The chaos continues. I've been following it and yet I cannot pretend
to predict what will happen. This administration is unprecedented in many ways.
Obviously there are power struggles afoot. We will learn more
of them in the coming years as people defect and talk. I'm sure some within the
Trump White House will hold their breaths and wait to see what Bannon does and
says next. His media savvy makes him a potentially powerful enemy and yet Trump
and the people around him play hard ball and have little interest in the law.
The Deep State is as I have argued engaged in something of a
civil war. Trump I continue to assert is not the 'maverick' some make him out
to be but instead represents an extreme and very ugly faction within the elite.
That said, he's breeding instability and harming US prestige
around the world and this is something that will ultimately upset all who are
involved. Whether or not to remove him is part of the debate, the battle.
Contain or remove? The former is much easier and that project
has been well underway. Bannon's removal marks a key stepping-stone and in this
move they're killing two birds for the price of one. It's damage control,
tempering Trump's politically incorrect and foolish remarks regarding
Charlottesville, but they've also removed a key and influential figure
resistant to Trump's embrace of the Establishment mainstream within the
Pentagon. Somewhere there are some folks celebrating.
But what will Bannon do? That remains to be seen. If he
starts talking and stirring the pot and great deal of damage could be done.
There's another possibility. Trump and Bannon after eight months
in the White House may have come to the realisation that Bannon can be more
effective on the outside... running Breitbart, using Talk Radio and the like...
then trying to work within the bureaucracy. Trump's administration is besieged.
The street fighting may prove a needful distraction, especially with figures
like Bannon and Hannity to keep providing the narrative of agitation.
Of course Trump's own worst enemy is his himself. His foolish
pride, his impatience and his wrath have done more damage to his own cause and
defense than anything else. Whenever there's a hint of scandal whether real or
imagined, Trump will make it worse just because he's so outraged that someone
challenged him. If there's a smoldering fire that someone calls attention to,
he douses it with gasoline just to spite them.
I still think Establishment agent Robert Mueller's task is to
build a fatal dossier on Trump and then use it to force him to either comply or
go down in flames.
It may already be happening.
These are all just guesses of course. It's fascinating to
watch but also tiresome. It all feeds the general unease that I feel at this
time. My unease is not rooted in some kind of concern for America or that the
public no longer has a leader it can look to as a moral example. I also grow
weary of hearing such rubbish and lies belched forth by mainstream and
Establishment commentators.
Instead whether watching Trump or the seemingly endless
terrorist attacks in Europe, while scrutinising the developments taking place
in the tech sector or observing millions of zombies walking around staring at
social media on absurd little screens... I feel a great angst about where this
is all headed.
There was a pressure cooker at work in the 1990s but few
noticed it and 9/11 was a shock.
I think the pressure today is much worse and far more
noticeable. What does that mean? I don't know as of yet.
I don't know how you can say Trump isn't a maverick. Since his campaign, he has been quite the juggler, balancing contradictory forces that he surrounded himself with. He somehow managed to channel the many strands of the disaffected establishment, on the outer-perimeter of the neo-liberal coalition that dominates both republican and democratic parties, into a chaos machine. And thus I don't know why you think he is an utter buffoon. Everyone set the said sort of things about his campaign, his willful flouting of social taboos, his utter disregard for the consequences of any statement or line of thought. Every time the news predicted something would end his candidacy, he rebounded. Clearly, with the dismissal of a number of his host, especially Flynn and Bannon, he seems to be losing control of the war faction he made a deal with. The Mueller report might be the coup-de-grace for a Trump presidency, breaking him and replacing him with the war faction's candidate, Pence.
ReplyDeleteBut that'd be a last resort, wouldn't it? Better yet to paint Trump as a gorilla that was reeled in by the sensible operators (Pence, Kelly, Mattis, et al.) and play that in 2020 as a way to gain credibility for the discredited neo-cons. Even in the mainstream media people are playing odes to the Bush years, when the president was a respectable, pragmatic, and considerate leader. I suppose that's another eight years down the memory hole. I'm seeing, every now and again, right-wing "Christian" commentators distinguishing between the Alt Right white nationalism of Trump and the sensible conservatism of Buckley, of the old Republican party. All of these people are disgusting with their seared consciences.
This article in antiwar.com describes Bannon's departure in relation to Trump's abandonment of an "isolationist" foreign policy
ReplyDeletehttp://original.antiwar.com/justin/2017/08/20/the-revolution-betrayed/
Interesting article... perhaps it's no accident that Trump's Afghanistan escalation comes in the immediate wake of Bannon's firing.
ReplyDeleteTrump had some 'rogues' or 'outsiders' connected to him, but the administration is basically comprised of Wall Street types and generals. That's 'rogue' in terms of the Washington bureaucracy, but that's not rogue in terms of American Imperialism.
It's sort of like the some of the rough guys from the back, maybe some of the warehouse people have come up and taken over part of the front office. They're crude and have different tastes and some of the folks up front don't like it.
But they're all still part of the same company. If you're standing outside the security fence by the gated booth looking at the guy holding the gun and carrying the radio... nothing much has changed.
Like I said I'm just waiting to see if Bannon is now going to wage war for Trump or if his declaration that Trump's administration is dead means he's going to turn his guns against it.
What will the result be? Beats me but it could mean something worse than Trump...or more likely the whole Bannon movement implodes.
"perhaps it's no accident that Trump's Afghanistan escalation comes in the immediate wake of Bannon's firing."
ReplyDeleteSeems to me that is exactly why Bannon left when he did. Bannon wants the USofA to follow an isolationist path with no military involvement overseas. When the generals decided on a strategy of more (but limited) troops for Afghanistanan to try to stem the stratefic losses which are ongoing and persuaded Presdeint Donald Trump to follow that policy and Bannon failed to win the counter-argument it was game over for Bannon. His powers of persuasion were proved to be ineffective and he had lost face so it was time for him to pack his bags and move back to Breitbart to provide the quality propaganda for the masses at which he is so skilled. This is why he declared that his vision of the presidency (as an isolationist one) was not dead.
"the seemingly endless terrorist attacks in Europe"
Whereas it appears nobody in the Western hemisphere sheds a tear for the endless terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan, because ... they are not "westerners" and committing acts of barbarism is just second nature to them and they are used to it.
Typographical error -- that was intended to be "is noW dead."
ReplyDeleteI agree it's a shame that no one pays any attention to the terrorist attacks in the Middle East. Look at the floods in Bangladesh. It's much worse than Texas but no one cares.
ReplyDeleteMy point regarding terrorist attacks in Europe is that they are pushing Western society in a very troubling direction... ironically (or not) in the very direction certain bureaucrats and militarists want. Or to put it another way, I reject the mainstream narrative regarding the War on Terror and certainly the narratives regarding the host of attacks within Europe, but they are serving the purposes of those who would consolidate power.
There's major stuff going on and I think people would take to the streets if they understood it.