Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Trumpian Snapshot of America
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on February 26, 2017, Printed on February 26, 2017
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176247/ ;
The Art of the Trumpaclysm
How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself
By Tom Engelhardt
Its been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds? Tens?) A spectacular
production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in
America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it's
been! Its driving people back to newspapers (online, if not in print) and
ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24/7 cable news shows, never lack
for breaking news or audiences. Its a smash in both the Hollywood and car
accident sense of the term, a phenomenon the likes of which weve simply
never experienced. Think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and the cameras
rolled. Its proved, in every way, to be a giant leak. A faucet. A spigot.
An absolute flood of non-news, quarter-news, half-news, crazed news, fake
news, and over-the-top actual news.
And you know exactly what -- and whom -- Im talking about. No need to
explain. I mean, you tell me: What doesnt it have? Its lead actor is the
closest weve come in our nation's capital to an action figure. Think of
him as the Mar-a-Lego version of Batman and the Joker rolled into one, a
president who, as he told us at a news conference recently, is the least
anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life and the
least racist person as well. As report after report indicates, he
attacks, lashes out, mocks, tweets, pummels, charges, and complains,
showering calumny on others even as he praises his achievements without
surcease. Think of him as the towering inferno of twenty-first-century
American politics or a modern Godzilla eternally emerging from New York
harbor.
As for his supporting cast? Islamophobes, Iranophobes, white nationalists;
bevies of billionaires and multimillionaires; a resurgent stock market gone
wild; the complete fossil fuel industry and every crackpot climate change
skeptic in town; a press spokesman immortalized by Saturday Night Live
whose afternoon briefings are already beating the soap opera General
Hospital in the ratings; a White House counselor whose expertise is in
alternative facts; a national security adviser who (with a tenure of 24
days) seemed to sum up the concept of insecurity; a White House chief of
staff and liaison with the Republicans in Congress whos already being sized
up for extinction, as well as a couple of appointees who were dismissed or
even frog-marched out of their offices and jobs for having criticized The
Donald and not fessed up... honestly, you couldnt make this stuff up, or
rather only Trump himself can do so. And by the way, just so you know,
based on the last weeks of news I could keep this paragraph going more or
less forever without even breaking into a sweat.
Among so many subjects I havent even mentioned, including Melania and
former wife Ivana -- is it even possible that she could become the U.S.
ambassador to the Czech Republic? -- there are, of course, the Trump kids
and their businesses and the instantly broken promises on (such an
old-fashioned phrase) their conflicts of interest and the conflicts about
those conflicts and the presidential tweets, threats, and bluster that have
gone with them, not to speak of the issue of for-pay access to the new
president. And how about Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner (another walking
conflict of you-know-what), who reputedly had a role in the appointment of
the new ambassador to Israel, a New York bankruptcy lawyer known for raising
millions of dollars to fund a West Bank Jewish settlement and for calling
supporters of the liberal Jewish group J Street far worse than kapos (Jews
who aided the Nazis in their concentration camps). Kushner has now been
ordained Americas ultimate peacemaker in the Middle East. And dont forget
that sons Donald and Eric are already saving memorabilia for the future
Trump presidential library, a concept that should take your breath away.
(Just imagine a library with those giant golden letters over its entrance to
honor a man who proudly doesnt read books and, as with presidential
executive orders and possibly even volumes hes written, signs off on
things hes barely bothered to check out.)
And speaking of Rome (remember Nero fiddling?), have you noticed that these
days all news roads lead back to... well, Donald Trump? Take my word for
it: nothing happens in our world any longer that doesnt relate to him and
his people (or, by definition, it simply didnt happen). Since he rode that
Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, his greatest
skill has, without any doubt, been his ability to suck up all the media air
in any room, whether that room is the Oval Office, Washington, or the
world at large. He speaks at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and, amid angry outbursts on leaks from the intelligence
community and attacks on the dishonest media for essentially firing his
national security adviser, he suddenly turns his attention to the
Israeli-Palestinian issue and says, So, I'm looking at two-state and
one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I'm very happy with the
one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a
while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but
honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians -- if Israel and the Palestinians
are happy, I'm happy with the one they like the best. And the world as
weve known it in the Middle East is suddenly turned upside down and inside
out.
Generalizing
In its way, even 20 months after it began, its all still so remarkable and
new, and if it isnt like being in the path of a tornado, you tell me what
it's like. So no one should be surprised at just how difficult it is to
step outside the storm of this never-ending moment, to find some -- any --
vantage point offering the slightest perspective on the Trumpaclysm thats
hit our world.
