The Trumpenstein Project

It is now more apparent than ever that Donald J. Trump was the creation of someone or something very powerful. He was wound up and escorted directly from his Reality TV world, onto the national political stage.

As I’ve noted many times, Trump’s radical, often revolutionary campaign rhetoric appealed to millions of disgruntled citizens like me. I found it difficult to believe that this lifelong One Percenter- of whom I held a not terribly detailed but decidedly negative impression- could possibly be saying such things.

For those with short memories, Trump not only referred to “globalists,” in Alex Jones-style conspiracy-friendly terms, he noted over and over again that the system was rigged, and “you can’t fix it by trusting those who rigged it.” His slogans “America First” and “Drain the Swamp” energized most of those in my world.

Trump hinted at conspiracies and cover ups that other politicians simply never have. He inferred Ted Cruz’s father may have been involved in the JFK assassination. He noted that “some people believe” Vince Foster was murdered. As Roger Stone told me back in 2015, “he knows about all the conspiracies- you would love him.”

He called out the “phony” unemployment statistics, which were changed in the 1990s to dishonestly count only those presently filing for benefits. This was in addition, of course, to disparaging “fake news” and blasting mainstream journalists for their lies and distorted coverage. All of this was music to my ears.

Several times, Trump lamented the “senseless wars” that had cost “trillions of dollars,” which would have permitted us to “rebuild this country several times.” He was the first politician to accurately assess our pathetic infrastructure and label it as the embarrassment it is. He criticized political leaders of both parties over the horrendous trade deals like NAFTA, which outsourced our industry and left us unable to make electronics, clothing or anything else of substance.

And most of all he lit into our disastrous immigration policy. As he said many times, “you either have a country or you don’t,” and made countless specific promises in this area. He claimed that he would end Obama’s unconstitutional DACA program on the first day in office, would sign an Executive Order ending birth-right citizenship, end the deadly H-1B Visa foreign worker program, and take a step back and “look at all immigration,” including legal immigration. He was the first candidate I’d ever heard who talked freely about deporting illegal immigrants.

Trump seemed utterly “awake” on the vaccine question, and how they are obviously linked to the alarming rise in autism rates. He promised a commission to study the issue, and just after his inauguration, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of all people, held a press conference to announce that he would be chairing it.

Trump’s selection of neocon fundamentalist Mike Pence raised more than a few eyebrows, but his stunning inaugural address kindled a great deal of hope that perhaps he actually did intend to keep all those promises. I was moved by that address, and considered it the best since John F. Kennedy’s.

We all know what happened next. Pence wasn’t an anomaly; Trump appointed one odious Deep State veteran after another to all key positions in his cabinet. The only even semi-outsiders were Steve Bannon, who was quickly marginalized and later unceremoniously dumped, and General Mike Flynn, who was demonized after a cup of coffee as Trump’s National Security Adviser. Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador typified his selections; a John McCain-style warmonger par excellence, who had been a vocal #Never Trumper during the presidential campaign.

I have often wondered, in fact, how many of those who have surrounded Trump in the White House, and still surround him (the tremendous turnover rate hasn’t featured any diversity of thought- one Swamp Creature simply supplants another), actually voted for him. Has that ever been asked about any previous president?

Needless to say, Trump didn’t end DACA on his first day in office. He didn’t end birth-right citizenship. He didn’t stop the H-1B Visa program, and now we have more Visa workers than ever. Despite all his radical rhetoric, Trump has been actually deporting fewer illegals than Barack Obama.

Those of us who fell for the rhetoric and the slogans should really have known better. The evidence was there; his public endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president in 2008, the photos of him laughing and socializing with the Clintons. The creepy video of him schmoozing with Rudy Giuliani in drag. Giuliani, of course, would go on to become an influential adviser to President Trump. And Trump would quiet the post-election cries of “Lock her up” regarding Hillary Clinton by telling his loyal followers that “we don’t need that now,” and called her “good people.”

