For Trump, it is a sure fact that the proud USA and American people are being bled by transnational business that has caused jobs in the country to be lost, whole industrial regions that once flourished to go to rot, American infrastructure to decay, the local population to sink into poverty, trade balances to be negative, and government debt to be gigantic. For him, this goes hand in hand with an alarming decline in American military power, which he sees not only in the curbed expansion of US weapons budgets over the last decades, but also in the USA’s lack of success in its military engagements over the last quarter century.

It’s clear to him that all this is the result of a sell out of American interests that is as huge as it is criminal. An utterly corrupt “establishment,” in his view, has allowed economic dealings by which American jobs have been stolen, thereby depriving his “hard-working” and “beautiful” Americans of their right to the happiness of achieving, by their superior proficiency, the prosperity for themselves and their families, and thus for America as a whole, that befits them and their nation. This picture of America’s deep crisis and its causes shows what Trump’s picture of the world altogether is like.

Opportunities that hinder and prevent success in life: that is a contradiction that takes some coping with. Of course, those concerned could take it as an indication of the prevailing purposes that are inherent in their supposedly so neutral living conditions; and they would be wise to do so. For that would put the conflict of interests organized by the law-enforcing authority right on the agenda, and they would only need to win the class struggle. But that would mean abolishing this strange paradox and not constructively “coping” with it.

Nobody wants to say that prosperity and poverty — free access to the wealth of goods produced in the world and exclusion from them — necessarily belong to our unbeatable economic system; that would be something like critique of capitalism, god forbid. The idea is that there is some match between money earned and job. As if one and the same yardstick showing thousands per month were applied to the different jobs, and one job ended at the second thousand while the other was only just starting at the twentieth or two hundredth. Differences in income aren’t all right just like that, they are all right because they are fair. Just as the double meaning of ‘to earn’ says: receiving income and being entitled to it belong together. The relation being, by common consent, that income depends on what a person deserves, not the other way round.

At least in principle. In the real working world, everybody, when it comes down to it, knows plenty of cases in which the equation between just deserts and financial remuneration doesn’t quite work out.