Still, odd as it may seem under the circumstances, Trumps presidency came
from somewhere, developed out of something. To think of it (as many of
those resisting Trump now seem inclined to do) as uniquely new, the
presidential version of a virgin birth, is to defy both history and reality.
Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of
history. Hes unimaginable without it. This, in turn, means that the
radical nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how
radical the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life,
politics, and governance. In that sense, to generalize (if youll excuse
the pun), his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate
portrait of the America weve been living in for some years now, even if
wed prefer to pretend otherwise.
After all, its clearly a government of, by, and evidently for the
billionaires and the generals, which pretty much sums up where weve been
heading for the last decade and a half anyway. Lets start with those
generals. In the 15 years before Trump entered the Oval Office, Washington
became a permanent war capital; war, a permanent feature of our American
world; and the military, the most admired institution of American life, the
one in which we have the most confidence among an otherwise fading crew,
including the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, banks,
television news, newspapers, big business, and Congress (in that descending
order).
Support for that military in the form of staggering sums of taxpayer dollars
(which are about to soar yet again) is one of the few things congressional
Democrats and Republicans can still agree on. The military-industrial
complex rides ever higher (despite Trumpian tweets about the price of
F-35s); police across the country have been armed like so many military
forces, while the technology of war on Americas distant battlefields --
from Stingrays to MRAPs to military surveillance drones -- has come home big
time, and weve been SWATified.
This country has, in other words, been militarized in all sorts of ways,
both obvious and less so, in a fashion that Americans once might not have
imagined possible. In the process, declaring and making war has
increasingly become -- the Constitution be damned -- the sole preoccupation
of the White House without significant reference to Congress. Meanwhile,
thanks to the drone assassination program run directly out of the Oval
Office, the president, in these years, has become an assassin-in-chief as
well as commander-in-chief.
Under the circumstances, no one should have been surprised when Donald Trump
turned to the very generals he criticized in the election campaign, men who
fought 15 years of losing wars that they bitterly feel should have been won.
In his government, they have, of course, now taken over -- a historic first
-- what had largely been the civilian posts of secretary of defense,
secretary of homeland security, national security adviser, and National
Security Council chief of staff. Think of it as a junta light and little
more than the next logical step in the further militarization of this
country.
Its striking, for instance, that when the president finally fired his
national security adviser, 24 days into his presidency, all but one of the
other figures that he reportedly considered for a post often occupied by a
civilian were retired generals (and an admiral), or in the case of the
person he actually tapped to be his second national security adviser, a
still-active Army general. This reflects a distinct American reality of the
twenty-first century that The Donald has simply absorbed like the human
sponge he is. As a result, Americas permanent wars, all relative disasters
of one sort or another, will now be overseen by men who were, for the last
decade and a half, deeply implicated in them. Its a formula for further
disaster, of course, but no matter.
Other future Trumpian steps -- like the possible mobilization of the
National Guard, more than half a century after guardsmen helped desegregate
the University of Alabama, to carry out the mass deportation of illegal
immigrants -- will undoubtedly be in the same mold (though the
administration has denied that such a mobilization is under serious
consideration yet). In short, we now live in an America of the generals and
that would be the case even if Donald Trump had never been elected
president.
Add in one more factor of our moment: we have the first signs that members
of the military high command may no longer feel completely bound by the
classic American prohibition from taking any part in politics. General
Raymond "Tony" Thomas, head of the elite U.S. Special Operations Command,
speaking recently at a conference, essentially warned the president that we
are at war and that chaos in the White House is not good for the warriors.
Thats as close as weve come in our time to direct public military
criticism of the White House.
The Ascendancy of the Billionaires
As for those billionaires, lets start this way: a billionaire is now
president of the United States, something that, until this country was
transformed into a 1% society with 1% politics, would have been
inconceivable. (The closest we came in modern times was Nelson Rockefeller
as vice president, and he was appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1974,
not elected.) In addition, never have there been so many billionaires and
multimillionaires in a cabinet -- and that, in turn, was only possible
because there are now so staggeringly many billionaires and
multimillionaires in this country to choose from. In 1987, there were 41
billionaires in the United States; in 2015, 536. What else do you need to
know about the intervening years, which featured growing inequality and the
worst economic meltdown since 1929 that only helped strengthen the new
version of the American system?
