If he could, President Donald Trump might roll up his sleeves and single-handedly manage U.S. foreign and military policy. He would be the only man in the room for the coming negotiations with Russia and NATO. He would personally select targets for lethal strikes in places like Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. He might even spend his afternoons piloting each of the unmanned drones and choosing the right moment to pull the trigger.
But he can’t. It’s too much work for one man. Instead, he’ll likely pursue his overseas agenda through the administrative instrument over which the White House has the most direct control — the National Security Council, or NSC, and the national security adviser.
John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, emphasized the raw power of the NSC in a four-page staffing memo that he sent to President-elect Obama in 2008. “The White House really has two chiefs of staff,” Podesta wrote: the actual chief of staff and the national security adviser, who runs the NSC on the president’s behalf. The memo was among the hacked Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks in the run-up to the election.
Evidence of the NSC’s vast, opaque powers runs through postwar presidential history. As President Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger cemented his access to the Oval Office and outmaneuvered his rival, Secretary of State William Rogers, eventually taking Rogers’s job. Under President George W. Bush, the National Security Council was discussing the possibility of invading Iraq as early as July 2001, at the suggestion of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
It seems unlikely that a President Trump would invest anyone with the kind of trust held by Kissinger or Rumsfeld. Trump burned through a number of high-level campaign staff during the months leading up to the election, and the only consistent members of his inner circle are his immediate family.
One worry among the national security community is that Trump may wind up being, in effect, his own national security adviser.
Paul B. Stares, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies the NSC, characterized Trump as “someone who likes to be in total control, believes he knows more than his subordinates, encourages competition and tension among them.” In an email, Stares said these qualities are “antithetical to all the virtues we look for at the pinnacle of the national security decision-making process. So the question is: Is he going to change? Or are we going to see a very different NSC process?”
“The president is the key person,” said David Rothkopf, the CEO and editor of Foreign Policy and the author of a book on the history of the NSC. “Trump has no experience dealing with the various agencies in question, nor with the White House apparatus. He has essentially no experience with anybody in the national security community. There’s going to be a kind of battle — Who’s going to teach him national security? Who’s going to show him the right way to run a meeting, how to delegate, how to use the NSC, how to use the agencies? If his professor is Trump himself, who doesn’t know anything, that’s one thing. If it’s [former Defense Intelligence Agency director and Trump adviser] Michael Flynn, a deranged maniac, that’s something else.”
Formally known as the “assistant to the president for national security affairs,” the national security adviser heads up the NSC, one of the federal government’s most powerful and least transparent entities. The council was created in 1947 as part of the far-reaching National Security Act. Its original purpose was to coordinate the Department of State and the Department of Defense in their efforts to husband American power around the globe. Today, the NSC has evolved into the federal government’s foreign policy spinal cord, the most direct bureaucratic means presidents can impress their will directly onto the rest of the government, with a minimum of external oversight. “If it [the NSC] doesn’t work, it is like congestive heart failure,” said David C. Miller Jr., a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, in a congressional hearing this September. He called the national security adviser “the most important presidential appointment not subject to Senate confirmation.”
The hub of the NSC is the NSC Principals Committee, a kind of super cabinet. Its nerve center is the Situation Room in the West Wing basement. Twelve of the 13 people depicted in the famous White House photo taken in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden operation were connected to the NSC. By law, the Principals Committee includes the president, vice president, and secretaries of defense, state, and, since 2007, energy. The committee’s exact composition varies from meeting to meeting, to be decided by the president and senior White House staff. Within the broad strokes of the original 1947 law, as updated over the years and then amended by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, NSC quite literally makes its own rules, and those rules are set by the president.
President George W. Bush leads his National Security Council in the Situation Room of the White House on Oct. 12, 2001, in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Eric Draper/White House/Getty Images
A few weeks after inauguration, the new NSC will issue its first memo, signed by President Trump. The memo will define who is part of the Principals Committee and the Deputies Committee, which is made up of the principals’ seconds-in-command. Even the names of the memos bear the fingerprints of the president. For Kennedy, they were “National Security Action Memorandums.” For Reagan, they were “National Security Decision Directives.” Obama called them “Presidential Policy Directives.” According to the Federation of American Scientists, Obama has issued 43 of them over eight years. Twenty-two have been made public in whole or part; the other 21 remain secret.
