Glenn Greenwald talking:
I remember last night, I was on Twitter, and I—someone linked to a tweet from Donald, which I clicked on. And in his biography, it now just says, very simply, “President-elect of the United States,” with his huge picture and then “Donald J. Trump” underneath. And it was startling. It’s still very difficult to believe, very difficult to believe that Donald Trump is the president-elect of the United States and will actually be president of the United States in two months. I don’t think we’ve even begun to process or analyze the actual repercussions of that.
And then, when you go to this sort of second-order horror, it’s almost like a wicked nightmare, like the worst—like Sarah Palin as the secretary of interior, or Rudy Giuliani, who I’ve long regarded as probably the most authoritarian and borderline fascist mainstream figure in American political life, to be the attorney general in charge of the prosecutorial power and the FBI, or Chris Christie, a lifelong prosecutor, in charge of the mechanisms of homeland security, or John Bolton, one of the most sociopathic warmongers on the planet, in charge of anything—these are genuinely terrifying prospects. And so, no, I don’t have much intelligent to say about that, because I haven’t really started to even accept it yet.
I guess the one thing that I would say is that, to the extent that one can find any kind of silver lining in the election of somebody as horrifying as Donald Trump, it is that he will be—that this sort of extremism can galvanize a unified opposition that cuts across what had been impenetrable ideological and partisan lines to create a more potent opposition than has existed for a long time in this country, and that there will be a kind of clarifying moment about core political values, that we’ve allowed to be assaulted by the establishment wings of both parties, about the necessity of protecting those. And I am at least hopeful that there will be a kind of backlash that will be positive to the horrors that we’re about to endure, many of which are unimaginable.
I think foreign policy is the area where there’s the biggest question mark. The fact of the matter is that the primary critique of Donald Trump throughout the course of the campaign against the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was that they have used the military too much to engage in wars that were unnecessary, costing far too much money and sacrificing far too many lives, not, on occasion, he pointed out, just American citizens, but also the lives of innocent non-Americans. At the same time, he is advocating this explicit form of war criminality where he wants to reintroduce torture and carpet bombing and those sorts of things.
To expand Guantánamo and to essentially embrace all of the components of the war on terror. So, I think that it really remains to be seen. I think it probably will be the case that there will be moments when the D.C. elite will be demanding that we intervene militarily, where Hillary Clinton would have been tempted to do so and Donald Trump won’t. And maybe that’s, on balance, in a very isolated way, something that’s positive. But the idea of putting into someone like this’ hands the military of the United States and all of its might and the spying apparatuses, I think, is extremely alarming. And I guess we’ll have to see how that manifests.
— source democracynow.org