In swift order in these years, we moved from billionaires funding the
political system (after the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision
opened the financial floodgates) to actually heading and running the
government. As a result, count on a country even friendlier to the already
fantastically wealthy -- thanks in part to whatever Trump-style tax cuts
are put in place -- and so the possible establishment of a new era of
dynastic wealth. From the crew of rich dismantlers and destroyers Donald
Trump has appointed to his cabinet, expect, among other things, that the
privatization of the U.S. government -- a process until now largely focused
on melding warrior corporations with various parts of the national security
state -- will proceed apace in the rest of the governing apparatus.
We were, in other words, already living in a different America before
November 8, 2016. Donald Trump has merely shoved that reality directly in
all our faces. And keep in mind that if it werent for the
one-percentification of this country and the surge of automation (as well as
globalization) that destroyed so many jobs and only helped inequality
flourish, white working class Americans in particular would not have felt so
left behind in the heartland of their own country or so ready to send such
an explosive figure into the White House as a visible form of
screw-you-style protest.
Finally, consider one other hallmark of the first month of the Trump
presidency: the feud between the new president and the intelligence sector
of the national security state. In these post-9/11 years, that state within
a state -- sometimes referred to by its critics as the deep state, though
given the secrecy that envelops it, dark state might be a more accurate
term -- grew by leaps and bounds. In that period, for instance, the U.S.
gained a second Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security with
its own security-industrial complex, while the intelligence agencies, all 17
of them, expanded in just about every way imaginable. In those years, they
gained a previously inconceivable kind of clout, as well as the ability to
essentially listen in on and monitor the communications of just about anyone
on the planet (including Americans). Fed copiously by taxpayer dollars,
swollen by hundreds of thousands of private contractors from warrior
corporations, largely free of the controlling hand of either Congress or the
courts, and operating under the kind of blanket secrecy that left most
Americans in the dark about its activities (except when whistle-blowers
revealed its workings), the national security state gained an ascendancy in
Washington as the de facto fourth branch of government.
Now, key people within its shadowy precincts find Donald Trump, the
president who is in so many ways a product of the same processes that
elevated them, not to their liking -- even less so once he compared their
activities to those of the Nazi era -- and they seem to have gone to war
with him and his administration via a remarkable stream of leaks of damaging
information, especially about now-departed National Security Adviser Michael
Flynn. As Amanda Taub and Max Fisher of the New York Times wrote, For
concerned government officials, leaks may have become one of the few
remaining means by which to influence not just Mr. Flynns policy
initiatives but the threat he seemed to pose to their place in democracy.
This, of course, represented a version of whistle-blowing that, when
directed at them in the pre-Trump era, they found appalling. Like General
Thomass comments, that flood of leaks, while discomfiting Donald Trump,
also represented a potential challenge to the American political system as
it once was known. When the fiercest defenders of that system begin to be
seen as being inside the intelligence community and the military you know
that youre in a different and far more perilous world.
So much of whats now happening may seem startlingly new and overwhelming.
In truth, however, its been in development for years, even if the specifics
of a Trump presidency were not so long ago unimaginable. In March of 2015,
for instance, two months before The Donald tossed his hair into the
presidential ring, in a post at TomDispatch I asked if a new political
system was emerging in America and summed the situation up this way:
Still, dont for a second think that the American political system isnt
being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present
crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the
officials of the national security state. Out of the chaos of this prolonged
moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of
politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call
it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending its not
happening.
Were now living in Donald Trumps America (which I certainly didnt either
predict or imagine in March 2015); were living, that is, in an ever more
chaotic and aberrant land run (to the extent its run at all) by
billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant
president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state. That,
in a nutshell, is the America created in the post-9/11 years. Put another
way, the U.S. may have failed dismally in its efforts to invade, occupy, and
remake Iraq in its own image, but it seems to have invaded, occupied, and
remade itself with remarkable success. And dont blame this one on the
Russians.
