Women in the West and Africa take on Trump

A million women, perhaps millions, marched against misogyny and to maintain key, civil rights, on the day after TV host and three times bankrupt Trump became US President. And so is born both the Trump era - and its antidote.

When half a million women turn out in Washington, tens of thousands in London and thousands in Nairobi - facing down the most powerful man in the world and the vast, international machine that serves him - something very important has happened. The world learns at a stroke the means by which to force Trump into his own defeat. 

All sorts of schemes and plots are bubbling away in Capitol Hill and other capitals to check or reform or threaten or impeach the new President. His strange liking for Putin and his Moscow antics will cause impeachment. His inability to launch a massive government spending plan at the same time as 'massive' tax cuts will be blocked by a republican right in Congress and bring his downfall. And Mrs May will speak firmly to him (especially if he calls her 'my Maggie' as we are told he is given to do!) But none of these optimistic speculations get to the heart of the 45th US President's grip on his power. 

Trump's view is that he has won. To him that means everybody else should follow what he says. In the end the Republican Congress, the media, the establishment, the military, and the US based billionaires who decide things, will make their peace. The official Democratic Party already has (with the exception of John Kerry perhaps). Barring the starting of a war with China - which is now the most dangerous possibility in world politics - see 'The Coming War with China' a John Pilger film on the UK's Channel 4), Trump will be able to enact watered down or spiced up versions of programme. They will undoubtedly produce a succession of mini to large scale crises, but Trump believes and his coterie believe, that he can ride it all.  

His campaign against the public media will continue to pour greater authority into the snake oil news found on the Internet. The billionaires will make more billions from Trump's spending plans, either directly through contracts to build infrastructure or indirectly as the stock market rises. The 'hard men' of the US military are in a state of revengeful, orgasmic bliss as Trump talks of China's 'rape' of America. 

And now comes the women' marches. Women were the first to mobilise in the West against WW1. The suffrage movement in Britain split on the matter, but women's anti-war leadership was a prominent political fact. In the event 1917 and the Russian Revolution brought the US into the war full heartedly and that decided the early outcome. The mobilisation of women in the Glasgow rent strikes prefigured Red Clydeside. Most recently in the UK the anti-nuke / anti war movement, women's mobilisation has been a prominent and leading part of that struggle. Now women have shown the world how to challenge Trump. Only a mass movement of the people, countering Trump's assertion of his own 'mass' following, drains the spurious legitimacy that he claims - regardless of Trump's 20 million Twitter followers. The women who marched have now laid down a challenge to the Western and hopefully the African world. Onto the streets! Onto the streets! We will put an end to the new age of cant!