to Sadiq Khan have articulated much more elegantly than I what Trump is. This is my contribution.