The NSC is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, although Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., proposed a bill that would have changed that earlier this year. It has a tiny stub of a website and a small budget: $12.6 million under the Executive Office of the President. It has no headquarters of its own, operating out of the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building.
Unlike the secretaries of defense and state, the director of the CIA, and many other heads of key agencies, the national security adviser and NSC senior staff are not subject to Senate confirmation. During Obama’s term, Capitol Hill became more partisan, which led to even more power concentrating within the NSC, with the president’s most trusted allies obtaining proximity and influence inside the White House. Meanwhile, more experienced figures, who may not have been the president’s first choices but could survive Senate confirmation, were shipped off to the agencies.
After controversy over John O. Brennan’s role in the Bush-era torture program forced him to withdraw his name from consideration for CIA director in 2008, he obtained arguably more influence inside the White House as assistant to the president for homeland security, a role that expanded under Obama to be a dual-hatted NSC role that also served as a deputy to the national security adviser and a full member of the Principals Committee. Working in a basement office a few steps away from the Oval Office, Brennan wound up with better access to the president than Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, and his director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, both of whom departed during the administration’s second year. “There have been some complaints that Mr. Brennan has exercised an influence on intelligence activities that more properly belongs to the director of national intelligence,” noted a 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service.
National Security Adviser Susan Rice listens to Indonesian President Joko Widodo and President Barack Obama speak to the press following talks at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 26, 2015.
Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Another would-be cabinet member who wound up on the Principals Committee is Susan Rice, who in 2012 withdrew her name from consideration for secretary of state in the midst of criticism from Congress over her comments on the Benghazi attacks. John Kerry, someone with more experience but weaker White House ties than Rice, was confirmed as Obama’s second secretary of state; Obama appointed Rice to be his third national security adviser.
The NSC exercises so much control that it can become a kind of scapegoat for an administration’s worst mistakes. Under Reagan, NSC had an in-house “special activities” or covert action wing, which organized much of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages fiasco. When the plot unraveled, a special prosecutor came down hardest on the NSC, particularly National Security Adviser John Poindexter and one of his staffers, Oliver North.
In the case of Obama’s NSC, many of the administration’s Senate-confirmed heavyweights, including members of the Principals Committee, have complained about being shut out. For all his accomplishments, Obama struggled to forge deep relationships with old Washington hands — Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden being the exceptions. In his memoir, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta wrote that his speeches and interview requests had to be cleared by the White House, and that the administration’s senior staff exerted tight control over his interactions with Congress. Robert Gates, Obama’s first secretary of defense, called it “micromanagement.”
Under previous administrations, the NSC’s third-tier “interagency” or “directorate” committees had two chairs: one from NSC staff, and one from outside agencies. Under Obama, most of the committees eliminated the outside co-chair. “This may be one reason why there was criticism of the Obama administration centralizing control of the process,” says Stares. “They might have done that to maintain control and discipline, but it does come at a cost. You can be perceived as micromanaging, or distrustful.”
In an email, Ned Price, an NSC spokesperson, wrote that the council draws most of its in-house staff from agencies like State and Defense. “Almost 90 percent are career public servants spending one to two years on the NSC staff before returning to their home agency.” Price put the number of NSC “policy and leadership staff” at less than 200. Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., who chairs the House Foreign Relations Committee and recently held hearings on NSC reform, has claimed that the total staff level is above 400.
Stares said that the council’s increasingly broad responsibilities carry a risk of being overly focused on the short-term. “We’ve got to get away with being fixated on structure and process and numbers and instead think about what we want the NSC to do well,” he said. “The common lament seems to be that the NSC is in an endless struggle to manage day-to-day events. There isn’t time to pause, think, and look at the big picture.”
Obama will be leaving the NSC with an unusually flat structure. Beneath the principals and deputies committees are more than 20 “directorates” organized around regions and issues. There was speculation that Hillary Clinton’s NSC might take a more hierarchical form, with a thicker layer of presidential assistants and White House “czars” — presidentially appointed mid-level staffers — mediating between the directorates and the Deputies Committee.
Today, the Republican Party holds a thin 54-46 majority in the Senate. If the Senate proves hostile to Trump’s cabinet choices, it is likely that some of his innermost circle will wind up on the NSC, as the president can choose to populate the Principals Committee with his chief of staff, and other non-confirmed appointees. Shortly after the beginning of Obama’s first term, the Principals Committee had 13 full members. Two of those members were neither elected nor subject to Senate confirmation. Another two members of his senior White House staff were “invited to attend every NSC meeting.”