No one said it better than French King Louis XV: Après moi, le Trump.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick
Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's
latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global
Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt
© 2017 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176247/
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Trumpian Snapshot of America
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on February 26, 2017, Printed on February 26, 2017
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176247/ ;
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Reviews of our latest Dispatch book, John
Feffer's superb dystopian novel, Splinterlands, are just beginning to come
in and they're uniformly superb. The Washington City Paper, citing its
"brilliance," writes, "If youre having a hard time deciding whether to read
1984 or The Origins of Totalitarianism -- or if youve already read them
both and want something in-between -- consider local author John Feffers
Splinterlands." The Midwest Book Review adds, "Readers who enjoy dystopian
stories that hold more than a light look at political structures and their
downfall will more than appreciate the in-depth approach John Feffer takes
in his novel." I urge you to support TomDispatch (and get a riveting late
night read) by picking up a copy, or for a $100 donation ($125 if you live
outside the U.S.), get your own signed, personalized copy from the author
via our donation page (where numerous other books of our moment are also
available) and give this site a real helping hand. Tom]
The Art of the Trumpaclysm
How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself
By Tom Engelhardt
Its been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds? Tens?) A spectacular
production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in
America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it's
been! Its driving people back to newspapers (online, if not in print) and
ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24/7 cable news shows, never lack
for breaking news or audiences. Its a smash in both the Hollywood and car
accident sense of the term, a phenomenon the likes of which weve simply
never experienced. Think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and the cameras
rolled. Its proved, in every way, to be a giant leak. A faucet. A spigot.
An absolute flood of non-news, quarter-news, half-news, crazed news, fake
news, and over-the-top actual news.
And you know exactly what -- and whom -- Im talking about. No need to
explain. I mean, you tell me: What doesnt it have? Its lead actor is the
closest weve come in our nation's capital to an action figure. Think of him
as the Mar-a-Lego version of Batman and the Joker rolled into one, a
president who, as he told us at a news conference recently, is the least
anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life and the
least racist person as well. As report after report indicates, he attacks,
lashes out, mocks, tweets, pummels, charges, and complains, showering
calumny on others even as he praises his achievements without surcease.
Think of him as the towering inferno of twenty-first-century American
politics or a modern Godzilla eternally emerging from New York harbor.
As for his supporting cast? Islamophobes, Iranophobes, white nationalists;
bevies of billionaires and multimillionaires; a resurgent stock market gone
wild; the complete fossil fuel industry and every crackpot climate change
skeptic in town; a press spokesman immortalized by Saturday Night Live
whose afternoon briefings are already beating the soap opera General
Hospital in the ratings; a White House counselor whose expertise is in
alternative facts; a national security adviser who (with a tenure of 24
days) seemed to sum up the concept of insecurity; a White House chief of
staff and liaison with the Republicans in Congress whos already being sized
up for extinction, as well as a couple of appointees who were dismissed or
even frog-marched out of their offices and jobs for having criticized The
Donald and not fessed up... honestly, you couldnt make this stuff up, or
rather only Trump himself can do so. And by the way, just so you know, based
on the last weeks of news I could keep this paragraph going more or less
forever without even breaking into a sweat.
Among so many subjects I havent even mentioned, including Melania and
former wife Ivana -- is it even possible that she could become the U.S.
ambassador to the Czech Republic? -- there are, of course, the Trump kids
and their businesses and the instantly broken promises on (such an
old-fashioned phrase) their conflicts of interest and the conflicts about
those conflicts and the presidential tweets, threats, and bluster that have
gone with them, not to speak of the issue of for-pay access to the new
president. And how about Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner (another walking
conflict of you-know-what), who reputedly had a role in the appointment of
the new ambassador to Israel, a New York bankruptcy lawyer known for raising
millions of dollars to fund a West Bank Jewish settlement and for calling
supporters of the liberal Jewish group J Street far worse than kapos (Jews
who aided the Nazis in their concentration camps). Kushner has now been
ordained Americas ultimate peacemaker in the Middle East. And dont forget
that sons Donald and Eric are already saving memorabilia for the future
Trump presidential library, a concept that should take your breath away.
(Just imagine a library with those giant golden letters over its entrance to
honor a man who proudly doesnt read books and, as with presidential
executive orders and possibly even volumes hes written, signs off on
things hes barely bothered to check out.)
And speaking of Rome (remember Nero fiddling?), have you noticed that these
days all news roads lead back to... well, Donald Trump? Take my word for it:
nothing happens in our world any longer that doesnt relate to him and his
people (or, by definition, it simply didnt happen). Since he rode that
Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, his greatest
skill has, without any doubt, been his ability to suck up all the media air
in any room, whether that room is the Oval Office, Washington, or the
world at large. He speaks at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu and, amid angry outbursts on leaks from the intelligence
community and attacks on the dishonest media for essentially firing his
national security adviser, he suddenly turns his attention to the
Israeli-Palestinian issue and says, So, I'm looking at two-state and
one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I'm very happy with the
one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a
while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but
honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians -- if Israel and the Palestinians
are happy, I'm happy with the one they like the best. And the world as
weve known it in the Middle East is suddenly turned upside down and inside
out.
