The
Extraordinary Array of Those Questioning Trump’s
Legitimacy
By Gary Leupp
January 18,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "CP"
- It
is an extraordinary situation. The ruling class seems by
and large quite shocked by the election result. Donald
Trump is surely a representative of the class—in that
he’s a billionaire for god sake—but, for the majority of
the richest and most powerful, not their preferred
choice as chief executive of the USA. This is apparent
by Trump’s treatment at the hands of the corporate media
(that he continues to insult), by the foreign policy
establishment, by the intelligence agencies (which he
sometimes disparages), by Congressional leaders of both
parties who generally regret that he won. The Deep State
seems to have its knives drawn for him.
Wall Street
would have been comfortable—equally comfortable—with Jeb
Bush or Hillary Clinton as president. The RNC and
DNC—the Central Committees of the official Two
Parties—are huge concentrations of bourgeois power.
Reince Priebus and Debbie Schulz Wasserman as their
chairs were creatures of the status quo. The pundits
favored Bush to win the Republican nomination, or maybe
Cruz (despite his unpopularity among his peers), or
maybe Rubio; Trump was an amusing long shot. And of
course they assumed that Clinton would be the Democratic
shoo-in. What could go wrong?
Things started
to go wrong when the Trump campaign, treated to
limitless free media exposure, spiraled out of control.
The more outrageous Trump became, the more he attracted,
first the Neanderthals, and then the more thoughtful
types who thought, “Hm, looks like he could win. He’s
awful, but at least he’s better than her.” And there are
always plenty of opportunists like Giuliani, Christie
and Carson willing to jump on a bandwagon that looks
headed to possible victory.
In alarm,
prominent Republicans including Mitt Romney expressed
open disdain. In August 50 GOP former intelligence
officers signed a statement opposing Trump, including
CIA and National Security Agency Director Michael
Hayden, former Director of National Intelligence and
Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, former Dick
Cheney security adviser Eric Edelman, former Homeland
Security secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, and
former deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick. In
October 55 retired flag military officers signed a
statement declaring Trump “utterly unworthy of being
commander-in-chief and president.” House Speaker Paul
Ryan, the most powerful figure at the time in the
Republican Party, who only endorsed Trump in June, was
by one count obliged to distance himself from the
candidate eight times by August and declined to campaign
for him.
Alas, despite
all this confusion and alarm within the ruling class,
the Trump genie had been let out of the bottle.
And what of
Clinton’s smooth path to power, to be paved by such
experienced political operatives as campaign director
John Podesta and Wasserman Schulz? Something started
going very wrong when Bernie Sanders kept getting
massive youthful crowds who were anything but turned off
by an elderly Jewish socialist talking about college
debt relief. They were so confidant of the pervasiveness
of their own tired Cold War thinking among the masses
that they assumed no self-avowed socialist could gather
any momentum. The fools!
And then there
were those Wikileaks emails (allegedly hacked by
Russians) showing how the DNC chair had assured her
colleagues that they needn’t be “silly,” because Sanders
“won’t be president”; how one staffer had raised the
prospect of labeling Sanders an atheist in largely
evangelical districts; how Podesta had recommended using
press contacts to promote Trump as one of the more
easily defeatable of the Republican candidates.
This plus the
(separate) issue of Hillary’s use of a home server for
emails, and alleged violations of security policy and
accountability, and Comey’s sudden reopening of the
investigation so soon before the election. There was no
enthusiasm for Clinton, and especially among the youth,
a lot of simmering resentment that the primary process
had been rigged. If the Clinton camp smugly expected the
Sanders supporters (having been “brought into the
political process”) would channel their much-praised
“enthusiasm” into a Clinton vs. Trump race, they were
optimistic. Many enraged Sanders supporters would never
defile themselves with a Clinton vote.
And so, a
corrupt process produced a uniquely unpopular
president-elect. And now you have a unique convergence
of forces all questioning Trump’s legitimacy to rule,
but for different reasons.
