Truthdig November 19
An Insubordinate President
By Paul Street
Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0
“Insubordinate elites,” as the distinguished American foreign policy historian
Alfred W. McCoy calls them, have long been a problem for the United States
empire. They privilege their own personal interests and/or concept of serving
their own nations above fealty to the United States, its allies and the
Western-based multinational corporate and financial interests that reign behind
the shield of U.S. power.
Over the years, these disobedient foreign leaders have come in different forms.
Some have been men of the socialist, populist and nationalist left—actors like
Mohammad Mossadeq (Iran), Jacobo Arbenz (Guatemala), Patrice Lumumba (Congo),
Fidel Castro (Cuba), Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Sukarno
(Indonesia), Salvador Allende (Chile), Michael Manley (Jamaica), Maurice Bishop
(Grenada), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua) and Hugo Chavez (Venezuela). Washington
has responded to the defiance of these and other “left” Third World and
“developing nation” actors with assassinations, assassination attempts, coups,
coup attempts, invasions, counterinsurgency campaigns, espionage, propaganda
and the cultivation of political and military opposition and influence within
the noncompliant states.
But you don’t have to be on the anti-imperial left to become what the U.S.
ruling-class and imperial establishment considers an insubordinate elite and
get put on Washington’s shit and target lists. The South Vietnamese dictator
Ngo Dinh Diem was considered Washington’s man in Saigon until his refusal to
roll back corruption and make any concessions to reform turned him into an
embarrassing obstacle to U.S. control. The John F. Kennedy administration
approved a CIA-assisted coup that murdered Diem and his powerful brother.
Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll during most of the
1980s. After he stole yet another election in 1989, however, he faced withering
criticism from Washington and the U.S. media. “In the interim,” Noam Chomsky
observed five years later, “Noriega had shown improper signs of independence,
offending the master by lack of sufficient enthusiasm for Washington’s
terrorist war against Nicaragua and in other ways.” The U.S. invaded Panama,
killing thousands and taking Noriega away to rot in a federal prison.
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Saddam Hussein ceased to be Washington’s good friend in Baghdad when he got
cocky and invaded oil-rich Kuwait, challenging a U.S.-sponsored petro-state and
threatening to become an excessively powerful new force in the oil-rich Middle
East. A vicious U.S. assault (the so-called Persian Gulf War, a one-sided
imperial slaughter) ensued, followed by years of mass-murderous U.S.-led
economic sanctions and a full U.S. invasion and occupation (leading to Saddam’s
death, along with that of more than a million other Iraqis) in 2003.
Another example is the long U.S.-sponsored Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“Despite the billions in aid lavished on Karzai,” McCoy notes in his new book
“In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global
Power,” U.S. calls for him to be an effective U.S. ally by being less openly
corrupt “led to public tantrums” and “inflammatory outbursts from Karzai.” The
George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations “found it impossible to control
Karzai. … With Washington’s reform initiative effectively neutered, much like
Diem had done decades earlier, Karzai was free to spend the next four years
presiding, as the sardonically dubbed ‘mayor of Kabul,’ over the growth of the
Taliban resistance movement.”
Yet another case is the Philippines’ thuggish president, Rodrigo Duterte. He
turned against the United States, breaching his country’s 70-year alliance with
Washington, and cozied up to China last year. The rupture came after President
Barack Obama had the gall to weakly criticize Duterte’s extrajudicial murder of
thousands in the name of the war on drugs. “Who does he think he is?” Duterte
responded, adding: “I am no American puppet. I am the president of a sovereign
country, and I am not answerable to anyone except the Filipino people. Putang
ina mo [Your mother’s a whore], I will swear at you.”
Which brings me to another violent and mean-spirited Obama-hater: Donald Trump.
Incredible as it might seem, the United States, the global superpower itself,
has been plagued by the presence of an insubordinate, dysfunctional, corrupt
and excessively nationalistic elite in its own top “democratically elected”
position—the U.S. presidency.