Trump could respond to congressional concerns about growth in the NSC by cutting its staff numbers, but Price, the spokesperson, said that recent presidents have not exercised total control over NSC staff, at least not at the lower levels. “The vast majority of those staffers are career public servants,” he wrote in an email, “who, as a general matter, do not turn over with a change of administration.”
So far, little is known about Trump’s plans for the NSC’s organization and leadership. He may not have any. It bears watching.
Top photo: Actors on the set of “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” on March 14, 1963.
Guliani has zero intl. diplomatic experience. But the media is way more interested in the gossip and hype. Drain the swamp! Knife fights! Infighting! What’s next?
Rudy for SOS? There’s a fucking war waiting to happen.
No matter what anyone says Donald Trump will do what he has always done: Speak his mind. Straight from the hip.
If the Department of Defense can’t find $6.5 Trillion Dollars, what are the chances President TRUMP can….?
PBS Report on Accounting Fraud:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/accounting-fraud-is-business-as-usual-at-the-pentagon/
FreeThoughtProject citing $6.5Trillion missing per Inspector General:
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/audit-reveals-pentagon-6-5-trillion/
But this is folly to an extent. The elite democrats that created a Trump Presidency are none other than Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama themselves. Aside from policies that have continued to harm the well being of the middle class since the 90s (NAFTA & Repeal of Glass Steagall – thank you Clinton Team. And yes, I acknowledge that those were Republican initiatives, but both Bill & Hillary fought to get bi-partisan support for them).
Now fast forward to 2008. Obama comes to power with the worst mess on his hands from the Uni-Party overlords since the Great Depression. Instead of bailing out “PEOPLE” which would have the immediate effect of shoring up banks, he bails out banks, with the hope that they will inject liquidity in the market – didn’t happen.
Now, take Obama Care – this great intention paved a few more miles to hell. People have experienced the fastest increases in history on the price of their insurance premiums. This was tantamount to salt in the wounds of the middle class still reeling from 2008’s financial crisis.
And finally, Obama can thank the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft regime for the worst trampling of the constitution since ….EVER ! Thanks to the Patriot Act. And all this did was set Obama up for the largest expansion of spy power EVER. Which, I’d be ok with, if it were limited to foreign groups. However, as we all know, it is not. And with that power comes HUBRIS. And with that hubris, came a deep desire to maintain power. And so in 2012, the Obama Administration set the stage for this years election by “modernizing” the Smith Mundt Act which had previously outlawed the use of propaganda in the US on US citizens. This modernization essentially legalized the use of propaganda in the US. Have trouble believing that – here’s an article from SFGATE.com (not exactly a neurotically charged conservative publication worried about every possible infringement of the constitution):
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/US-Government-Funded-Domestic-Propaganda-Has-4668001.php
And so now come 2016, with incredible hubris and power and the ability to manipulate en masse, comes an election that the entrenched players know is a long shot because they know how much they have bled the country. They throw everything that they can into the game. But people are disgusted and work tirelessly to oust them…thankfully, it happened. The only people that the Democrats can assign blame to are themselves and their uniparty counterparts in the Republican party that helped them along the way.
NNSA, not NSC. NNSA is the nuclear weapons offshoot from the Department of Energy, DOE; which was itself previously known as the Atomic Energy Commission, AEC, itself previously known as the Manhattan Project; which began as a nuclear weapons production program involving Hanford WA; Berkeley CA; Chicago IL; Los Alamos NM, and Oak Ridge, TN. The primary beneficiary of the $1 Trillion “Nuclear Weapons Modernization Program”. You see, we need to have the nuclear weapons under control of the Apple Cloud for maximum efficiency; those floppy disks are too antiquted, not easy enough to hack. Stuxnet-vulnerable USB sticks would be SO much better. Just ask Peter Thiel, Trump Technology Advisor. Do I see some fat Palantir contracts in the future? Well, regardless, corporate government hog contracts are not anything new.
