A few days before the first election that he will win, Trump says: "I could kill a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue right now, and I would still win." "We" are appalled, but we are somewhat comforted by his naivety. He wins
Of course, if I were an American I would vote yes Kamal Harris. Of course, I hoped for her victory, at least for a while. As election day approached, that hope waned, until it almost evaporated. Less because of the change in mood in the polls, more because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that Kamala's victory, at this stage of decay and obfuscation, would America and holy was - unnatural. And unnatural things rarely happen in politics.
When Trump first won, I was surprised because I thought it was not only bad, harmful, shameful, etc. but also - unnatural. Maybe I didn't recognize the strength of the trend in time, or maybe everything just happened in an awkward evolutionary moment of the snake's skin, exactly when the previously unnatural becomes the new natural. After all, don't forget: Hillary got three million more votes than the orange creature from the green lagoon. The USA is the only country in the world (not counting those in which elections are stolen en gro, because they are not states, they are more modern armed tribes with chiefs prone to cannibalism) in which elections can be lost in this way. Now, Trump won Kamala by an even more convincing margin, winning many places where for generations it was believed that someone who did not vote for the Democrats would have his hand withered, his wheat would never grow white again, and his only son would become a mobster, a lawyer or a copywriter.
So what happened in the meantime? "Elite" and "deep state" became the most hated words, and by God, so did "meritocracy", although it was not yet clear what exactly that meant, but it is clear that something was designed to destroy the strings of the "little man". Fortunately, there are characters like Trump to defend him... A visitor from Neptune would think that the orange man must have been a bum picked up from a bench on the banks of the Hudson or a laid-off steel worker in Pittsburgh, not a neglected parasite of the caste of the big caste ("The Family Tarana") of the nouveau riche who went through life without learning anything, because he didn't even need any knowledge to make a living from it. I couldn't even swear that he had learned to operate an elevator, since I can easily imagine that he had never been alone in an elevator in his life.
Okay, but knowledge is not everything in life - even Einstein was not the president of the world - so what about other virtues? Honesty, modesty, truthfulness... Even Trump's voters will not tell you that they have ever detected traces of something like that in him.
"We" may not have understood what was happening, but Trump did; predator instinct. A few days before the first election that he will win, Trump says: "I could kill a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue right now, and I would still win." "We" are appalled, but we are somewhat comforted by his naivety. He wins. Granted, he didn't shoot anyone, but we realize that he really could have, and we try to see where this new world we've woken up leads us. Our heads are like a GPS that resets the settings after the driver did not turn onto the highway as it should have been only logical, but on a wild field path.
What's boiling somewhere underneath it all? Processes of long duration, as always. Let's go back to the time before GPS. It is infinitely useful to watch movies, read books, listen to music and read newspapers and magazines from 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago. The war is already a relatively long time ago, the ruins and hunger have emerged, contempt for every "f" from fascism is almost universal, we live in consolidated democracies, freedoms of all kinds - political, trade union, artistic, sexual - are growing and spreading. At least this is the life of Western Europe and North America - and others trot after them, no matter how far they go. The South is not among the worst... Of course, this is not the time for idealization, by no means: the Cold War with its risks and paranoia, America that is just starting to emerge from informal apartheid and plunges into Vietnam and similar shit, Germany that is "healing" its identity trauma, among other things and crazy left-wing terrorism, Italy which adds right-wing terrorism and two large and countless small mafias to it, France which does not know how to deal with Algeria neither as a colony nor as a an "independent country" which, with its neighbors, is slowly beginning the siege of Paris, but everyone pretends not to see it because the Gods of the Left will roast you for paying too much attention to mere facts and too little to class consciousness, which alone gives facts real meaning, Britain according to the IRA, but also which is dragged to one edge of ruin by the dilettante Labor government, and then pushed to the other edge of ruin by Thatcherism, which sometimes looks like a cytostatic to treat a cold...
BUT, in spite of everything, for the most part, people live well, freely, and even economically quite peacefully. The "Golden Decades" got that name for a reason.
