What’s
Worse: Trump’s Campaign Agenda or Empowering
Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert It?
By
Glenn Greenwald
August
09, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- During his successful 2016 presidential
campaign, Donald Trump, for better and for
worse, advocated a slew of policies that
attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing
bipartisan Washington consensus. As a result, he
was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely
repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative
guardians of that consensus, along with their
sprawling network of agencies, think tanks,
financial policy organs, and media outlets used
to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the
Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street,
Silicon Valley, etc.).
Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is
simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite
circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions,
lining up with remarkable fervor behind his
Democratic opponent. Top CIA officials
openly declared war
on Trump in the
nation’s op-ed pages
and one of their operatives (now
an MSNBC favorite)
was tasked with
stopping him in Utah,
while
Time magazine reported,
just a week before the election, that “the
banking industry has supported Clinton with
buckets of cash. … What bankers most like about
Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump.”
Hank
Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W.
Bush’s treasury secretary, went to the
pages of the Washington Post in
mid-2016 to shower Clinton with praise and Trump
with unbridled scorn, saying what he hated most
about Trump was his refusal to consider cuts
in entitlement spending (in contrast,
presumably, to the Democrat he was endorsing).
“It doesn’t surprise me when a socialist such as
Bernie Sanders sees no need to fix our entitlement
programs,” the
former Goldman CEO wrote. “But I find it
particularly appalling that Trump, a
businessman, tells us he won’t
touch Social
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”
Some of Trump’s advocated assaults on D.C.
orthodoxy aligned with long-standing views of at
least some left-wing factions (e.g., his
professed opposition to regime change war in
Syria, Iraq/Libya-style interventions,
global free trade
deals,
entitlement cuts,
greater conflict with Russia, and
self-destructive
pro-Israel fanaticism),
while other Trump positions were horrifying to
anyone with a plausible claim to leftism, or
basic decency (reaffirming torture, expanding
GITMO, killing terrorists’ families, launching
Islamophobic crusades, fixation on increasing
hostility with Tehran, further unleashing
federal and local police forces). Ironically,
Trump’s principal policy deviation around which
elites have now coalesced in opposition — a
desire for better relations with Moscow — was
the same one that Obama, to their great
bipartisan dismay, also adopted (as evidenced by
Obama’s
refusal to more aggressively confront the
Kremlin-backed Syrian government
or
arm anti-Russian factions in Ukraine).
It is true that Trump, being Trump, was wildly
inconsistent in virtually all of these
pronouncements, often
contradicting
or
abandoning them
weeks after he made them. And, as many of us
pointed out at the time,
it was foolish to assume that the campaign vows
of any politician, let alone an adept con man
like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for
what he would do once in office. And, as
expected, he has
betrayed many
of
these promises within
months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall
Street interests he railed against have found a
very welcoming embrace
in the Oval Office.
Nonetheless, Trump, as a matter of rhetoric,
repeatedly affirmed policy positions that were
directly contrary to long-standing bipartisan
orthodoxy, and his policy and personal
instability only compounded elites’ fears that
he could not be relied upon to safeguard their
lucrative, power-vesting agenda. In so many ways
— due to his campaign positions, his outsider
status, his unstable personality, his witting
and unwitting unmasking of the truth of U.S.
hegemony, the embarrassment he causes in Western
capitals, his reckless unpredictability — Trump
posed a threat to their power centers.
It is
often claimed that this trans-partisan, elite
coalition assembled against Trump because they
are simply American patriots horrified by the
threat he poses to America’s noble traditions
and institutions. I guess if you want to believe
that the CIA, the GOP consulting class, and
assorted D.C. imperialists, along with Bush-era neocons
like Bill Kristol and David Frum, woke up one
day and developed some sort of earnest,
patriotic conscience about democracy, ethics,
constitutional limits, and basic decency, you’re
free to believe that. It makes for a nice,
moving story: a film from the “Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington” genre. But at the very least,
Trump’s campaign assaults on their most sacred
pieties was, and remains, a major factor in
their seething contempt for him.
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This article was first published by
The Intercept
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
