Trump's Role As A Russian Eunuch

Watching Donald Trump's panoply and excess raises questions. Didn't this guy go disastrously bankrupt over a decade ago? Isn't it true that no banks would loan him money? If Trump has a colossal reputation it ought to be as a colossal financial failure. When U.S. banks refused to loan to him, European banks stepped in, but there are questions about why. Did they extend credit to Trump after he was guaranteed by Russian friends? The point is, he owes billions. He is not in the driver's seat.

In unfolding Trump news stories we read the resilience of Donald Trump seems to have more to do with powerful friends helping him out, cosigning his loans. Many of those friends appear to be Russians. They've kept him afloat because he's been useful to them and might be more useful in the future. Well that time has come. He's now president of the United States, the most powerful country in the world. But he's on the hook.

All along, his finances have been dicey. We don't know how dicey because he's hidden that, but very dicey by all accounts. Billions owed, much of that debt overseas debt, much of it Russian obligations. Being obligated to foreign powers is not appropriate for a leader of a country.

Which is why Donald Trump's life of obscene excess reminds me of the Indian maharajahs during the Raj.

During that period when the British ruled India, they kept the old Indian princes on their thrones and allowed them to live in splendor and powerlessness. They were political eunuchs, no powers at all, just show. Photographs from the period reveal a bizarre excess, a pathetic gaudiness. A gaudiness that reminds me of Donald Trump. Pomp and puppetry. The vulgar excess of Trump's personal style says something about what he lacks. He's compensating for feelings of powerlessness with excessive show. What power he exercises appears to be exercised by his puppet master through him the way the British used their princely puppets during the Raj, keeping them in splendor but reserving all powers to the master.

This cannot be a good state of affairs. The vast luxury of the Indian princes who dined on peacock tongues while millions starved became a greater insult to the people of India when they woke from their imperial nightmare and threw the British out. These princes were useful idiots, like Donald Trump, providing expensive showy cover for the foreign ruler, letting the natives believe they still ran their own affairs.

We've Seen This Before

The New York Review of Books reminds about the sequence of power grabs following the Reichstag fire in 1933.

"On February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. “There will be no mercy now,” he exulted. “Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.”

"The next day, at Hitler’s advice and urging, the German president issued a decree “for the protection of the people and the state.” It deprived all German citizens of basic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly and made them subject to “preventative detention” by the police. A week later, the Nazi party, having claimed that the fire was then beginning of a major terror campaign by the Left, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections. Nazi paramilitaries and the police then began to arrest political enemies and place them in concentration camps. Shortly thereafter, the new parliament passed an “enabling act” that allowed Hitler to rule by decree."


SLATE discusses the strategy by the Trump/Bannon regime to strip our democracy of powers and vest all power in the White House.

"The rage felt by the president’s critics is real, and understandable, but it also plays into Trump’s broader agenda. His chief strategist Steve Bannon outlined that strategy this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, describing it as nothing less than the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon’s comments this week suggest a darker, more nefarious purpose to the nascent Trump administration’s dysfunction. It may be the case that the Trump team is deliberately failing to staff, manage, and provide resources for federal agencies so as to sabotage and slowly dismantle them. To make matters worse, the Trump team might be leveraging the controversies regarding its disastrous national security moves to obscure and conceal that slow and steady demolition of the bureaucracy.”

The Guardian discusses the Cheney power grab that followed 9/11.

"When he took office as vice-president, Cheney's career in government had been that of the dutiful fixer. He had played by the rules for decades, from the Ford administration on, carrying out others' orders in the bureaucratic shadows, making compromises he must have found objectionable. After 9/11, he finally had his opportunity to put his own stamp on things.

"The new way of doing business was the perfect expression of the "do anything" rationale: the concentration of unheard-of powers in the presidency (and vice-presidency) and the application of raw force against all enemies, real and perceived – to intimidate, to obtain information and to punish."