Trump is no leftist people’s champion, obviously. Think Diem, Noriega, Karzai
and Duterte—not Fidel, Lumumba, Allende, Ho or Hugo. He’s a malignantly
narcissistic real estate baron whose basic missions in life are to advance his
own wealth and glorify his personal image and brand. He is venality and ego on
steroids—too commercial and selfish to be an actual fascist, but an ugly
epitome of the worst excesses of the capitalist, plutocratic, racist, sexist,
militaristic and ecocidal American system.
The problem for the U.S. ruling class is that the American system and empire is
compelled to sell itself as humanitarian, multicultural, peaceful, democratic,
benevolent and wise. “The United States,” then-Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright said in 1999, channeling the establishment conventional “American
exceptionalist” wisdom, “is good. We try to do our best everywhere.”
“If we have to use force,” Albright had explained one year earlier, “it is
because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we
see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to
all of us.”
“Our security,” Obama intoned in his first inaugural address, continuing the
exceptionalist mythology as he prepared to commit new war crimes, “emanates
from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering
qualities of humility and restraint.”
It’s hard to match such nationally and imperially self-congratulatory rhetoric
and marketing with the history, persona and conduct of “Prima Donald.” As a
candidate with a long record of sexual harassment and racial insult,
“Trumplethinskin”:
● Gave his fellow ruling-class presidential contenders juvenile and nasty
nicknames (“Little Marco,” “Low Energy Jeb,” “Crooked Hillary”) and even
insulted the looks of one candidate and other candidates’ wives.
● Encouraged violence against black protesters and embraced the nation’s racist
police state, calling for a “national [racist] stop-and-frisk law” (which would
create a national racist state of martial law) in the name of “law and order.”
● Absurdly claimed that the nation was being overrun by illegal Latino
immigrant rapists and murderers.
● Was transparently addicted to the language and imagery of hyper-masculinist
violence.
● Embraced torture (“it works”) and called for the murder of alleged Islamic
terrorists’ families.
● Asked why the U.S. had nuclear weapons if it couldn’t use them and insanely
advocated the nuclear weaponization of arch-reactionary and absolutist Saudi
Arabia.
● Mocked Asians and a disabled journalist in front of hot microphones.
● Behaved like a boorish and unprepared adolescent during his
not-so-presidential debates with Hillary Clinton, whom he called “a nasty
woman” and threatened (to the applause of his white nationalist campaign rally
attendees) to “lock up.”
This is a very abbreviated list.
As president of the United States, Trump has:
● Falsely and childishly claimed that the “fake news” media exaggerated the
size of mass protests over his election.
● Went (also on day one) to the CIA headquarters to tell stone-faced
intelligence chiefs that the U.S. might have another chance to invade Iraq and
“get the oil.”
● Made preposterous, paranoid-style charges, claiming that he was denied a
popular-vote victory by illegal immigrant voters and that he was wiretapped by
Obama.
● Tweeted a cartoonish film of him beating up “CNN” at a wrestling match.
● Tweeted a denunciation of a retail firm that dropped its daughter’s perfume
brand.
● Displayed open affinity for authoritarian rulers like Vladimir Putin,
Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and Rodrigo Duterte.
● Continued to absurdly deny the existence of anthropogenic (really
capitalogenic) climate change, the biggest problem of our—or any—time.
● Advance-pardoned a convicted racist and fascist sheriff (Joe Arpaio) who
created deadly open-air “concentration camps” (Arpaio’s own proud term) to
detain suspected undocumented immigrants of Latino background.
● Targeted strangely selected Muslim (and other) nations for transparently
racist travel bans.
● Called a distinguished federal magistrate who ruled against his travel
measure “a so-called judge.”
● Claimed that another federal judge’s ruling against his scam “university” was
tainted by the jurist’s Latino ancestry.
● Threatened genocidal and thermonuclear war (“fire and fury”) on North Korea,
putting millions of lives at risk on and around the Korean peninsula while
engaging in a cartoon-like war of words with North Korea’s equally bizarre
ruler, Kim Jong Un.
● Defended neo-Nazis and other vicious white nationalists, offering them
dog-whistle encouragement after they marched by torch light and killed in
defense of Confederate (slave power) war statues.
● Phoned Duterte to call him “a good man … doing an unbelievable job on the
drug problem.”
● Insulted U.S. ally South Korea by claiming that it was once “part of China.”
