John Chuckman
LARGE EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY RUTH DEYERMOND IN THE INDEPENDENT (AND QUICKLY TAKEN DOWN)
“Why Trump's presidency is almost identical to Boris Yeltsin's Russian premiership
“Trump is often compared to other political figures from US history, including Richard Nixon, but perhaps the most striking parallel of all is not with a figure from the American past but with a Russian: Boris Yeltsin, post-Soviet Russia’s first president”
I thought this a good piece.
There's some I disagree with, but it is definitely well worth reading.
Yeltsin was an interesting public figure, although without a doubt, a very destructive one.
But one can say that of many figures in history. In America, Lyndon Johnson is a strong example. Very able in political machinations, but a failed leader with his personal qualities of deviousness and greed driving him to disaster.
So, too, Trump, although a far less interesting and sympathetic figure. He's actually a pretty twisted personality with his teetotaling ways - please remember, Hitler was a teetotaler - and his complete wrong-headedness in listening to the words of others. In that, he is like a very egocentric child.
The relationship with the daughter is also strange. She has been proven to be a not a very capable person. She's not even charming, as both she and daddy very much think she is. She shares his ego, almost like the Greek myth where three sisters shared an eye.
Her and Daddy's performance at a world summit was breathtakingly dumb. All the leaders have kids or grandkids they could have insisted on putting into official group pictures of leaders, but only Trump did it and only Ivanka was thick enough to smilingly go through with it with no sense of embarrassment over her performance in front of infinitely more qualified and experienced people.
The Trumps have proven to be genuine American grotesques.
There was an underlying appealing human quality in Yeltsin that is missing almost completely from Trump. One would likely have enjoyed sharing a bottle with Yeltsin while vigorously chatting away, as many did.
But we got Trump through the badly-failed American political system. A choice between Trump and Clinton? What kind of a "choice" was that?
America has just reached a stage of corruption I think with no turning back. Money is totally at the center of national politics, and big money means only big and powerful interests having any influence. It has pretty much reached the stage of a plutocracy which goes through an elaborate and costly play of elections, elections in which only the wealthy and influential have any role that counts. The ordinary voter is treated like the ordinary consumer, someone to be subjected to immense campaigns of advertising and marketing. The establishment wins no matter what the outcome because both parties vet candidates to be acceptable to imperial interests.
Now, Trump slipped through that vetting process as a genuine political outsider who only succeeded because the Democrats insisted on running the very much disliked Hillary Clinton. And Americans do like mavericks, which is what Trump seemed to be, but he has proven to be quite the opposite of a maverick.
The establishment took him by the hand very early and explained the rules of the game, which he has embraced enthusiastically, with virtually every maverick hint or suggestion from his campaign forgotten. Get along better with Russia? Get out of Syria, leaving it to the Russians to clean up? Why can’t Israel pay for its own defense? Why is the Middle East on fire? Those and other important questions are gone, leaving something which is almost pathetically laughable, a big-mouthed provincial who blunders around, posing for pictures with stern face and jutted jaw, while carrying out his establishment-set tasks faithfully.
The egomaniacal signatures on documents in almost Crayola-thick lettering ten inches high are held proudly before the cameras each time, as if to say, see, folks, I signed an order. He’s an embarrassment to many Americans of both parties, but so long as he does what he is supposed to do, he is tolerated by the people who matter.
Trump is making an unholy mess of the Middle East for that very reason of America’s money-drenched politics. He knows he will need a lot of money for any chance of success in 2020, so he caters to the likes of multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson to get it. And money does matter – for advertising, for polls, for marketing, for travel, for campaign-stop preparations, for clever organizational people, for speech-writers, for bands, for flags, for make-up, for photographers, and on and on. American elections have very costly production values.
So does good press, and I thought from the start the embassy move to Jerusalem, a completely unnecessary, clumsy, and complicating act, was about securing some more sympathetic press for the future. It is just a fact that virtually all of America’s high-end press and broadcasting are in hands very sympathetic with Israel. At any rate, there was nowhere to go but up from what he experienced in his campaign.
Adelson eats and breathes Israel. It is hard to understand why he spends any time in America except that it is where the source of his wealth is located and it is the location of politicians to influence on Israel’s behalf.
The proven psychopath, Netanyahu, is always ready to encourage and flatter, too, as with a new Israeli coin to be issued with Trump's portrait commemorating the foolish embassy re-location to Jerusalem. It's all a pretty sick way - real insider, money-driven stuff - to make policy affecting hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East.
Policy artificially constructed to benefit a few million in Israel against the interests of hundreds of millions of others is not sound and is mighty dangerous stuff, but for all one can see, Trump never gives it a thought, but then neither does a great part of the American establishment, some maybe being quite happy in private that Trump can take the flak for doing what they wanted done. Israel is a cozy partner with the American political establishment and powerful agencies like CIA.
In matters like that, Trump does act much like a drunken Yeltsin dancing around.
Trump's situation is also complicated by the American establishment's own perception of the country's relative decline in the world - an inevitability given that "the American Dream" was built on the temporary circumstances of the post-WWII - and its determination of how to react, which is extremely aggressively, as though they thought it possible to bully their way through continued leadership in a changed world. A big-mouthed bully like Trump is only too glad to accommodate and act as though he is leading the charge.
Trump's showy ego and empty knowledge enable him to play the role of vainglorious fool leading the enterprise. Things here get very muddled with the powerful role of the Neocons who advocate an aggressive America, the better to defend Israel. Trump is now thoroughly caught in a thick web of these interests. And one can have no trust in his ability to negotiate his or America's way.
Trump also is a prisoner of American Nativism, people with baseball caps comprising his primary political base. It is odd that this group so embrace a billionaire wheeler-dealer from New York, New York City for many of them always having represented almost a symbol of Eastern putridness, but they very much do. Just as a lot of Christian fundamentalists embrace this worldly, cynical, and often quite immoral man (as a recently married man paying for sex with a porn star) and he has no church affiliation. This base support represents another dangerous situation, especially where matters of migration and religious identity are concerned. These are groups which do not care that Trump, the supposed super-Patriot, weaseled his way out of military service, so long as he salutes the flag and condemns (legitimate) shows of protest at football games. Facts don’t matter to people who don’t think.