So was Trump packaged and sold, like a marketplace version of Frankenstein, to appeal to the percolating dissent in the heartland, and the people who were once called “the silent majority?” That “silent majority” isn’t the majority now, thanks to millions of immigrants and a steady cultural drift to the left. But they maintain an influence in the “flyover states,” and tipped the electoral college balance in the 2016 election.

Trump represents a symbol of all that America once was, when it was ruled exclusively by white males. White males who didn’t back down, or apologize, and spoke their mind. The fact that Trump actually has backed down, repeatedly, on budget deals, on immigration, on withdrawing troops, and other issues, doesn’t seem to damage his brand in the eyes of those who still support him. He talks and tweets a strong game. He makes fun of individual reporters in press conferences. He loves fast food. In their eyes, he’s one of them.

The Trump Project consisted of a renegade candidate, with radical ideas and brash talk, but also a cartoonish ego and often shocking inability to articulate. While those in the heartland ate up the juvenile name-calling and impolite style, a huge portion of Americans were appalled, and unleashed a vitriol not seen since the halcyon days of World War II, when Adolph Hitler took on a satanic veneer that no bogeyman had previously, or has since.

This week, Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of a “left” that found “McCarthyism” repugnant and lampooned any fervent anti-communist, attacked Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Clinton, in the best tradition of the right-wingers she presumably hated, called Gabbard a “Russian asset,” and included Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in the same category.

Many good people, who once loved my work, have jumped on this surrealistic bandwagon. They’ve drank the anti-Trump Kool-Aid to such an extent that they’re willing to form alliances with our intelligence agencies, Trump’s former aide John Bolton, or anyone else anywhere who opposes him. And they dutifully dub anyone who criticizes the Clintons, or Joe Biden’s son, or supports Trump’s talk about withdrawing troops as “Russian Bots.”

The Trump Project has succeeded in killing any hope of an independent political movement, outside of the phony left-right paradigm. All political discourse now is filtered through the prism of Trump’s outlandish personality, and how one reacts to it. And most Americans have responded predictably to the programming, and fall in faithfully into either the “love” or “hate” category.

We have gone from a president that the most absurd “conspiracy theorists” believe may have been created in a lab- Barack “no real personal history” Obama, to a character right out of WWE central casting, manufactured to get the maximum amount of cheers and hisses. A perfect leader for our burgeoning Idiocracy.

Lincoln once talked about a house divided being unable to stand. Our house is hopelessly divided, and barely standing. It won’t take much of a wind to blow it down. We really need a Frank Capra to devise a happy ending to this story.

The Impeachment Waltz

Let me confess; I would have supported the impeachment of almost every president since Lyndon B. Johnson.

Just in more recent years, both Reagan and George H.W. Bush could have been impeached over the October Surprise and Iran/Contra scandals. Bill Clinton could have impeached for many high crimes and misdemeanors, but the mass murder at Waco certainly stands out as an impeachable offense. Dubya could have been impeached for the “weapons of mass destruction” lie and the government stand down on September 11, 2001. Barack Obama assassinated an American citizen with a drone, bragged about it, and then killed his sixteen year old son a month later. I don’t recall any impeachment efforts over that. 

This whole “get Trump” campaign reminds me of the state-sponsored, media supported efforts to oust Richard Nixon from the White House. When I was researching Hidden History, it became abundantly clear that, compared to the crimes of almost every other modern president, Nixon’s actions associated with Watergate were child’s play. As an unsophisticated teenager, with a budding far left Democratic political conscience, I bought into the rhetoric that Nixon was an incomparably evil politician that we had to “get rid of.” In the same way, Americans are now being counseled, by that same putrid, state-controlled press, that Donald Trump is even worse than Nixon, and we simply “must” remove him from office.

Donald Trump has proven to be little more than a buffoon. In my view, he was hired to play a part, and has played it well. His halting, ungrammatical method of communicating grates on the nerves of any educated person. His childish bragging and impossible ego are so cartoonish they defy belief. His gutter-level arguments with mindless celebrities would be beneath the office of a low level bureaucrat, let alone the president of the United States. But none of those are impeachable offenses. And yet this behavior is what has triggered perhaps a majority of Americans to demand his impeachment.