● Alienated even Australia by cutting off his initial phone call with that
nation’s head of state when the prime minister reminded Trump of the United
States’ commitment to absorb a small number of refugees.
● Openly obstructed “justice” by firing and intimidating top federal law
enforcement officials.
● Used the presidency to advance his own global real estate fortune.
● Worked to suppress minority voting rights in advance of the 2020 elections.
● Consorted with a top adviser and close friend (Roger Stone) who uses the
threat of mass right-wing, white-nationalist violence to discourage efforts to
remove Trump.
● Continued to engage in juvenile Twitter assaults on his political enemies and
media critics.
● Gave himself a “10” on Puerto Rico hurricane relief after he bungled the
federal emergency response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation of the island.
● Attacked San Juan’s mayor for calling him on his failure.
● Told Puerto Ricans they didn’t experience a “real catastrophe like Katrina.”
● Suggested the Puerto Ricans were lazy and lectured the island about the
crushing debt unjustly imposed on it by U.S. finance capital.
● Idiotically told North Dakota residents that the White House would make North
Dakota’s drought “disappear” (“It’ll all go away; you’ll see”).
This, too, is an abridged list. The record of abnormal incidents in the insane
clown presidency of Donald Trump goes on and on. The Twitter- and Fox
News-addicted Bad Grandpa Trump is a great embarrassment for Brand USA.
To make matters worse from a U.S. ruling-class perspective, Trump campaigned
outside and against conventional neoliberal and ruling-class policy wisdom. He
came into the presidency as a reactionary “populist” and nationalist demagogue.
He ran as an open critic of the expansive, multilateral and “free trade”
globalism long embraced by the United States’ wealth and power elite. Claiming
(absurdly) to be a champion of the heartland’s “forgotten” white working class,
he denounced corporate globalization, calling the North American Free Trade
Agreement a jobs destroyer.
He denounced Wall Street’s abandonment of the nation’s middle and working
classes and promised to bring back the nation’s lost manufacturing and
coal-mining jobs. Speaking to his imagined, vast, white working-class Archie
Bunker- and Joe the Plumber-esque base, Trump has channeled Pat Buchanan-esque
“America First” isolationism, protectionism and unilateralism. He promised a
trade war with China, calling the nation’s leading trading partner the
perpetrator of “the greatest [job] theft in history.” He denounced the U.S.
political system as hopelessly corrupt.
Insulting ruling classes and nations abroad, he has lectured European NATO
allies on their duty to “pay up,” bashed Japanese and Chinese imports, told
Japan to pay for the U.S. military bases that occupy it, called South Korea’s
free-trade agreement “horrible,” and told South Korea to pay for the
anti-missile system the U.S. set up there.
Unlike the classy, erudite and refined imperialists Barack Obama and Bill and
Hillary Clinton, the Muslim-obsessed Trump has never read a memo, white paper
or report from “Wall Street’s think tank”—the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR), the granddaddy of all U.S establishment policy formation groups.
Trump joined in the chorus of right and left opposition to Obama’s “pivot to
Asia” and CFR-recommended gambit to contain the rise of China with multilateral
trade agreements designed to split Eurasia between East and West—the
Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership. By McCoy’s expert, deeply informed account, Trump’s election has
significantly escalated the pace of U.S. imperial decline, accelerating
Beijing’s transcendence over Washington as the world’s preeminent power.
All of this and more has been deeply dysfunctional and disobedient as far as
the American ruling class is concerned. It’s not for nothing that Trump was
shunned by leading corporate and financial campaign donors, who preferred any
number of Wall Street- and CFR-vetted candidates, starting with Hillary Clinton
and Jeb Bush, over him in 2016. And it’s not for nothing that “The Lyin’ King”
has faced relentless corporate-state media criticism and mockery along with a
campaign for impeachment or some other form of removal ever since he defeated
the national elite’s preferred presidential selections last year.
The arch-imperial super-spook, former National Intelligence Director James
Clapper (a curious liberal hero these days) and Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chair Bob Corker, R-Tenn., have gone on national television to
question Trump’s fitness for the presidency, hinting at 25th Amendment removal
on grounds of incompetence.