Generalizing
In its way, even 20 months after it began, its all still so remarkable and
new, and if it isnt like being in the path of a tornado, you tell me what
it's like. So no one should be surprised at just how difficult it is to step
outside the storm of this never-ending moment, to find some -- any --
vantage point offering the slightest perspective on the Trumpaclysm thats
hit our world.
Still, odd as it may seem under the circumstances, Trumps presidency came
from somewhere, developed out of something. To think of it (as many of those
resisting Trump now seem inclined to do) as uniquely new, the presidential
version of a virgin birth, is to defy both history and reality.
Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of
history. Hes unimaginable without it. This, in turn, means that the radical
nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how radical
the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics,
and governance. In that sense, to generalize (if youll excuse the pun), his
presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the
America weve been living in for some years now, even if wed prefer to
pretend otherwise.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467244/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467244/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20After all,
its clearly a government of, by, and evidently for the billionaires and the
generals, which pretty much sums up where weve been heading for the last
decade and a half anyway. Lets start with those generals. In the 15 years
before Trump entered the Oval Office, Washington became a permanent war
capital; war, a permanent feature of our American world; and the military,
the most admired institution of American life, the one in which we have the
most confidence among an otherwise fading crew, including the presidency,
the Supreme Court, public schools, banks, television news, newspapers, big
business, and Congress (in that descending order).
Support for that military in the form of staggering sums of taxpayer dollars
(which are about to soar yet again) is one of the few things congressional
Democrats and Republicans can still agree on. The military-industrial
complex rides ever higher (despite Trumpian tweets about the price of
F-35s); police across the country have been armed like so many military
forces, while the technology of war on Americas distant battlefields --
from Stingrays to MRAPs to military surveillance drones -- has come home big
time, and weve been SWATified.
This country has, in other words, been militarized in all sorts of ways,
both obvious and less so, in a fashion that Americans once might not have
imagined possible. In the process, declaring and making war has increasingly
become -- the Constitution be damned -- the sole preoccupation of the White
House without significant reference to Congress. Meanwhile, thanks to the
drone assassination program run directly out of the Oval Office, the
president, in these years, has become an assassin-in-chief as well as
commander-in-chief.
Under the circumstances, no one should have been surprised when Donald Trump
turned to the very generals he criticized in the election campaign, men who
fought 15 years of losing wars that they bitterly feel should have been won.
In his government, they have, of course, now taken over -- a historic first
-- what had largely been the civilian posts of secretary of defense,
secretary of homeland security, national security adviser, and National
Security Council chief of staff. Think of it as a junta light and little
more than the next logical step in the further militarization of this
country.
Its striking, for instance, that when the president finally fired his
national security adviser, 24 days into his presidency, all but one of the
other figures that he reportedly considered for a post often occupied by a
civilian were retired generals (and an admiral), or in the case of the
person he actually tapped to be his second national security adviser, a
still-active Army general. This reflects a distinct American reality of the
twenty-first century that The Donald has simply absorbed like the human
sponge he is. As a result, Americas permanent wars, all relative disasters
of one sort or another, will now be overseen by men who were, for the last
decade and a half, deeply implicated in them. Its a formula for further
disaster, of course, but no matter.
Other future Trumpian steps -- like the possible mobilization of the
National Guard, more than half a century after guardsmen helped desegregate
the University of Alabama, to carry out the mass deportation of illegal
immigrants -- will undoubtedly be in the same mold (though the
administration has denied that such a mobilization is under serious
consideration yet). In short, we now live in an America of the generals and
that would be the case even if Donald Trump had never been elected
president.
Add in one more factor of our moment: we have the first signs that members
of the military high command may no longer feel completely bound by the
classic American prohibition from taking any part in politics. General
Raymond "Tony" Thomas, head of the elite U.S. Special Operations Command,
speaking recently at a conference, essentially warned the president that we
are at war and that chaos in the White House is not good for the warriors.
Thats as close as weve come in our time to direct public military
criticism of the White House.
