Editorial – Stop blaming politicians
Public debate today is obsessed with personalities. Political life is reduced to a revolving cast of individuals who are either demonised as the source of society’s problems or celebrated as its saviours. Few illustrate this better than Donald Trump.
But focusing on individuals like Trump misses the central issue. He is not an anomaly, nor the cause of the problems people associate with him. He is a product of the system in which he operates.
Modern society is organised around production for profit, competition, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a minority. At the heart of this system lies the wage relationship: the majority of people must sell their ability to work in order to live, while a minority owns and controls the means of producing wealth.
This is where exploitation occurs—not as an exception, but as a normal feature of the system. Workers produce more value than they receive back in wages, and that surplus is taken as profit. It is this process that generates wealth at one pole and insecurity at the other.
Within this framework, politics is not a neutral arena. Governments, regardless of who leads them, are compelled to maintain the conditions for profitable production. This limits what any politician can do. They may differ in style, rhetoric, or policy details, but they operate within the same economic constraints.
In such conditions, it is hardly surprising that figures emerge who are aggressive, self-promoting, and skilled at channelling frustration. They speak to real discontent—but redirect it away from the structure of society and towards scapegoats, rivals, or personalities.
The public, meanwhile, is encouraged to focus on those personalities. Outrage is directed at individuals, elections are framed as moral contests, and political engagement becomes a matter of choosing sides. This keeps attention away from the wage system itself—the very mechanism that produces inequality, instability, and recurring dissatisfaction.
Whether it is Trump or any other political figure, the pattern remains. Different individuals come and go, but the underlying relationship between those who work for wages and those who live from profit continues unchanged.
From this perspective, attacking individual politicians is not only insufficient, it is a distraction. It creates the illusion that replacing one leader will solve problems that are rooted in how society is organised at a much deeper level.
As long as the wage system remains—where the majority must work for wages and a minority appropriates the surplus—inequality and conflict are inevitable, and the kinds of political figures people argue over will continue to emerge.
If there is to be meaningful change, the focus has to shift away from personalities and towards the structure itself. The real question is not who governs, but whether a system based on wages, profit, and class division can ever serve the interests of the majority.
Until that question is faced, the cycle will continue—and so will the conditions that produce figures like Donald Trump.