All of this raises an interesting question: How on earth did the nation’s
unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire let the vicious
sociopath Donald Trump into the White House? Aren’t the wealth and power
elite’s big-money-drenched and highly corporate mass-mediated candidate
selection and vetting processes designed to prevent insubordinate elites (of
whatever ideological or other persuasion) from rising into higher office?
Yes, they are, but the American ruling class, it turns out, is not as
politically omnipotent and all-seeing as some lefties seem to think even in its
own imperial “homeland.” Trump was something of an extraordinary exception to
the normal money and politics rule last year. As the distinguished liberal
political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Martin Gilens (Princeton)
note in their new book “Democracy in America?”:
“
It is extremely difficult to win a major government office without the backing
of affluent campaign donors. … To be sure, the 2016 ‘outsider’ campaigns of
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump seemed to demonstrate that—at least under
certain circumstances—huge contributions from the usual millionaire and
billionaire donors may not be necessary to compete. But of course, Sanders did
not win the Democratic Party nomination, let alone the general election. Trump
was an extremely unusual case: His celebrity and communications skills markedly
lowered his campaign costs by giving him an enormous amount of free media
exposure. And Trump had his own fortune to fall back on, if necessary, which
also helped make him unusually independent of megadonors.
Among the “certain circumstances” that let Trump slip into the Oval Office last
year, we must include the wage and income stagnation that has long plagued the
nation’s working-class majority (even as the rich have gotten ever-more
obscenely prosperous) and the transparent takeover of the both the nation’s two
dominant political organizations by Wall Street and corporate America. Millions
of ordinary Americans resent those who seem to have jumped ahead of
them—“whether they focus on wealthy corporate executive and hedge-fund managers
or on immigrants and minorities” (Page and Gilens).
The rigging of the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders was key. By
tapping and channeling populist “anti-establishment” anger in accord with
majority-progressive public opinion, Sanders (who ran against “the billionaire
class”) would have defeated Trump (who ran primarily against “immigrants and
minorities”).
Trump owed much of his victory to the hopelessly dull and Wall Street-pleasing,
proletariat-dismissing/-dissing Hillary Clinton campaign. The elitist and
oligarchic Clinton was unwilling and perhaps unable to rally the Democratic
Party’s purported lower- and working-class base. She foolishly assumed that
popular horror at His Awfulness would provide all the mass mobilization she
really needed. As Mike Davis notes in Haymarket Books’ new must-read collection
“U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty”:
“
While Trump was factory-hopping in the hinterlands, [Mrs. Clinton’s] itinerary
skipped the entire state of Wisconsin as well as major contested centers such
as the Dayton, Ohio, area. The Clinton camp obviously believed that aggressive
campaigning in the last weeks by Obama and Sanders, reinforced by celebrities
such as Springsteen and Beyoncé, would ensure strong turnouts by
African-Americans and millennials in the urban core while she harvested votes
from irate Republican women in the suburbs. … Her campaign refused to heed the
dangerous signals from Rust Belt, going ‘totally silent on the economy and any
future plan what would be helpful to people’ … [showing] stupefying inattention
to voter unrest in long-Democratic non-metropolitan counties urged upon Trump
by his ‘pugnacious pollster,’ Tony Fabrizio. … In the event, Clinton’s huge
popular majorities on the West Coast were worthless currency in the Electoral
College while Trump reaped a windfall from his final few weeks of barnstorming
the Rustbelt.
The Democrats’ surrender of the white working-class and rural vote was based on
an idiotic calculus that turned out to be suicidal in a handful of upper
Midwestern battleground and Rust Belt states. “For every blue-collar Democrat
we lose in western Pennsylvania,” U.S. Wall Street Sen. Charles Schumer
infamously and falsely predicted, “we will pick up two moderate Republicans in
the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and
Wisconsin.”
Nope.
Still, Trump deserves credit for keeping the evangelical wing of the Republican
Party loyal for the general election—no simple achievement given Trump’s
salacious and sinful record as a self-aggrandizing New York City-based media
narcissist, casino mogul and sexual predator. As Davis adds, “Boss Tweet”
played his cards right, keeping the religious right on board with clever and
significant concessions:
“
[I]f visceral nationalism and white anger gave him the nomination, it was not
enough to ensure that the big battalions of the GOP, especially the
evangelicals who had supported [Ted] Cruz, would actively campaign for him.