In any case, NNSA. That’s where you’ll find your Dr. Strangeloves these days. No big deal. Perhaps we can trade Dr. Strangelove to the Russians in exchange for Dr. Zhivago?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15YgdrhrCM8
How much money is being wasted on activities outside of the US proper? People world wide don’t appreciate our ways of doing things in their yard. I hope Trump shuts down everything except the military installations in place prior to 9/11 to focus on the current disaster called domestic policies. Trump would clearly see the money we spent on killing foreigners is more than enough to provide healthcare for every person in the US. For the first time our government would actually have a material affect on our lives in the positive. Our relationships with foreign governments would improve and the relationships with every US citizen would improve. I should be a consultant!
A lot of those pre-9/11 bases are places we don’t need, like Germany or the UK. Congress passed a resolution refusing to close domestic bases until we closed unneeded foreign ones. Closing the bases would save us billions.
How many votes did Jill Stein get (besides mine)?
Rand Paul got booed by the GOP audiences, as did Gary Johnson, & Ron Paul did before him. Apparently, your sensible suggestion is not what people want, or at least aren’t willing to vote for. :(
All these people entering the White House know nothing about the vast majority of the things they now have power over, and some, like Bill Clinton, don’t seemed to have given one thought to doing any of it anyway. Bill was like “National what? I’m off for a blow job in the broom cupboard”
What really are the National Security issues of the USA that aren’t being created by the US itself? Neither China nor Russia are the aggressors in any of the current tensions – they are US-created and thus NSC-created. Terrorism? Well, who really knows what is going on there, but is it really a mammoth issue? There is already a vast machine put in place against “them”, whoever they are, and it is already established that the USA – ergo the NSC – are intimately involved in most of it. The biggest danger is not if the terrorists up the ante, but if a major state such as Saudi Arabia are blamed for it all. Then there is Iran. Iran are not a direct threat to US security, but the US are a direct threat to them. North Korea? Are they again really a threat? Regionally to some degree, but again it depends on the interfering of the US in the region, rather than North Korea itself. If the US withdrew there is a possibility of a civil war in the region, but there is also the chance for reconciliation.
The US’s strategy of “power projection” is really just bullying and interfering, nothing more. They might go and try to bully the guy in The Philippines or attack some other random poor soul. But in all likelihood under Clinton it would’ve been far worse – troops in Syria firing back at the Russians, then troops in Iran, then maybe WW3.
Trump telling the current batch of NSC “advisers” to shut up and do one might be the best thing for the world right now. And as a money-man, he probably won’t get a hard-on like Bush Sr did when the morning war brief headed his way, nor want to make sick jokes about drone killing his daughters suitors whilst he orders some more real ones like Obama did.
America is NOT the world’s policeman and should not use this excuse. No one is going to invade America. No one is even going to invade one of America’s close allies. No one could, it is strategically impossible.
But other countries may feel perfectly justified in defending their territories and wider economic and political interests and this is the main threat to peace, because the Americans seem determined to press on regardless.
America’s genuinely “national” security issues are not particularly great, but its activities overseas are, and they are also potential powder kegs for escalation and return fire.
And then there is the spying issue. This coupled with heavy-handed control of the domestic population and continued excessive corporate exploitation is the biggest threat to America’s “national” security.
Hatred of Trump will just cause widespread vicious bitching and whining by hypocritical Liberals who preach democracy then can’t accept it when it doesn’t deliver what they want. Just read any of the articles on here right now.
Call me naive. Call me a cunt – I call everyone else it. But I am far less worried about WW3 now than I was if Clinton had got into power.
My biggest fear for Trump’s presidency is not so much what Trump wants to do, it is what the people he has ousted force his hand to do, then blame him for. How will Saudi and Israel react to his appointment? How will the hawks in the military and the top men in the NSA? And what will the Democrats and dissenting GOP opponents do to undermine, disgrace, usurp, embarrass, and enrage him and how will he react?
Again, problems caused by America, not by the rest of us. These are the things that worry me the most.
Michael Flynn is a registered democrat.
If Trump really wants things to change
he could try to put Putin in charge of the NSC.
After all the democrats frothy bullcrap during the campaign,
it would make sense, but I don’t think Trump is capable of such
an un-“president-ed” move.
He’ll probably delegate the corruption like his predecessors.
Who could he select who’s more bloodthirsty than Hillary?
A few neocons, like Richard V. Cheney.
I have often thought of Hillary Clinton as
Dick Cheney in a dress. She and many democrats are Neocons
who use words to pretend that they aren’t.
Hillary is Cheney in a pantsuit.