Look at who then leads the states, who the majority votes for. Angels and geniuses? Just work. But, people with competencies at least in politics, and usually in something else, far above the "ordinary voter". Honest enough that they are not thieves (well, Italians don't count 🙂 ) and if they are, they will end up in prison and certainly out of politics. They would end their political career if they pushed a passer-by a little more roughly on Fifth Avenue or overtook a tractor in a full lane. They provide everyone with "freedom to bark", but not themselves. No one will arrest you if you say that "immigrants are eating our dogs and cats" in some murky bar, but the president of the state or government who would say that would first be sent to an insane asylum under rotation, and then to further proceedings.
Today, it's sexy for a voter to vote for someone who's much more unhinged than himself. Most of the voters of Trump, Orban, Putin, Vučić are much better and better people than them.
Less than two days of blockade - that's how long it took to see how weak and powerless the public media service is, both from the outside and from the inside. At the moment of writing this text, it is the eighth day of the blockade, and the sixth that RTS is not broadcasting its program. They also seem to be facing a strike inside the house. And the essence of blocking RTS is not in what it publishes, but in what it keeps silent
In the months after the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, the flames of rebellion spread throughout Serbia. The first protests started in Novi Sad right after the tragedy. The authorities responded with arrests, police cordons and intimidation, but instead of calming down the protesters, new protests followed.
The rector of the University of Belgrade, Vladan Đokić, has been the target of top state officials and regime tabloids for months, who label him as an insidious instigator of student protests, an opportunist, "the face of evil" and "the leader of the criminal octopus." How and why a rector became "state enemy number one"
"I'm standing in the cordon, and my daughter is shouting at me 'aw, aw, killers'. What should I do? If they ordered me - I would throw down my baton and bulletproof vest and stand on the side of my child," a police officer from the south of Serbia, who works as needed in the Belgrade Police Brigade, told "Vreme"
The recent formation of the Đura Macuta government is part of the regime's revenge and cynicism. This can be seen most in the "black troika" of new ministers appointed to deal with the parts of society that are the leaders and symbols of the big rebellion that lasted for several months, the cause of which was the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, which claimed 16 human lives. Education, universities, unsolicited media and parts of the judiciary that refuse to listen to orders, either publicly, with announcements, or hiding behind legal procedures, should be dismantled. Those who will have no problem doing everything they are told, even reinforcing the orders with their own inventions, are chosen for this.
Who mentions the extraordinary elections when the rating of the party in power is falling, and according to all surveys, Vučić is not the most important political factor in the country, but the students?
The brutal beating of students and citizens in Novi Sad shows that the regime is not only ready to take revenge - it is actually carrying it out
If in reality the principle of balance is violated - the way the incompetent regime violated the relationship between the concrete elements at the Novi Sad Railway Station - reality will behave like a canopy: it will fail to obey
The archive of the weekly Vreme includes all our digital editions, since the very beginning of our work. All issues can be downloaded in PDF format, by purchasing the digital edition, or you can read all available texts from the selected issue.
See all
Trump is not an anomaly or a passing phenomenon, as it seemed when he left the White House at the end of his first term. He is the majority of America. Now that all the levers of power are in Trump's hands, the people of America are left to wonder what this choice says about themselves. If he is the best political leader, what a country it is
After the election failure in 2012, the Republicans launched an internal review process: what went wrong. All of this is summarized in a report colloquially called an autopsy of the Republican Party. With the 2016 election result in mind, it would seem that they made the right move at the right time, although it is difficult to determine whether the text of the autopsy was a guide to the election victory or, simply, Donald Trump happened. The Democrats have the same task in 2024, the only question is whether they are capable and willing to fulfill it
The policies of the new US president are a version of destructive and authoritarian national capitalism - even with elements of racism - that reaches out to those dissatisfied with the so-called liberal hegemony and the power structures that sustain it. Therefore, it is not difficult to determine where such political enthusiasm in Serbia comes from when it comes to Trump. Serbs like to think of themselves as a collective victim of the same system, or at least the government in Serbia tries to project such an image to the electorate.
Vucic invited Trump as a guest, as soon as possible, although we do not know if he promised to come. Everything will be in order - from bread and scones to Ivica who will sing and prepare a new set of photos from the last meeting, like back in New York
Donald Trump's return to the White House could significantly affect the US smartphone market. His plan to impose a 60 percent tariff on goods made in China includes Apple devices, which could drastically raise their prices and weaken the US tech giant's position
The state fell apart, the system fell apart; could at least one of them survive, even at the expense of the other? Or were they bound by the same barbed wire?