Trump’s stroke of genius was to allow the religious right, including former
Cruz cheerleaders David Barton and Tony Perkins, to draft the Republican
platform and then, as surety, to select one of their heroes [Mike Pence] as his
running mate. … To ensure implementation of the [right-wing] agenda, Trump
promised to recompose the federal judiciary with evangelical fellow travelers,
beginning with the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. … With
the Supreme Court at stake and Mike Pence smiling from the dais, it was easier
for the congregation to pardon the crotch-grabbing sinner at the head of the
ticket. Trump, as a result, received a larger share of the evangelical vote
than Romney, McCain or Bush, while Clinton underperformed Obama among
Catholics, including Latinos.
Add in the dark support he got from the neo-fascistic, Mercer family-supported
“alt-right” (gained in part by making the noxious white nationalist Steve
Bannon his top campaign official), the cost-saving gift of free media
attention, and the red state-amplifying impact of the Electoral College—the
“unthinkable” Orange Ascendancy was sealed. The election fell into the
insubordinate real estate mogul’s lap, much to the surprise of most pollsters
and prognosticators, present writer included.
The neoliberal “deep state” ruling class has been trying to figure out how to
deal with Trump ever since. A military coup and assassination are out of the
question in the “homeland”—this isn’t Honduras. The setting requires more
civilized and constitutional methods of containment and, perhaps, removal:
trying to surround him with as many establishment actors as possible; helping
keep his approval numbers just hovering above his “deplorable”
white-nationalist Amerikaner base with a steady drumbeat of negative media;
investigating him and his inner circle for “Russian collusion.”
Besides weakening the naughty Trump, the conspiratorial Russiagate campaign has
the benefit of diverting public attention and discussion away from the
bipartisan corporate state’s responsibility for the New Gilded Age capitalism’s
hollowing out of America. It exonerates the two dominant capitalist parties,
the American empire, and the corporate media from legitimate blame for the
chilling rise of Herr Donald. It also helps keep the flames hot beneath
Washington’s ongoing New Cold War with the proudly disobedient and nationalist
rulers atop Washington’s No. 2 geopolitical rival, Russia (China is No. 1).
Last September, in one of the more colorful rhetorical flourishes against
Trump, the hilariously disobedient Dear Leader Kim Jong Un said that he would
he would “surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged dotard with fire.”
He will do no such thing, of course. Meanwhile, however, it would appear that
the “dotard” is being tamed by the U.S. political, economic, media and imperial
elite—with the threat of impeachment and the presence of just enough “deep
state” neoliberal handlers within his bizarre administration.
The tough-talking trade warrior predictably went all mushy on China during his
recent trip to Asia. He dropped charges of currency manipulation and told the
Chinese that he didn’t blame them for attacking the U.S. market. He also
shelved his verbal wargames with North Korea for the most part. That was him
being a good, well-behaved Donald: The nation’s unelected and interrelated
dictatorships of money and empire have no interests in a trade war with China
or a shooting war with North Korea.
The leading oddsmaker site Ladbrokes recently gave Trump a 40 percent chance of
“leaving office via impeachment or resignation before the end of his first
term.” The Robert Muller III investigations could certainly help make that
happen, along with Trump’s foolish habit of feuding with top Senate Republicans.
But 40 percent is too high.
The corporate Democrats probably want to keep the president around to run
against in 2018 and 2020. Trump-hating worked like a charm for them in last
Tuesday’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Top Democrats likely hope that
His Awfulness will permit them to sweep back into office without having to make
too many concessions to their party’s progressive-liberal Bernie Sanders wing.
In the meantime, those of us on the actual left can hardly be expected to get
teary-eyed about Trump’s role in furthering the decline of U.S. global
power—well underway since at least George W. Bush’s foolish and blundering
invasion of Iraq. As Noam Chomsky noted in the late 1960s: “The costs of empire
are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits
revert to a few within.”
