This Tuesday's FBI massacre to the contrary, the Trump regime remains well-ensconced and difficult to dislodge with the President having taken hold of the government's investigative power and busily consulted, as of this writing, Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The corrupt interior nature of politics as practiced is on display and constitutionally implemented remedies could become closeted, making the times at this moment more dangerous than perhaps any other period of history.
While questions about the President's competency have been growing in high places (The New Yorker May 8th) they're not shared by the supporters who elected him. Mental health professionals have been citing instances when Donald Trump seemed confused about where his Navy was sailing or hazy on details of his own health care bill. He is obviously poorly read to the point of near-illiteracy as his recent confusion of Andrew Jackson with the Civil War illustrated. What continues to be missed in this picture, however, is his supporters who consider themselves in a fight to the death because their lives, their families and children have been destroyed by globalization. It's no small thing unless you work in Silicon Valley.
What this economically destroyed population that elected Trump sees is that he is lightning quick in his grasp of political opportunities-such as blocking the FBI's investigative power by firing Jim Comey and thus strengthening his hand. They see his intuitive genius for skillfully incentivizing opponents with promises that may be empty. The Rose Garden celebration last week was a case in point. There had in actuality been no passage of health care legislation, no change in Obama Care, and no new jobs to speak of, but it served Trump well as political showboating that, however fraudulent, further strengthened his momentum toward his personal goal: benefiting from the profits of the Wall Street system.
A totalitarian tyrant, Hannah Arendt observed, claims to be "more obedient...than any government ever was before....pretending to establish the reign of justice on earth... without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behavior." That's vintage Trump.
Essential to his success are these people, long ignored by the Democrats, who are the victims of the nation's vast deindustrialization, off-shoring, and subsequent inequality who are desperate and in their extremis see Donald Trump as their best and only hope for economic recovery. Yes, they see his crudeness, his compulsive lying, but since that's often been how their own lives have been destroyed they count on his brutalism to do what the democrats haven't, which is to give their lives and their children a new chance. Whether by hook or by crook, no longer matters.
The Rose Garden charade last week also made the President's congressional confreres happy (and faithful) because it provided momentum for their ambitious plan to reform tax policy which is actually another bullet aimed at the heart of abandoned workers. Robert Greenstein for 35 years the director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote an immediate reply:
"the President's emerging fiscal agenda...features large increases in defense funding offset by cuts in a range of significant domestic programs, substantial tax cuts mainly for people at very high income levels, losses in health care for millions of low- and moderate-income Americans, and potentially deep cuts in entitlement programs outside of Medicare and Social Security, including programs vital to tens of millions of Americans of lesser means."
Hannah Arendt's words ring true again. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she observes that the uniqueness of totalitarianism was its capacity to "explode the very alternative on which on which all definitions of the essence of governments have been based...between lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary and legitimate power."
Lightning quick, this is where we are today. We can see a Trump hegemony expanding internationally and exercising arbitrary power as the former Exxon Mobile magnate Rex Tillerson--now Secretary of State---announces drastically cutting jobs and streamlining his State Department to better represent a firm-handed manager; one prepared to use military threats and money for purposes of guaranteeing Trump's dominion amidst the starvation and growing violence from Afghanistan to Somalia to the Korean peninsula. A global oil executive knows exactly how to do such deals.
Meanwhile, as noted, the Democrats remain missing in action while this Trump agenda unfolds. Aside from their new found skill at chortling and jeering Republican missteps they seem no closer today to advancing a reformed agenda than they were on the day they eliminated Bernie Sanders and his reform campaign last June. Silence reigns, as it did in the Hillary Clinton campaign, with no serious policy reforms offered that could deliver infrastructure job-creating programs, or Medicare for all, or justice-for-all foreign policy goals in regions where inequality is vast beyond imagining.
"Calculation" remains the lingua franca in both political parties, meaning the Democrats bear strong resemblance to their Republican adversaries in the art of turning access to money and power into policy-making that is personally advantageous. In winning passage for Obamacare six years ago the Democrats created a system that never laid a hand on the health care industry---which grows today at an annual inflation rate twice the rate of inflation in the Consumer Price Index. At its passage Obamacare could not find a bi-partisan coalition for ending such profiteering in health care, which is why it is so complicated and vulnerable in the long run.
The question on this post FBI day is how the accelerating momentum toward autocracy, a totalitarian autocracy, can be stemmed. Many desperate people could care less. Likewise many comfortable people, especially in faith communities, who are buying the idea that faith is about making them safe and comfortable. That's also one of Trump's promises. Of such stuff an Orwellian world can be made.
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