The Ascendancy of the Billionaires
As for those billionaires, lets start this way: a billionaire is now
president of the United States, something that, until this country was
transformed into a 1% society with 1% politics, would have been
inconceivable. (The closest we came in modern times was Nelson Rockefeller
as vice president, and he was appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1974,
not elected.) In addition, never have there been so many billionaires and
multimillionaires in a cabinet -- and that, in turn, was only possible
because there are now so staggeringly many billionaires and
multimillionaires in this country to choose from. In 1987, there were 41
billionaires in the United States; in 2015, 536. What else do you need to
know about the intervening years, which featured growing inequality and the
worst economic meltdown since 1929 that only helped strengthen the new
version of the American system?
In swift order in these years, we moved from billionaires funding the
political system (after the Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision
opened the financial floodgates) to actually heading and running the
government. As a result, count on a country even friendlier to the already
fantastically wealthy -- thanks in part to whatever Trump-style tax cuts
are put in place -- and so the possible establishment of a new era of
dynastic wealth. From the crew of rich dismantlers and destroyers Donald
Trump has appointed to his cabinet, expect, among other things, that the
privatization of the U.S. government -- a process until now largely focused
on melding warrior corporations with various parts of the national security
state -- will proceed apace in the rest of the governing apparatus.
We were, in other words, already living in a different America before
November 8, 2016. Donald Trump has merely shoved that reality directly in
all our faces. And keep in mind that if it werent for the
one-percentification of this country and the surge of automation (as well as
globalization) that destroyed so many jobs and only helped inequality
flourish, white working class Americans in particular would not have felt so
left behind in the heartland of their own country or so ready to send such
an explosive figure into the White House as a visible form of
screw-you-style protest.
Finally, consider one other hallmark of the first month of the Trump
presidency: the feud between the new president and the intelligence sector
of the national security state. In these post-9/11 years, that state within
a state -- sometimes referred to by its critics as the deep state, though
given the secrecy that envelops it, dark state might be a more accurate
term -- grew by leaps and bounds. In that period, for instance, the U.S.
gained a second Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security with
its own security-industrial complex, while the intelligence agencies, all 17
of them, expanded in just about every way imaginable. In those years, they
gained a previously inconceivable kind of clout, as well as the ability to
essentially listen in on and monitor the communications of just about anyone
on the planet (including Americans). Fed copiously by taxpayer dollars,
swollen by hundreds of thousands of private contractors from warrior
corporations, largely free of the controlling hand of either Congress or the
courts, and operating under the kind of blanket secrecy that left most
Americans in the dark about its activities (except when whistle-blowers
revealed its workings), the national security state gained an ascendancy in
Washington as the de facto fourth branch of government.
Now, key people within its shadowy precincts find Donald Trump, the
president who is in so many ways a product of the same processes that
elevated them, not to their liking -- even less so once he compared their
activities to those of the Nazi era -- and they seem to have gone to war
with him and his administration via a remarkable stream of leaks of damaging
information, especially about now-departed National Security Adviser Michael
Flynn. As Amanda Taub and Max Fisher of the New York Times wrote, For
concerned government officials, leaks may have become one of the few
remaining means by which to influence not just Mr. Flynns policy
initiatives but the threat he seemed to pose to their place in democracy.
This, of course, represented a version of whistle-blowing that, when
directed at them in the pre-Trump era, they found appalling. Like General
Thomass comments, that flood of leaks, while discomfiting Donald Trump,
also represented a potential challenge to the American political system as
it once was known. When the fiercest defenders of that system begin to be
seen as being inside the intelligence community and the military you know
that youre in a different and far more perilous world.
So much of whats now happening may seem startlingly new and overwhelming.
In truth, however, its been in development for years, even if the specifics
of a Trump presidency were not so long ago unimaginable. In March of 2015,
for instance, two months before The Donald tossed his hair into the
presidential ring, in a post at TomDispatch I asked if a new political
system was emerging in America and summed the situation up this way:
Still, dont for a second think that the American political system isnt
being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present
crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the
officials of the national security state. Out of the chaos of this prolonged
moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of
politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call
it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending its not
happening.
Were now living in Donald Trumps America (which I certainly didnt either
predict or imagine in March 2015); were living, that is, in an ever more
chaotic and aberrant land run (to the extent its run at all) by
billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant
president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state. That,
in a nutshell, is the America created in the post-9/11 years. Put another
way, the U.S. may have failed dismally in its efforts to invade, occupy, and
remake Iraq in its own image, but it seems to have invaded, occupied, and
remade itself with remarkable success. And dont blame this one on the
Russians.
No one said it better than French King Louis XV: Après moi, le Trump.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author
of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End
of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs
TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick
Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's
latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global
Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt
© 2017 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176247/