As I’ve said in Trump’s defense, you have to do something in order to do something wrong. The sad fact is Donald Trump has done little more than talk, tweet, boast, and break promises during his three years in office. While his rhetoric can still sometimes sound great- witness his recent comments before the United Nations extolling nationalism over globalism- his act grew old a few years ago. When Trump has acted, he has tended to follow the same neocon-style policies that a President Jeb Bush would have. Despite all his heated rhetoric about immigration, which I believe is the primary cause of the intense hatred so many feel towards him, Trump has actually deported fewer illegals than Barack Obama.

I didn’t think that Trump’s enemies could possibly come up with something more ridiculous than the Russian “collusion” fairy tale, but they have managed to do so. They are genuinely trying to impeach him for ambiguous inferences in a phone call to the Ukrainian president. Earlier this year, three Democratic Senators sent a letter to a Ukrainian prosecutor, in which they unambiguously threatened to withhold aid to the country unless their political objectives were met. And Joe Biden, around whose son and his seeming corruption all this revolves, boasted on videotape about getting the Ukrainian prosecutor fired a few years back. It seems the height of audacity, and hypocrisy, to become apoplectic about Trump allegedly doing what these Democratic Party politicians are documented to have done themselves.

In 1998, Republicans succeeded in voting articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton. The mainstream media at the time, in stark contrast to their overt cheerleading for this impeachment, were visibly devastated. To my amazement, the major networks refused to televise the impeachment trial in the Senate. Consider that; an event of such historic significance it has only happened once before in American history, and our state-controlled media considered it unworthy of being televised. You can bet everything you own that if Donald Trump is impeached, every millisecond of the process will be broadcast, over every network in the world.

What does is say about Americans, that they can ignore the kind of career corruption of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the crimes of so many other recent politicians, and yet be willing to unceremoniously dump Donald Trump for what is, in comparison, simply very loud bluster? I have read the comments of many people I normally respect, who have called in the past for a military overthrow of Trump. They simply want him gone, and they don’t care how it’s done.

Whoever hired Trump for this role, and is writing this script, they have done an extraordinary job of dividing the country. Presumably, that was the primary goal of this production. And the dividing line is no longer Mason-Dixon, it’s Donald Trump. All political discussion now is channeled through Trump’s personality, and how individuals respond to it. We’ve devolved back to a point where we’re arguing around a digital checkerboard, over whether you’re “fer” him or “agin” him.

I never expected the election of Trump. I thought, like almost everyone else, that the “fix” was in for Hillary Clinton, the Queen of Corruption. So because of that unanticipated curve ball, I really have no idea what to expect next. Could Donald Trump be impeached, over an unclear “threat” to withhold foreign aid unless Ukrainian authorities investigated the corruption of Joe Biden’s son? If so, that says a lot about the state of present-day America, what I call America 2.0. Think of it; the “bad guy” here is the one seemingly demanding an investigation into corruption, not the person or persons guilty of corruption.

And then there is the much ballyhooed “whistle blower” who is, in reality, a CIA spook. To accurately be defined as a whistle blower, this person would have to be exposing CIA corruption. Instead, the CIA appears to be assisting the drive to impeachment in a partisan way. And the same state-controlled media and “liberal” politicians who are silent about the abominable treatment accorded genuinely heroic whistle blowers like Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, have suddenly found a “whistle blower” they can love.

After the resignation of Richard Nixon, Americans were counseled, by the same state-controlled media that led the efforts to oust him from office, that the entire affair proved “the system works.” By the “system,” they mean the disastrous two party duopoly that restricts debate like no other “free” country in the world.

There are no “good guys” to root for here. Trump is the victim, but he is, as always, totally unsympathetic. He still has what has always been his best quality; his high-profile enemies are all more despicable than he could ever hope to be. And the “bad guys” will undoubtedly win, no matter what happens, as they always do.

Perhaps this is all just a message, comprehensible only at a subconscious level, that anyone sincerely wishing to reform things, to “drain the swamp,” to “put America first,” will be summarily rejected by the “system” that we are told works so well.