John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY
In a way, Trump is worse and more dangerous than a typical liar
But I'm not sure Trump even knows when he is lying.
Basically, as we've seen and heard from him in so many matters, Trump's reality is whatever he wants it to be.
It's a mental condition, not unlike psychopathy.
He is happy with the tales he tells, and he expects others to be happy with them, too. When they are not, he just insults them, calling them liars or other nasty names.
I think the only safety for the world from a man like this lies in the fact that he is unable to act on many of his tales. The establishment lets him rant on, but indeed blunts any of his acts that it doesn't regard as in keeping with its pre-existing agenda. Unfortunately for countless millions of ordinary people, that pre-existing agenda is itself also threatening.
America wants nothing so much as a return to the 1950s, or rather a return to the relative importance of America in the world of that time, to the respect that it enjoyed then, because the world has grown away from a reality once so comfortable for America. The trouble is that the effort to return to that world can only involve aggression, threats, Mafia-like pressures and extortions because it is something entirely artificial being imposed, something going against many natural developments of the last seventy-five years.
This is what we are seeing right now, whether it’s America telling Europe where it can buy its natural gas or telling China how it should sell its products or telling third countries that they should not buy any of Russia’s military technology or allowing its colony of Israel literally to seize the homes and assets of Palestinians, or telling countries like Venezuela who they should elect so that resources can be treated the way America wants them treated.
This is the vision for our near-term future, and what is Trump’s role in it?
Trump can be seen now as frantically trying to retain his job as President. Much like a drowning man waving his arms and splashing desperately. He actually tries now to outdo the establishment with its own agenda as a way to demonstrate his usefulness to them and to ward off the threat he is under. Nothing of the few sensible changes Trump first offered, changes the establishment regarded as threatening, is going to be realized. The tiny change he recently offered in Syria, for example, has already been distorted into something beyond recognition.
After all, official agencies of the American government, set to work by the previous administration and portions of his own party did try to unseat him, and he remains threatened by ongoing investigation. He knows that the threat isn’t just about supposed collusion with Russia, which has always been a dark fairy tale which tried to exploit America’s throbbing hangover from the Cold War.
However, Russophobia in general isn’t just that. It is the implicit recognition of Russia as a stumbling block to America’s reassertion of world dominance, an extremely important point. I think Russia is viewed in Washington much as ancient Carthage was viewed by the rulers of the Roman Empire, clearly a very dangerous perspective.
And America is reinforced in that view by those running its powerful colony in the Middle East. That is how they, too, see Russia, as a stumbling block to America’s complete dominance, the situation they embrace as best for their own interests.
This chaotic, dishonest, and raging man, Trump, has a closet bulging with skeletons, and a well-resourced investigation could come up with any number of them. Embarrassment or indictment or forced resignation rather than impeachment are definitely ongoing possibilities for him, and here is an ego that regards itself as just too big to fail.
The fact that this bizarre man was elected tells us something about America, and that is that there are tens of millions who feel powerless, who feel no one really represents them. There is a good deal of desperation.
And they are absolutely right to feel the way they do, but they only added to the list of their own woes by electing a man who can do nothing for them and whose recklessness is shaping up itself as extremely dangerous - in Venezuela, In Syria, in Palestine, in Iran, in Yemen, in North Korea, and in a list of other places.
The government of a world empire, one working to redouble its authority over others, has next to no use for the ordinary people of its own country, except when it comes to filling uniforms, but Trump pretends that he has because the belly-over-the-belt set are his people, his political base. That’s why, while other promises are forgotten, “the wall” has not been - that costly, pretty much pointless project means a lot to “his people.” Depriving him of it provides a natural path to weakening him for the 2020 election. Hard to see any compromise possible there.
The threat of war is as constant now as it was under Obama, and I believe it is becoming even more so. After all, even if Trump cannot decide everything as he likes to pretend he does, he still influences the international situation, its tone and direction, and he adds only more instability and recklessness.
And in China, the same recklessness has already started serious aspects of economic war. This is unbelievably dangerous to the health of world society, given the many economic weaknesses we see, especially in the United States, with debts and deficits and various bubbles generated by low interest rates and artificially pumped-up liquidity.
His grand illusion of “Make America Great Again” - just a re-tread of the now-irrelevant “American Dream” slogan – is causing buttons to be pushed that were best left untouched. The establishment knows his slogan is rubbish, but they are using him to undercut China, a country they resent and fear and a country they have wanted to undercut for a long time. It was Obama, answering to the same masters, who spoke of a “pivot to Asia.”
China is definitely on a natural path to becoming the world’s premier nation, and if there is anything the American establishment can do to torpedo that, it will. Trump and his economically-illiterate talk of China stealing American jobs is useful. Of course, no one is going to start closing factories in China and reopening them in America – Trump’s foggy-brained vision of the future – but attacking China so relentlessly can slow it down, something America’s newly assertive establishment views as useful.
The simple goal of the people who really run America is to reassert their authority worldwide. They cannot do that through economic competition anymore and they cannot do it through the immense respect America once enjoyed after WW II, but they sure can work on the military and financial and foreign policy fronts to become a more threatening bully that makes incessant demands and seizes opportunities as they come along.
They are working hard to undermine the elected government in Venezuela in part because the guy they have lined up as “leader” there has promised he would sell off the government’s big petroleum assets. But it’s more than just that. Venezuela is just one piece in a large puzzle. America wants a return in Latin America also to the 1950s, a time when an unquestioning giant plantation system was dominated by American-compliant governments. Cuba is very much back on the list of targets after Venezuela, as are several other states. The “Lima Group” is just one more Cold War-style front organization for getting what you want from others. They help do your dirty work, giving your arrogant demands an appearance of wider respectability, in return for favors and considerations. Hitler’s willing helpers, as it were. Something of the same role Israel enjoys in the Middle East.
Serious world economic collapse is not just a dark fantasy, it is a real possibility, given the many frailties we see. Things are now slowing in China. Things are slowing in Germany. Europe is rife with division. None of the American establishment has been willing to bear the least burden to rebalance things in America, to correct dangerous excesses. Instead of paying the taxes they should have to pay down debt, they received more outrageous tax cuts. It is behavior which almost exactly parallels that of the great dukes and churchmen of France in the years leading to the French Revolution.
In this they are blood brothers, Trump and the Washington establishment. Trump’s entire career is one of fighting taxes and taking unfair advantages with no regard for the consequences to others and society at large. Trump’s personal real estate empire reflects the efforts over years of accountants and tax lawyers constantly battling government more than it does anything else. He has been a decades-long chiseller in slow motion, which is why he refused to release his tax records.
So, too, in military matters. Overwhelmingly, these establishment people avoided military service, as Trump very much did at the very height of horrors in Vietnam. The guy who regularly has his picture taken in custom-made bomber jackets and other military gear welcomed no opportunity to wear them when they weren’t just political costumes. He’ll hug the flag for countless photo-ops, but it never occurred to him to risk anything personal for it.
But the American establishment is always ready to send others off to war to inflict God-knows-what on the poor people of the world. They do it in the name of “freedom,” but they mean only the freedom to control and exploit. That’s what those American flag lapel pins they all insist on wearing really mean.
And the costliest, least economically-beneficial institution in America, the military and its associated security establishment, just keeps getting more money than it knows what to do with. It now consumes more than a trillion dollars a year. This works towards the large economic threat, but it also adds still more to the threat of war. Great standing military machines have always in the past proved to be agents for war, not for peace.
