Posted by Rude One
You know, I was halfway through writing a big piece that boiled down to
"What if Donald Trump was a raging liberal who promised to do all the
things I want? Would I be just ashamed to support him at this point?" I
stopped because it was all so, so fucking obvious.
But I really want to know from Trump voters: Does any of this embarrass you?
Any of the shit with Michael Flynn and Russia?
Any of the ridiculous things Trump says, like threatening to "destroy
the career" of a state legislator?
Any of the ludicrous comments and
promises he makes?
His complete lack of understanding of the way the
government actually functions?
His complete lack of knowledge about the
United States's relationships with other countries?
The disastrous and
unnecessary military mission in Yemen?
The fact that he is literally
doing the things he said he was going to do, like tearing families apart?
The demonstrable lies?
Does any of it make a dent with you?
I stopped, too, because I realized that it doesn't. And that reasoning
with most Trump voters is like running a flea circus. You can fool
people into thinking the fleas are doing tricks and acrobatics, but it's
just fleas being fleas. Whatever frame you put on it, they're gonna do
whatever the fuck they please.
Whenever we face the joke of a presidency we're forced to endure right
now, we're not merely facing the pumpkin-headed doom goblin at the top.
We're facing all of his supporters who are unmoved by any ethical lapse,
any law broken at this point, even the Constitution itself. So we
either have to write them off as a mad tribe that has taken over the
temple and hope they orgy themselves to death or we have to reason with
them, however terrible it might be to walk up to a group of convulsing
idiots and ask them to listen to your insights you got from watching
CNN.
The takeaway from the blog post was going to be that I'd like to think
that I'd be embarrassed. I'd like to think that it would matter even if
President Stumblefuck McBleedingheart was going to tax the wealthy more
and rein in Wall Street and get rid of money in politics and spend
shit-tons on infrastructure and alternate energies and make reversing
climate change a top priority and attack poverty with education and jobs
programs and on and on. If he was as dumbly evil and evilly dumb as
Trump, I'd like to think I'd be able to say, "Yeah, but, holy fuckballs,
man, can we just impeach him already?"
Shame is a powerful tool. We need to deploy it more and make Trump's ardent supporters feel like outcasts for denying reality.
As
the Guardian points out, this has an important and likely not
accidental effect: it leaves the State Department entirely unstaffed
during these critical first weeks, when orders like the Muslim ban
(which they would normally resist) are coming down.
The
article points out another point worth highlighting: “In the past, the
state department has been asked to set up early foreign contacts for an
incoming administration. This time however it has been bypassed, and
Trump’s immediate circle of Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, son-in-law
Jared Kushner and Reince Priebus are making their own calls.”
(5) On Inauguration Day, Trump apparently filed his candidacy
for 2020. Beyond being unusual, this opens up the ability for him to
start accepting “campaign contributions” right away. Given that a
sizable fraction of the campaign funds from the previous cycle were paid
directly to the Trump organization in exchange for building leases,
etc., at inflated rates, you can assume that those campaign coffers are a
mechanism by which US nationals can easily give cash bribes directly to
Trump. Non-US nationals can, of course, continue to use Trump’s hotels
and other businesses as a way to funnel money to him.
(6)
Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed.
On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft,
Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown.
This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the
most that can be said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for
it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the
government’s official bank), even though it’s highly unclear who, if
anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been
traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies.
Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier
(the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that
Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and
removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier
said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And
19.5% sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”
Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.
What does this all mean?
I
see a few key patterns here. First, the decision to first block, and
then allow, green card holders was meant to create chaos and pull out
opposition; they never intended to hold it for too long. It wouldn’t
surprise me if the goal is to create “resistance fatigue,” to get
Americans to the point where they’re more likely to say “Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys ever stop?” relatively quickly.
However, the conspicuous absence of provisions preventing them from executing any of the “next steps” I outlined yesterday,
such as bulk revocation of visas (including green cards) from nationals
of various countries, and then pursuing them using mechanisms being set
up for Latinos, highlights that this does not mean any sort of backing down on the part of the regime.
Note
also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made
it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny
all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct
contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the
DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to
follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday,
and the various links there, for details) Significant in today’s
updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a
role in the decision.
That
is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS
(and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other
branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all
of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean
nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts
are being ignored.
Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup d’état against the United States. It gave them useful information.