Dare you to take the time to read this. Great insight, great dangers, but some optimism by a couple of them. Dare you to take the time to read this.
Richard Dawkins and Other Prominent Scientists React to Trump’s Win
What the election results mean for science, in gut responses from Scientific American ’s Board of Advisers
SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM|BY ANDREA GAWRYLEWSKI
Andrew Bacevich
Better to have one smart guy in charge, than a bunch of neocons.
Trump should handle it all, he can do it. No, I am not kidding.
Trump needs to NOT bring any old guard republicans or banksters to his cabinet.
Drain the swamp!
Yeah, hold your breath for no banksters or neocons, “…everything will be really pretty.”
Well, he should bring in Liz Cheney. David Addington. Of course, I don’t know whose behind the scenes like you do, but jeezuz, it’s going to be ugly.
On another note, Sarah Palin should definitely be Interior Sec’y.
This is a parlor game. I’ll get back to you after I’ve researched it more thoroughly. I would, though, think of the revolving door between the WH and the people sitting on the boards, if not on top of the chain of command, of the top defense contractors. That’s how they solidified the money flow to the Deep State. Great food for thought Mattathias Schwartz.
I fail to see why General Flynn is a “deranged maniac”. He’s among the few people who state that the FSA and their allies have strong ties to Islamists. I find the claims of a Russian threat from Generals like Phillip Breedlove and Trump’s main opponent to be more terrifying and deranged. (That said, Flynn did publish a book with neocon Michael Ledeen, which itself had some wild conspiracy theories about Russia.)
Ledeen is ALWAYS wrong. (Why he’s considered such an expert. ; ) )
That doesn’t lend much credibility to Flynn.
That said, how many Friedman/Ledeen Units before Ledeen is on the team? ; )
How rich. Obama now seeks to modernize our nuclear weapons while blocking votes in the UN to ban them. Obama used far-right Nazi groups in the Ukraine to overthrow their government two months before an election and reignite a cold war with Russia. Democrats have sought to stoke Russian hate to deflect from the racist rigging that the DNC was engaged in during the primary when they wanted to use Sanders’ Jewishness to degrade him.
On the other hand, Trump wants to negotiate with Putin. Yet the brain-dead liberals of the Intercept now imagine that he is the danger to nuclear war. No liberals – Obama has drastically increased the danger to nuclear war and he has always been in bed with the nuclear power industry. Liberal blind hate for Russia is the real danger to nuclear war. Most importantly, liberal inability to critique a Democratic president is a grave danger, period.
The election of Trump actually helped avoid a nuclear war with Russia, which Clinton was madly inviting.
Exactly! With her war-monger attitude and her obsession with a no-fly zone over Syria, Clinton would have posed a far bigger danger of nuclear war than Trump.
Trump will do as he’s told by the military-industrial complex, just like Obama.
This isn’t a prediction of Trump’s conduct, incidentally; it’s a statement of the deep state’s power over most if not all presidents. What Trump actually wants to do is anybody’s guess, but he will be constrained unless it’s what the duopolistic establishment desires.
it’s getting comical. Say anything to get elected then go to the whitehouse, get comfortable, then get brow beat and beat up and be told to F Off. They’ll say stuff like – yer outta here in a few years but we’ll still be around.
it isn’t the size of the USG that is a problem, it is the power.
I don’t believe Obama was brow beaten into undertaking the revolting and despicable polices he engaged in. He went in there with precisely those policies in mind, and hired precisely the cabinet needed to effect them. He was a monster from the get-go. He just happened to be a melanin-enhanced monster instead of the usual pasty variety.
Back in the day, Casey, Poindexter and North were the shadow government, working with Bush from the CIA as the “shadow government” while Reagan was, by some accounts, non compos mentis, and in any case, a mere script reader. To suggest that a mere carnival barker like Trump would be telling their successors what to do seems like the tail wagging the dog.
Democratic Party has no one to blame but itself for Donald Trump victory
Bernie Sanders would have won in a landslide
By Yvonne C. Claes
The headline says it all.
I and millions of other Berners repeatedly warned Democratic Party leadership that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate and they risked losing the White House to a buffoon reality star if they insisted on making her the nominee.
And we were proven right.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane. Here are the first two paragraphs of a March 18 column I wrote on Medium:
“Hillary Clinton will not win the general election if she is the Democratic nominee for President. Period. Full stop. Nothing more to say, folks.