Trump's Goal Is The End Of Our Democracy

What does President Bannon want? He wants to destroy our system of government. He wants to fulfill what Grover Norquist wished for some years ago, to degrade and weaken and diminish government to the point where he can drown it in the bathtub. That’s what he outlined in his speech to CPAC the other day. He sees Trump as his vehicle for destroying our democratic form of government, our government by the people and for the people, as Lincoln described it.

Bannon sees structure and rules and systems and fair play and good government as evil. The only government he wants is government by him or someone he can manipulate. This is why there's so much admiring talk about Putin. We may learn, if the Republican Congress doesn't manage to cover it up, that Putin is operating Bannon and Trump. Like puppets, as Hillary pointed out and Trump lamely disputed.

Bannon's speech reported in the Washington Post

Many of these antidemocratic and unAmerican ideas have been there for years, spoken out loud by Republicans. Take the famous 1980 speech by Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the Reagan Revolution rubbishing the idea of letting all Americans vote and deriding “good government” as a kind of evil delusion, what he called “GooGoo.” They thought and still think democracy is a nuisance, democracy is childish, democracy is foolish and evil. They are now closer than ever to achieving their dream of making America a white Christian (sic) authoritarian state.

Video of the infamous Paul Weyrich speech is on YouTube and it is chillingly prescient.

Masha Gessen wrote an article for the New York Review of Books shortly after the election in which she warned about the ways an autocrat degrades democratic norms. She’d seen it in Russia under Putin. The playbook looks very much like the playbook of the Trump/Bannon White House.

Ron Rosenbaum, one of the best analysts we have of the psychology of the Nazi regime, wrote an equally sharp warning about Trump in the LA Review of Books. I urge you to read and share both articles.

Both these articles warn that what a determined tyrant does first is discredit and destroy the news media, beginning with the journalists who don’t take dictation but actually analyze and criticize what he is doing. Which is what journalists are supposed to do. Without journalists reporting the truth we are powerless.

America Has Lost Its Political Mind (And How To Regain It)

American politics has lost its mind. There are sane pockets, maybe even a sane majority, but that sane part of America lost control in November. White America got conned, not just by Trump but by Putin and by the third parties Putin helped promote with funding and the cynicism created by his disinformation efforts. In an election won by a sliver that sliver was decisive. And the people who were conned will be hard to un-con. People dislike being corrected. Reason and facts have limited power.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the stubbornness of deception

Obama's pollster Cornell Belcher explains how this election was decided by a small sliver of the electorate

USNews on how the liberals and progressives can regain the moral high ground from the Christian Right

WIRED magazine on how Trump wins through the cognitive bias he's a master of

One of the architects of Milo's trolling playbook explains how it has fooled progressives

Hannah Arendt's discussion of how authoritarianism is achieved sounds chillingly relevant today

There’s some hope for fairer elections if we kill gerrymandering. There's this about that in SLATE

Meanwhile, postcards, phone calls, town meetings, daily letters. Michael Moore's TEN DAILY TASKS

Verblendungszusammenhang

Reading about tyrannies past you can find useful words for defining and explaining the current tyranny.

Verblendungszusammenhang: the word used during the postwar period to describe Hitler's "system of total delusion."

Opposition to tyranny is helpless if the opponents cannot understand or explain what they are opposed to, if they cannot understand what is happening.

Trump Plans To Make Government As Mean and Corrupt As He Is

Why do ordinary people do cruel things? Fear? Possibly fear of losing their jobs. Trump has people calculating it's safer to do something bad than to have it done to you. This is how it begins. This is where tyranny starts, when ordinary people go along out of fear, habit, learned obedience, a kind of secondhand malice.

Here's a story from the Baltimore Sun about the ordinary Customs and Border Patrol workers who did Trump's dirty work for him. You ask why, first learn how.

The civil service today is very professional and honest and uncorrupted. This was not always so. It used to be where politicians paid people for favors. The home of graft and corruption and political retribution. That gradually changed during the era following the two Roosevelts, especially under FDR.

The Daily Beast has this story about how Trump is planning to change it back to corruption and graft. Turning it back into a weapon a president can use against opponents. Nixon tried this, which was one reason he was run out of office. Cheney turned the CIA into a political tool by manipulating its analysis to start a war the experts said was uncalled-for and unwise. (The CIA resisted this.) That war turned Cheney’s former company from near bankruptcy into a massively profitable war machine. (An examination of that story by Juan Cole.)

