There comes a time in the life of every despot where he has to purge the unreliable, untrustworthy.
Hitler staged the "Night of the Long Knives," three days in which insiders considered potentially disloyal were hauled away and slaughtered.
Now Donald Trump is being urged to clean house - of unreliable, "establishment" Republicans.
In the wake of the resignation of his National Security advisor, Mike Flynn, Trump was most concerned about, not Flynn's lying, but who leaked the story, tweeting: "The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?"
Trump advisor, Roger Stone, says this president is being subverted by establishment Republicans operating on the inside to bring Trump down.
"It's establishment Republicans who don't really support his agenda and who leak like a sieve," Stone said by phone Tuesday. "So I am hopeful he will hire more Trump supporters and fewer establishment Republicans who are [not] loyal to him and his agenda."
Stone singled out presidential Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, former head of the Republican National Committee, as an exemplar of someone who's not fully on board with the Trump program.
"It's very hard to fathom why this guy is the chief of staff," Stone said. "He's loyal to the status quo and he's loyal to the big donors to the RNC — who are not the big donors to Donald Trump."
Stone also went after "the midget" Priebus on twitter: "Reince's purge of Flynn a "Pearl Harbor" for Trump loyalists. Hope the midget is ready to rumble @StoneColdTruth"
Steve Bannon's former shop, Breitbart, was quick to attack Priebus:
Breitbart News, the populist right-wing website once led by President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, published a scathing report on Tuesday stating that Priebus was responsible for the administration's rocky start while speculating that his future in the administration may also be short.
This could signal the start of the long-awaited bloodletting inside the White House camps. It seems the perfect opportunity to permit Bannon to complete his capture of Trump and the presidency.
10 comments:
If we buy this idea that it is so-called "insiders" who are responsible for the leaks, then Trump is in a double-bind here. The more he purges perceived insiders the more likely it becomes that Republicans in Congress won't play his games. Leading us closer to conclusion that we are all beginning to draw - war is an inevitability.
.. its just rats.. going after other rats.. & canniblism ..
.. basic rats in the granary behavior..
.. its part of their nature
Trump has an agenda to kill free-trade globalization. (Which he ran on.) Bring back Keynesian labor protection and managed trade. Republican neocons, however, were working with Obama to foist the TPP on Americans during the lame duck session — which Trump shut down.
So yes he has to whip the Republicans into shape to carry out his economic agenda. He isn't freaking killing anyone for Christ sake!
Funny how liberals went from Keynesians to Friedmanian neo-liberals to war-mongering neo-cons heartbroken that the Cold War revival with Russia is off and the TPP is dead.
Before this US election I considered myself a liberal. NEVER AGAIN!
Anon, you're caught in time going back to pre-election Trump and his populist promises.
Labour protection? Are you delusional. Do you know nothing of Trump's pick for labour secretary?
He's not killing anyone? Do you really believe that?
The entire western world has been neoliberal since it was ushered in during the Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney era. Trump may not like multi-national trade agreements but he's entirely neoliberal in his bi-lateral trade focus. You need to grasp the concept of neoliberalism. Read Stiglitz, "The Price of Inequality," or James Galbraith's "The Predator State." Both will give you a working knowledge of neoliberalism, theoretical and applied.
The inevitable outcome of neoliberalism is the wedge it creates between the public and their political caste. Into this wedge special interests insinuate themselves. This leads to a process of democratic decay. It begins with "political capture" exemplified in America's "bought and paid for" Congress. You can learn about this in the Gilens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern) 2014 study that chronicled how the public interest was subordinated to special interests in the legislative branch.
Political capture, once consolidated, leads to "regulatory capture." Here the special interests, regulated industries, are allowed to take control of the regulators by having their representatives appointed to the regulatory boards and tribunals. Canada has experienced this in our National Energy Board. Most major regulatory tribunals in the US are captured.
The final stage, the one we're witnessing underway in Washington today could be called "executive capture." This is where the heads of special interests, guys like Tillerson. Andrew Puzder and the Goldman Sachs trio, take direct control of major government agencies and departments.
Once political, regulatory and executive capture are concluded the last embers of liberal democracy are extinguished. A new order, oligarchy, prevails. It's taken them more than thirty years to get here and they're not going to hand control back to the plebs, not without a fight.
You seem to have taken the bait, anon, and now you're on the hook. Reality is not as you choose to see it. You have much to learn. If your concern is genuine you'll do some reading and get a useful grasp of neoliberalism, autocracy, illiberal democracy and oligarchy.
Anon has no trust in expertise - he's had quite enough of those. Anon trusts his gut - his lower gut. Out of his lower gut comes all he needs to know and all he says. All anyone needs to know about Anon is what comes out of his lower gut.
It isn't a fight between vipers by any means, but it is a fight between a red-bellied snake and neo-liberal vipers.
Trump's fangs are hardly fearful, but attacking him is when he becomes poisonous. It's that steady diet of poisonous frogs red-bellied snakes eat that makes them poisonous (in this case, for Trump, its' all that libertarianism that he ingests from the likes of Bannon).
And poisonous doesn't even mean dangerous. Biting him without taking chunks out would be the best course of action. Can the neo-liberals help themselves from doing that, though? Doubt it.
All in all though, this isn't even all that interesting.
It should be an opportunity, however, for liberals in the USA to get their shit together. With Trump going to war with the neo-liberal deep state, there should be openings in the political parties for true-blue old-school-style liberals to attack and exploit, and get their own agenda through. If a true-blue liberal doesn't win the next Democratic presidential primary, then liberals will have failed again.
Old-school liberals don't need to join hands with Trump, but they can use him. Use him to attack and destroy as much of the neo-liberal government as possible. Create holes in the Democratic Party, and get their own people in.
This should be a time of change and upheaval. All eras come to end, eventually. And real liberals should be trying to help bury the neo-liberal era, even burying it before it's actually yet a corpse.
Neo-liberals are being brought back down to earth at long last, and it's a great opportunity to settle some old grudges.
In the long run, Trump isn't even important. He's going to flail about, and bluster, but ultimately, accomplish little to nothing of value. Oppose him on principle, of course, but liberals should really be turning their guns on the neo-liberals, and taking them down, one by one.
Troy, I would be hard pressed to name more than a handful of what you describe as true liberals in American politics. Nader, to be sure, and Kucinich but they're past prime. I think that leaves Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and maybe Gavin Newsom.
I'm not sure the old liberal/conservative paradigm retains much utility today. What's missing - across the political spectrum - is progressivism, the fairly well fleshed out principles and values that binds a people to their government. It is what people crave and yet almost never receive from their government in the neoliberal era.
I continue to be amazed Mound how anyone can possibly think that Trump is going to fight Neo-Liberalism. He is a personification of Neo-Liberalism. His all millionaire cabinet are all Neo-Liberals with a dash of rightwing, Christian, white-supremacy thrown in for good measure. His desire to kill the TPP and "renegotiate" NAFTA are actually because they are not Neo-Liberal or rightwing enough for him and his friends. And anyone who thinks that he is going to help average working Americans must believe in Unicorns. And yet some fools still think he cares about average people or even the US economy in general. It is just amazing.
Hey, Kirby. Every rightwing populist relies on a core of public support that believes he (are there any females?) stands for the average guy, Joe Lunchpail. There will always be some who will abandon critical thinking and logic because they need to believe.
I continue to be amazed Mound how anyone can possibly think that Trump is going to fight Neo-Liberalism.
Nope he will not. But, unlike the current crop of politicians he gave lip-service to it.
Trump seems to be acting on the more disturbing elements of his election promises instead of what could have brought about change.
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