I’m not going to couch this reality in excess verbiage. Clinton doesn’t stand a chance.”
And here we are eight months later with well-paid political pundits scratching their heads wondering how a failed businessman with a used car salesman mentality could possibly be the leader of the free world.
If this post has an “I told you so” tone to it, it’s meant to. The Democratic National Committee (DNC)?—?with a major assist from corporate media?—?screwed up, and now the rest of us will have to pay for it. During the primary cycle Bernie Sanders consistently led Donald Trump nationally by double digits, and Sanders himself said he was the candidate to beat.
But nevermind. Instead of heeding Sanders’ warning and red flags in the polling, Democratic leaders doubled down on their efforts to push through Clinton as the nominee. The DNC and the corporate media colluded to derail Bernie’s campaign, as WikiLeaks emails have proven.
And when Berners expressed their suspicions that this indeed was happening, many Clinton supporters and the Democratic establishment taunted us for being “sore losers” who needed to “get in line” behind Hillary. They also called us “conspiracy theorists” who wore tin foil hats and refused to accept reality.
But ask Clinton supporters if they bothered to read WikiLeaks, which shed light on their candidate’s corruption, and they respond with unfounded and unproven accusations that Russia was interfering with the election. Nevermind the veracity of the emails that WikiLeaks, which has a 10-year history of accuracy and journalistic accolades, released. They turned a deaf ear and told us we were crazy.
Crazy smart, I’d say.
I’m not just gloating here. I’m angry. For more than a year Bernicrats had to put up with David Brock’s Correct the Record trolls on social media, and insults from corporate sycophants and party insiders such as California Senator Barbara Boxer and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell,
However, a special mention must be reserved for the DNC’s evil twins, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile.
Those of us on Team Sanders were subjected to months of smug denials by Wasserman-Schultz, then DNC Chairwoman, that she showed preferential treatment toward Clinton. Wasserman-Schultz scheduled debates between the two candidates at such ludicrous times as six days before Christmas and the Sunday night of Martin Luther King weekend.
Wasserman-Schultz had to step down from her post after WikiLeaks showed she indeed tilted the scales in Clinton’s favor (the DNC by its own rules is supposed to remain neutral in primary contests). Clinton hired Wasserman-Schultz immediately afterward to head up her presidential campaign.
Brazile, a former commentator for CNN, stepped in as the DNC’s interim chairwoman and remains in that position despite WikiLeaks showing she fed the Clinton campaign questions before scheduled debates with Sanders.
What really gets me is that despite all these advantages?—?a media that championed her and consistently led with negative stories about her opponent (Trump) or no stories at all (Bernie), the Democratic establishment’s backing (Obama et al) and countless celebrity endorsements (take your pick)?—?Clinton still couldn’t pull it off.
As comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore said pre-election: A ham sandwich could beat Trump.
Let’s talk election fraud
No, I’m not eager for a Trump Presidency. Hardly. But I am content that election fraud and voter suppression did not triumph at the polls.
I traveled in July to the sweltering City of Brotherly Love to challenge an obviously rigged system that disenfranchised many voters during the primary cycle. I was disgusted, and then angry, about the party’s shenanigans that deprived so many of the right to vote.
Election Justice did a study showing how the Democratic primaries were rife with voting issues that the corporate media never reported:
1) Targeted voter suppression
2) Registration tampering
3) Illegal voter purges
4) Exit polling discrepancies
5) Evidence of voting machine tampering
6) The security (or lack thereof) of various voting machine types
Hopefully, these issues are fixed before the next presidential election, but I seriously doubt political leaders will do anything about them.
Besides election rigging, Democratic bigwigs treated Berners with contempt. I attended the Democratic National Convention to voice my concerns about a Hillary nomination. I was outside the convention center in Philadelphia marching in oppressive 100-degree heat and stifling humidity.
Inside the convention hall the DNC had installed white noise machines to drown out objections and protests by Bernie delegates. Television coverage did not show seats emptied by Sanders delegates who walked out in protest. Meanwhile, speakers stressed unity, unity, unity, which was bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
What a Trump victory means
I’m especially pissed because Trump’s victory will embolden the Republicans, who undoubtedly can’t wait to get their millionaire hands on social programs. Trump will enter the Oval Office controlling both houses of Congress and possibly appointing to the Supreme Court a handful of justices due to deaths and retirements. This should make every liberal and Progressive shudder.