The civil service may not always be civil. They may be overworked and the long degradation of government systems by Republicans in Congress has made their work much harder to do well. Still they are remarkably diligent and honest and helpful. They see their jobs as important work for society, for us, because whether we like it or not we need the government to do many things. Without civil servants those things would not be done.

It's the honesty and the public service part that Trump wants to undo. He wants the government to be his baseball bat for beating his enemies foreign and domestic. He wants the government to be his shovel for putting millions into his businesses and the businesses of friends. He wants the government and all its workers to be his personal tool.

Galloping Fascism

"Donald Trump Is Becoming an Authoritarian Leader Before Our Very Eyes"

In the New Republic

"Donald Trump [henceforth to be called Dear Leader] on Friday issued a proclamation declaring January 20, 2017, the day of his inauguration, a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.” The decree was uploaded to the Federal Register on Monday…”

In the Daily Beast

"The White House has shut down its public comment line, instead telling callers, with an automated message, that they should contact the new administration via Facebook Messenger instead. There’s only one problem: Neither the White House nor President Donald Trump seem to currently maintain an active Facebook Messenger account."

In Variety

"A provision tucked into the defense bill guts the Voice of America board, stoking fears that Trump could wield a powerful propaganda arm."

In Politico

In his rambling angry speech at the CIA on Saturday [President] Trump said America should reinvade Iraq and take their oil. The words were different, but the rationale is the same as the one that Germany used when they invaded Eastern Europe in 1939-1941.

Reported by Juan Cole

Newt Gingrich, a familiar proxy for [President] Trump, said something the other day that sounded disturbingly fascist and authoritarian. Speaking of employees of the federal government, Gingrich said “All those bureaucrats overwhelmingly voted for Clinton. There won’t be any real cooperation until we change federal law so we can fire them.”

In Salon

A Stark Choice Between Good And Evil, Competent and Incompetent, Moderate/Progressive and Extreme Right

We have a choice in this election. A man who brags about assaulting women, who incites violence against minorities, who doesn’t pay the people he hires, who has reaped many millions by bankrupting companies and violating contracts, who promises to imprison his opponent, who has no relevant experience for the job, very limited understanding of the issues, and an unstable personality and hair trigger. The list is almost endless… Why is Donald Trump still supported by as many people as he is. To quote a famous song title: It Smells Like Team Spirit. He can be a monster but he’s their monster. By the way, Donald Trump will be brought into court on multiple fraud charges in November, and child rape charges in December.

The other candidate, Hillary Clinton is being questioned about her managing of an email account. Why is this an issue? Because the Republicans could find no other issue to attack her on. Ever Since Nixon the Republican strategy has been to attack the Democrats’ strongest candidate and tear them apart. They’ve done that and found nothing to attack but her womanhood and her use of email. Her strengths are obvious and many. Her weaknesses have all been attacked to death and she is still standing, a remarkable testament to her fiber and courage.

The Email issue is not a scandal, it's a witch hunt. SLATE asks why we're still talking about it with all that's at stake.

Trump meanwhile promises a dangerous sea change unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Donald Trump’s thirst for revenge is almost as great as his thirst for power and money

NBCNews reports on Donald Trump's vengeful world view. Once in power he will use that power to punish and destroy his opponents.

The GOP is now the authoritarian party angry white men have been dreaming about

New York Magazine has this analysis of the extremist authoritarian angry white man's party the GOP has become.

The GOP Discovers Fascism...And Likes It

The Republican leaders who a few months ago were calling Trump dangerous and extremist and bigoted and irrational are now lining up to support him. Maybe what this tells us is the Republican Party has been an authoritarian party for a long time. Fascist in all but name.

They are an obedient party. A shameless party. A party that ignores corruption and worships wealth and arrogance. When Deep Throat instructed Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money” this is where it was leading. The Republican Party has gotten there at last.

