John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The New York Times as Judge and Jury”
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Response to a comment which asks, “…he [Trump] has sanctioned Russia more than the last two Presidents combined, and now he is even killing some Russians and knocking their planes out of the sky. So why do they want to impeach him?
“WHY WOULD HE PRESENT A THREAT TO THEM OR ANYONE? I don’t get it.”
You have a real point. Here is my explanation.
In fact, Trump has demonstrated what a weakling he is - despite his noisy self-praise and bravado all the time - by literally giving the establishment everything it wants, and then some in certain cases, leaving behind the few things he seemed originally intent on doing, things that were worthwhile - better relations with Russia, leaving Syria, and stopping some of the horror of the Neocon Mideast Wars.
He has simply left all those worthwhile concepts behind in a desperate effort to be loved and to survive. What's left is his junk program of disparaging migrants and Muslims, a pastiche of barely-hidden prejudices, and still wanting to build a giant stupid wall plus plenty of stupid flag-kissing by a guy who avoided military service - a program that is tailor-made for the Walmart-NASCAR-gun meet-Pledge of Allegiance crowd that constitutes his base. It has no appeal for the establishment.
When he publicly criticizes (mainly black) football players who make a respectful gesture of protest, something they are entitled to do and which is none of his business as President, he is throwing still-bleeding chunks of meat to the base who adore him for it. He even goes beyond inappropriate criticism to suggesting penalties NFL management should implement, as though that were any business of a government official who is supposed to represent all the people.
The establishment types do like, at least, to appear enlightened, it's a matter of style if not substance, and many wealthy Americans greatly benefit by the loose system of illegal migrants as cheap labor which has prevailed for years. It provides a great informal system, complete with an endless supply of labor, the opportunity to pay low wages and to get rid of any worker causing trouble. Why else does any person think it has continued for so long? Do people really believe that only the lack of a "heroic" figure like Trump has allowed this situation to happen? Yes, Trump's base does hold to that pathetic idea, and he encourages them to hold the thought.
So, he ends in the worst possible of all worlds, a man who has just continued the policies of Obama, even intensifying them, and tearing up what little worthwhile Obama achieved. There's irony here, because Trump loathes Obama. Well, Obama bombed every day of his eight years, and Trump just continues. Obama was responsible for the mess in Ukraine, and Trump just continues. Obama was responsible for the pivot towards China, and Trump just continues. Obama created America's vast extrajudicial killing program, and Trump just continues, indeed, giving the CIA an even freer hand.
In another aspect of his desperate cowardice and wish to be liked and re-elected, he destroyed the Iran Nuclear Agreement - Obama's only serious worthwhile achievement in my view - owing directly to influence from Netanyahu and Netanyahu's biggest booster, American billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, who undoubtedly promises Trump tens of millions of dollars for his 2020 campaign. That Agreement was praised and supported by every Western statesman and by all technical experts. Now, it is replaced by threats and name-calling and instability.
Indeed, again to buy favor, he has given Israel's lobbyists everything they ask for. It is embarrassing to see such subservience to a small state which makes huge, often inappropriate, demands. Moving the embassy illegally to Jerusalem. Ending aid program after aid program for the Palestinians, including even heartless acts like hospital support in East Jerusalem. Berating the UN constantly, despite its now weakened voice after years of American browbeating, and withdrawing from important UN agencies like UNESCO to please Israel. It is simply an appalling and chaotic set of activities.
It all reflects Trump's very weak character, and it is all driven from a desperate effort to please the American power establishment.
He knows they dislike him. I think there are several aspects to their dislike. He is viewed as a political pirate, having no real background and having hijacked a major political party that was adrift. He is also viewed as a kind of crass nouveau riche type by all the old money. His crassness is measured by the fact that his past rickety real estate empire has only survived by endless legal maneuvering and, apparently, a big hand in the past from investments from Russian mob money.
Of course, there is also his basic awkward way of communicating, a jumble of half-thought notions that have appeal to people in Trump’s base, but these are people for whom the establishment has only contempt, nicely revealed in words characterizing them by Hillary Clinton during the campaign. The privileged who actually run America and its politics have little regard for average Americans who think they are entitled to anything just by virtue of being born in the country.
The Russian thing is important. While I think the whole Hillary Clinton claim about Russia helping him is complete crap, Trump nevertheless is where he is in part owing to Russian shady-money connections in the past propping up his shaky business empire. And if there is one thing the American power establishment can agree on, it's viewing Russia the way Rome viewed Carthage.
Russia is loathed because it represents a serious obstacle to the current driving hormonal rage of America in asserting its dominion over the planet. The rage is a development which reflects the establishment's unwelcome realization of America's relative decline in world trade and economics since the glory days just after WWII. There are a lot of countries out there now looking for their place in the sun, countries which were flat on the ground in the Ozzie and Harriet's days that encouraged the myth of the American Dream - a myth, by the way, which Trump uses on his trailer-park political base under the “Make America Great Again” slogan. It’s utter nonsense, and the big boys in Washington know that it is. They have other plans.
America is actually not able to compete with all those new competitors, and its position will inevitably further slide relative to them. That is not easily swallowed by the privileged folks who really run America and have enjoyed god-like positions for much of the time after WWII.
And their attitudes have been catered to by Washington's influential Neocon crowd, influential people well entrenched in Washington's establishment. The Neocons say America should just use its brute power to get what it wants. It is an "Israelized" point of view, and the Neocons have an ongoing relationship with Israel. Their advocacy for a newly aggressive United States is in part based on their belief that an aggressive United States is good for Israel.
So, we have a big aggressive drive - "full-spectrum dominance” is one of its official mottos - to literally tell people all over the planet, "It's my way or the highway" and to use force, almost in a Mafia protection-racket style, to carve out favorable advantages that couldn't be had by fair competition. There are many examples, but a good recent one is the effort to push out reasonably-priced Russian gas from Europe and replace it with far costlier American LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas). And now we have sanctions against people for buying Russian hi-tech weapons rather than American ones, as though that were a crime.
The establishment, given this new wave of aggression as one of its basic drives, just does not trust a Trump whose business interests in the past were “rescued” by Russian money and who talked the way he did during the campaign about normal relations with Russia, something, indeed, which is one of his only sensible views. Those establishment attitudes Trump just cannot overcome, and they have nothing at all to do with “Russia-gate.” The Russia-gate myth only exists owing to the pre-existing establishment attitudes about Russia, and Hillary Clinton has only been able to make her pathetic, half-baked claims about why she lost the election precisely because of the accepting environment of those pre-existing attitudes.
Not to defend Trump, whom I find appalling, but it is all a dirty and dangerous situation with the Democrats just as much behind the imperial drive as the Republicans. They are all establishment, with no distinctions to be made between them in foreign affairs and the aggressive imperialism.
The Trump drama only provides a kind of noisy sideshow, a sideshow unfortunately which contributes only more instability as this pathetic man struggles to survive against America’s establishment, almost trying to outbid them in the stupidities he will attempt.
