Translated excerpts of Srdja Trifkovic’s interview on the U.S. election for Serbia’s Public Media Service, Belgrade Radio II. [Audio file (in Serbian)]

There are endless skeletons in Hillary’s closet, many more than the renewed FBI investigation indicates. Her past record and her modus operandi are inherently scandalous, and many details are yet to be revealed. At home, America is more divided than ever. Whoever wins next Tuesday, we’ll have roughly one half of the electorate who will not see the outcome as legitimate or even legally valid. Abroad, the entire concept of global hegemony is in crisis—and on this issue the two candidates differ fundamentally.

Trump has assailed the holy trinity of the American “Deep State,” or permanent state: rampant immigration, globalizing “free trade,” and global empire. Hillary Clinton is determined to maintain the current strategic approach on all three issues, which is likely to have catastrophic results. Compared to her, Obama has been markedly cautious. In the summer of 2013 he refrained from direct intervention in Syria, in spite of the neoconservative-neoliberal duopoly’s intense pressure. It is to be feared that if she wins—and if the Republicans maintain their majority in both houses, and start insisting on further investigations—she will engineer some foreign crisis in order to consolidate her domestic position. This would open the possibility of uncontrolled escalation, in Syria and elsewhere.

Q: This campaign has been marked by many trivialities . . . 

ST: Primarily because the media focus has been on demonizing and deconstructing Donald Trump, and the media have acted as an integral part of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. His vulgarity notwithstanding, their obsession with Trump’s demolition has lowered the tone. It has masked the fact that there is no real split between the two parties’ establishment on the issue of global empire, immigration, and “free trade.” This is why a major segment of the Republican establishment has been anti-Trump: he has dared question these holy cows of the Duopoly. From the standpoint of the American deep state—the political establishment in Washington, the financial power node in Wall Street, and the military-industrial complex—Trump’s election would present a real and present danger. With Hillary at the helm they would enjoy the perfect comfort of continuity.

The first dangerous crisis would be her stated intention to create no-fly zones and “protected areas” in Syria. That could herald to the worst global calamity we have seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962 . . . And yet, the maintenance of this global empire is completely opposed to any rational notion of America’s national and security interests. It is rooted in an ideological obsession to which Hillary Clinton is deeply devoted, a triumphalist misunderstanding of “American exceptionalism.” This is an absurd notion, which has had its continuity ever since the Puritan settlement of New England in the XVII century, which claims that America is exempt from all legal and moral restraints that apply to the rest of the world. Intoxicated by this doctrine, to which she evidently subscribes, it is to be feared that she would follow the dictum of “my way or no way”—as amply evidenced in her State Department tenure. Some members of Obama’s cabinet have said that during that time she was always the most hawkish voice in the room. She tipped the balance over the Libyan intervention. At the same time, her chronic inability to admit mistakes and accept responsibility for them is indicative of sociopathic personality. This disorder was clearly visible after Ambassador Stevens and his crew were murdered in Benghazi in September 2012.

Q: Do you see the possibility of tampering with election results?

ST: Less in the sense of immediate technicalities, more in the impact of ongoing massive naturalization of millions of aliens, primarily Latinos who vote Democrat by default, without any adequate screening of their citizenship qualifications. This may make a difference in a host of battleground states, such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Democrats have willfully altered the demographic balance. In addition, how can we call an election “democratic” if citizens are not adequately informed? In this election we have seen the mainstream media machine abandon all pretense of objectivity. The problem is more structural than technical, the latter being embodied in the old Chicagoland slogan, “Vote early, vote often!” . . . 

The quality of the debate in the media has been abysmal. All structural problems of the American polity are primarily moral and spiritual, not economic, which undermines the functionality of the society as a whole—but none of that has ever been touched. What passes for “debate” is essentially mere reiteration of well-known ideological tenets, devoid of quality analysis and meaningful policy preposals.