The news media is doing its careful balancing job, where they refuse to report the insanity, bigotry and extremism of one candidate until they can invent something that makes the other candidate look just as bad.

The media message is “All politicians are dangerous, extremist, bigoted and irrational” so watch and laugh but get ready for the worst to happen.

They don’t report the policy differences (BORING!) they report the bickering, the tweets, the gossip, the bogus allegations. Trump is a master of the game of bogus allegations: he makes them ten at a time and is never called out for lying, and his lies quickly become the main story, turning the news cycle into a trash fiction contest.

Here are a few top national political observers bluntly admitting the F-word is the proper label for Donald Trump. He is a fascist.

This Is How Fascism Comes To America by neoconservative Robert Kagan in the Washington Post.

America Has Never Been So Ripe For Tyranny by conservative Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine.

The Dangerous Acceptance Of Donald Trump by liberal Adam Gopnick in the New Yorker.

There is still time for America to regain its sanity, but the 24-hour news cycle will be pushing insanity and unreason from now till November. FoxNews has gotten into the tank with Trump. The major networks report his excesses as if they are perfectly normal and reasonable and emphasize the continuing debate in the Democratic Party as if it an embarrassing failure to get in line and follow the leader. As if politics demanded an obedient public.

Those of us who remember Nixon might try to think Trump is no worse than that, and we survived that episode.

We survived it because it was not this extreme.

Nixon had a political resumé and was part of a fairly reasonable right-of-center political party of country clubbers and members of the chamber of commerce. Trump's resumé is a circus of bankruptcies, tax evasions and cynical corruption. There is no set of values in Trump's history, except property values, which he routinely inflates or hides or lies about to fool investors and avoid taxes and evade creditors. His business life has been one long confidence trick, or a series of confidence tricks. His personal life has been a series of confidence tricks too. His vulgarity is shocking––mocking a man with disabilities––in front of a national audience; making suggestive sexual comments about his own daughter and bragging about his penis size––in front of a national audience; slurring women, veterans and one minority group after another––in front of a national audience. How vulgar can a national figure get?

It's hard to imagine anyone more uncouth than Trump. And yet conservative church leaders are saying God demands that His followers vote for Trump. Trump who shows no familiarity with Christian values, and only contempt for all other religions. But it would be "unseemly" for the national news media to criticize one party's candidate without condemning the other equally. Their "standards" require "balance" but balance is a lie. There is no equivalence here. The Republican Party has disgraced itself but as long as its leaders and the news media refuse to notice this disgrace all will be well. And they may win the election by pretending all is well.

The leaders (can we call them leaders?) of the Republican Party think they can control this goon. Their only hope may be that their long campaign to degrade government, to make it weak and dysfunctional, has worked well enough that Trump will be installed at the head of a government that has no power at all. Our country has been a long, interesting experiment in democracy, but the founders never anticipated an experiment this deranged or cynical.

Fascism: Can It Happen Here?

It happened before in another educated industrialized country. Books were written about it. Milton Mayer's book was one of the best. He interviewed ten ordinary Germans in depth to discover how they'd been led down that path.

An excerpt from Milton Mayer’s THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS 1933-45

How did it happen then? Is it happening again now? The resemblances are disturbing: people who aren’t paying attention, people who are uninterested in the truth and more interested in what is popular, people who want a complete change from what we have and are eager to have an authoritarian government.

The German magazine Der Spiegel is calling Donald Trump the most dangerous man in the world.

How did this happen here?

Was it the well documented Deception Industry which urges people to disbelieve science and the advice of experts?

Was it FoxNews, which pumped us full of disinformation?

Are people eager for a dictator because they’ve been so skillfully confused––just so they don’t have to make decisions themselves?

George Will, who helped build this Republican Party, has finally grown alarmed by what he made.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi describes what has happened and how it happened.

VOX explains Trump's particular brand of authoritarianism.

Hand-wringing from the conservative middle-American beacon, The Chicago Tribune.

In the 1930s Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel, IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, about a fascist demagogue who is elected to the presidency and quickly makes of this country what Hitler made of Germany. Can it happen here?