If Trump gets that chance, the impact on the Supreme Court could be felt for decades.
With control of both houses at least until midterm elections two years from now when well over 400 seats will be up for grabs, Trump could?—?and has said he would?—?revoke Obamacare, which would leave 22 million Americans without medical coverage.
And the consequences for the planet are even worse. Trump denies that climate change is real, thereby assuring our precipitous fall into an environmental holocaust.
A word about Trump supporters
And before you parrot the patronizing media claim that Trump supporters are uneducated, I suggest you get your head out of your ass. Talk to Trump supporters. I have, and many are not racist hillbillies who swill moonshine “out yonder” while cleaning their shotguns.
Yes, bigotry does explain some of Trump’s appeal. And that’s pathetic. But to dismiss them all as bigoted Billy Bobs is simply elitist.
They are angry?—?which is really just inverted fear?—?because globalization and bad trade deals have sent their decent-paying jobs overseas, leaving them to work longer hours, struggle to pay healthcare costs, and wonder how they’ll be able to afford to send their kids to college. In other words, they are like millions of other Americans.
Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric resonated with them, just like Bernie’s populist talk resonated with millions of others.
The difference is that Trump often exploited that fear in a divisive way. Bernie, on the other hand, appealed to our better angels and called for us to unify to solve this country’s problems.
Oh, what could have been.
A clueless media
In the aftermath of Trump’s impressive victory over Clinton, the out-of-touch, uniformed talking heads on cable news have begun their post-mortem. And they resemble a bunch of first-year medical students at an inaugural autopsy: bewildered, nauseous, and vainly searching for the exit.
And they also are seeking someone to blame when all they really need is a mirror.
They are keen to cast aspersions on third-party voters, but that won’t work. The Green Party’s Jill Stein barely caused a blip in voting results, to my great disappointment. Libertarian Gary Johnson fared better, but he didn’t earn that magical 5 percent nationally that would have guaranteed the party federal funding going forward.
Johnson, if anything, siphoned off votes from Trump, not Clinton.
But what should it matter? I was told repeatedly by Clinton supporters that they didn’t need Berners to win the White House. And the DNC, through its dismissive treatment and outright mocking of Berniecrats, certainly didn’t inspire our loyalty.
I hope next time Democratic Party leaders aren’t so eager to discount the voices of half their base. The added tragedy is that many of these voters were younger, meaning Democrats turned off future voters who now may look elsewhere when supporting a candidate. #DemExit isn’t just a hashtag, afterall.
But judging by their lack of introspection and rush to cast blame, I seriously doubt Democratic leaders have learned a thing.
Just remember that when the next election comes around. Neither party, certainly not the Democrats, have demonstrated loyalty to us.
We owe them nothing.
I assume you’ve read Lofgren’s DEEP STATE. I strongly suggest you tackle THE DEVIL’S CHESSBOARD by Talbot if you haven’t already.
By all indication, the CIA/MIC/DOD/Wal lSt cabal use the CIA as their action committee and have for 25 years, at least. They choose not only who the nominees are, but our foreign policy. Their choice this time around was clearly Clinton, a decision made back in 2008 when they realized that Iraq would lose the election for ANY Republican (I’ll not go into Afghanistan, clearly another, worse, story.) To stay in power they had to propose an electable, controllable Democrat. Both Hillary and Obama were easily controllable, but Obama won out and Hillary was promised to be the follow-on President. She was given the Secretary post to shine up her credentials.
But, as usual, her wars were another piece of CIA disastrous misjudgement.
Then DS took control of the DNC and its mechanisms by getting Kaine to resign (with a VP promise) and putting Debbie Schultz in the robber’s seat. Now that that has proven to be another piece of bad judgment, do you see any route to: root DS out of power; put the positives you name into action without the negatives; form a really Progressive 3rd Party with a serious chance of electability?
So Clinton’s unpredictable, almost unimaginable loss to a Republican wild card renegade is a major defeat for Deep State.
That is what’s most important about this election result!
In “Dr. Strangelove”, the POTUS is a comedic straight man whose earnest diplomacy almost saves the world.
VERY GOOD ARTICLE, Mattathias …
Good ‘textbook’ for educating the masses on the inner workings of ‘the system’
miley cyrus?