Rep. John Lewis
says he can’t accept Trump because Russia helped him get
elected; his vow to boycott the inauguration ceremony
has been embraced (so far) by over 40 other members of
Congress. Similarly, the Deep State can’t accept him
because he wants rapprochement with Russia. Suddenly all
the liberal shills on TV are expressing reverence for
Lewis’s civil rights legacy and associations with Martin
Luther King alongside moral outrage at the charges
leveled against Moscow by the Deep State. How strange to
see Rachel Maddow and John Brennan in bed together.
There will be
tens of thousands of protesters on the cold streets of
DC on Friday chanting “He’s not my president!” mostly
for the reasons touted endlessly by the DNC: he’s a
racist, misogynist, bigot, who lost the popular vote.
Some will add to the charges “He’s a Putin puppet,” thus
making common cause with the worst war mongers who
remain firmly lodged in the power structure and (despite
his promises of good relations with Russia) around Trump
himself.
The
Revolutionary Communist Party on the other hand says we
can’t accept Trump because he’s a fascist. Their
manifesto calling for mass protests to “reach a
crescendo January 20” declares:
“By any
definition, Trump is a fascist… [Fascism] is a very
serious thing. It has direction and momentum and must be
stopped before it becomes too late. Fascism foments and
relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and
the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional
values.’ Fascism feeds on and encourages the threat and
use of violence to build a movement and come to power.
Fascism, once in power, essentially eliminates
traditional democratic rights. Fascism attacks, jails,
even executes its opponents, and launches violent mob
attacks on ‘minorities.’ In Nazi Germany in the 1930s
and ’40s, fascism did all these things. This is where
this can go.”
No mention of
any supposed Putin-Trump “bromance.” Not that there
should be. But the radical left—preoccupied with
opposing more imperialist wars in the Middle East—is not
much given to analysis of the U.S.-Russian relationship,
or reflection on the very real possibility of nuclear
war triggered by events in Ukraine, Syria or even the
Estonia.
The U.S.
possesses 7,100 nuclear warheads, Russia 7,300. (France
is thought to have 300, China 260, the UK 215, Pakistan
140, India 110, Israel 80, North Korea 8.) A
U.S.-Russian war could destroy civilization, not by
blowing up monuments and orchestrating acts of exemplary
horror, raping, crucifying and beheading children, but
by obliterating whole cities the way the U.S.
obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No, worse, much,
much worse next time than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That Trump’s
few vague words about friendship with (as opposed to
belligerency towards) Russia should set him up for this
“Putin’s puppet” charge quietly intimated on the one
hand by voices within the Deep State hoping to shame
Trump into towing the new Cold war line, and on the
other hand by John Lewis-type liberals eager to hop on
the Cold War bandwagon to justify their rejection of the
president-elect, should disturb any thinking person. It
is the patriotic union of all who can be united over the
traditional, knee-jerk Russophobia.
How can the
progressive anti-Trump movement move forward, if it
either embraces this narrative of Russian “interference
in the U.S. election” (which is based, after all, on the
premise that whoever leaked the damning DNC and Podesta
messages showing how the DNC worked to promote Trump’s
candidacy, and to curtail Sanders’ support, thereby
influenced public opinion against Clinton whereas public
opinion should have been mercifully spared the
information), or fails to target it as misinformation
and war mongering?
If the goal is
to so isolate Trump that he is somehow driven from
power, one would like the antiwar masses to smash the
corrupt system, build a new society and avoid war. One
would not like to make common cause with those who hate
Trump, not for his fascistic tendencies, but for his
challenge to the warmongering neocon/liberal
interventionist status quo that wants to maintain a
posture of unremitting hostility towards Russia.
Without
analyzing these dialectics, how can those who long for
revolution—as I do—navigate the post-election political
situation, and exploit the crisis to serve the people’s
ends?
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