I'd like to break the mould, as it were, by suggesting a couple of good things about Donald Trump. This is not a popular thing to do, I know. I hasten to add that I'm not pro-Trump, but I don't think everything is ever only either black or white.

Trump was right about the international trade agreements that the U.S. signed up to in the last, say, 30 years: they were structured so that factories in the U.S. could be relocated to low-wage countries, leading to unemployment, under-employment, and low-wage employment among the unskilled U.S. workforce. It was these trade agreements that were the main cause of the loss of hope and the anger among almost half the voting population in 2016. The trade agreements also had special clauses, called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses. These clauses prohibited any nation state that was a party to the agreement to legally challenge any part of the agreement. So, the trade deals were immune, even when they turned out to be harmful to significant section of a nation's population - as was the case in the U.S. So, when Trump claimed that these trade deals were 'bad for America' he was right: they were bad for a significant section of his constituency - the 'forgotten people', or Hillary Clinton's 'basked of the deplorables'.

Just as an aside, the international trade deals reflected the value system of neoliberalism: that national governments and nation states should be subsumed under the impersonal rule of corporate interests - even when these governments are democratically elected and attempt to represent and protect vulnerable sections of their own citizens. What is good about Trump is that he is not 'ideological'; he is not a neoliberal; and the neoliberal-dominated Washington Consensus, military-industrial complex, and mainstream media hate him because of his heterodox economic views. When we read and watch Trump being excoriated in the mainstream media, remember who is doing the criticism: the neoliberals - which include the dominant wings of both the Republican and the Democratic Parties. It doesn't mean that we, the public, must wholeheartedly agree with them. The U.S. polity is a three-way contest between the Trumpites, the neoliberals, and us the true liberals and progressives.

For those unfamiliar with the term 'neoliberalism', here are a couple of references:

"No deal capitalism: austerity and the unmaking of the North American middle class"; article by Eric Pineault; chapter 4 in, "Austerity: The Lived Experience", edited by Bryan M. Evans and Stephen McBride (University of Toronto Press, 2017) - ISBN 978-1-4875-2203-2 (paperback).

"Internalizing neoliberalism and austerity"; article by Stephen McBride and Sorin Mitrea; and "Austerity and outsourcing in Britain's new corporate state"; article by Stephen Wilks; chapters 5 and 13, respectively, in, "The Austerity State", edited by Stephen McBride and Bryan Evans (University of Toronto Press, 2017) - ISBN 978-1-4875-2195-0 (paperback).

"The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society", by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval (Verso, 2013) - ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-176-3 (hardback). - I'd recommend chapters 1, 8, and 9 in particular.