IGNORAMUS-IN-CHIEF?

 

Early this week I attended an event where Jerrold Nadler, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, overviewed what is happening in Washington, including the impeachment hearings, which I will not boor you with, because they are covered endlessly on all the cable channels. However, in the course of his remarks he compared Trump to Nixon, saying that, while they were both very bad people with   no scruples,  Nixon, at least, was intelligent and understood the consequences of his actions, whereas  Trump acts on his own whims, does not read anything and neither understands how the government works nor the consequences of the decisions he makes.  He said he calls Trump “The Ignoramus In Chief”.

While thinking about Trump as Ignoramus In Chief is amusing, it is also very dangerous. It obscures the fact that this incompetent, malignantly narcissistic and vile person seems not only to be the Useful Idiot of Vladimir Putin internationally, but also the Useful Idiot of the multi-billionaire libertarians and the extreme right wing republicans, led by Charles Koch – and that the policies that so many of us decry are actually their agendas.

At some time in the future – probably after many of us are long gone – historians will uncover the actual hold that Putin has over Trump. However, the fact that he has such a hold seems clear. Trump’s refusal to say anything negative about Putin, their secret meetings with no one else present, Trump’s actions in Syria and Turkey, etc, all point in that direction.

But Ukraine is where Putin’s reason for working for Trump’s election is the most obvious. To put this in perspective, although the right wing would like us to believe that “Ukraine is a strategically irrelevant patch of earth long ago ruined by the old Soviet Union” – as David Stockman, (Reagan’s discredited right-wing director of the Office of Management and Budget) recently wrote – Ukraine is actually almost twice as big in square miles as Germany, with a population close to double that of Australia.

The Russian economy is totally dependent for its survival on supplying its vast resources of oil and natural gas not only to Ukraine – a major customer – but also  through  the pipelines for these to the rest of the world, which run through – and thus are controlled by – Ukraine. That is why Putin sees control over Ukraine as vital. It also explains his hatred for Hillary Clinton. He was convinced that she engineered the 2014 uprising in which the  pro–Russian Ukrainian President Yanukovych  was overthrown and replaced by pro-western President Poroshenko. Putin was sure that Hillary’s election in 2016 would result in Ukraine joining NATO, resulting in his losing control of the customers for Russia’s fossil fuel supply. That is why he made such extensive – and ultimately successful – efforts to engineer Hillary’s defeat and Trump’s election. It is also why Putin is continuing to try to get Trump reelected in 2020.

Trump is also obsessed with trying to prove that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that actually interfered in the 2016 election – and in favor of Hillary, no less. The theory was originally advanced by Putin and has been picked up by Trump and worked on for many months by Rudy Giuliani.  (The Biden aspect seem to have been added on later). It also casts light on why Attorney General Barr has been circling the globe trying to dig up evidence to validate the theory. And  do not be fooled by the so-called evidence that Trump is strongly supporting Ukraine by supplying them with anti-tank Javelin missiles. First, the war in Ukraine is currently not being fought with tanks. Second, the agreement to supply the Javelins specifies that they can’t be used against the Russians.

Here at home, we seem to be suffering from the frog in the pot syndrome. The water temperature is now getting ever closer to the boiling point and it will soon be too late to jump out. Yesterday would have been almost unthinkable even two months ago . Roger Stone was found guilty on all seven counts for which he was charged – and it was only the third most important news item of the day! First was Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s gripping testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Then Trump tweeted denigrating her while she was in the midst of testifying (completely destroying the strategy of the republican committee members in the process). Trump’s issuance of a pardon to three military members convicted of war crimes, against the urging of the Pentagon, which in any other administration would have been headline news for several days, didn’t even make the list. It appeared below the fold in today’s New York Times. What is the betting that, when Trump pardons Roger Stone after his sentencing early next year, which I have reason to believe he will do, will not even be the major story that day?

In an Op-Ed In today’s New York Times,  Roger Cohen talks about how a life-long republican – a retired senior executive who now knows how bad Trump is – may still vote for him because he recently said “You have no other choice but to vote for me  … otherwise your 401k will go down the tubes”  – which  is factually untrue, because Trump is still riding the continuation of  the recovery of the economy under Obama. More importantly, it demonstrates how voters are prepared to believe that Trump is telling the truth this time, in spite of the 13,435 lies he has told while in office (as of a month ago). It also shows how we are beginning to accept as normal what Trump has already done to American values, the functioning of government and the norms of the presidency … that it is OK for us to even consider reelecting someone  who is observably unfit to be president – who has already moved quite far along the road towards destroying American democracy as well as America’s vital role as leader of the free world.

But this is where the plot thickens. It turns out that, in addition to Trump’s international actions being exactly in line with Putin’s objectives: his elimination of climate regulations; attempts to end Obamacare; tax cuts for the wealthy; immigration restrictions’ building the wall; dismantling of government departments; promotion of coal and fossil fuels’ appointment of cronies and lobbyists as cabinet members; and disregard of the law, are all in line with the objectives of the far right  and the Koch libertarians.

But none of this should be a surprise. When Trump says “I am the most transparent president ever” he is at least partially right . As I noted in my third Gerry Meandering posting, written in February 2017, Steve Bannon, at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), had announced the three elements of the Trump administration agenda, which were as follows:

 Deconstruction of the Administrative State – described simply as a way to eliminate over regulation, but with the true intention of eliminating the structure of government as a protector of the people.

US Sovereignty – described as seeing the world’s natural state as clashing civilizations, each having a fixed identity, with America’s identity being white and Christian

Opposition to Corporatist Global Media.- described as seeing the free press as being the enemy of the people.

(To read more about these, click on Home above and go to “Who Voted for Deconstruction?” dated February 28 2017.)

At the time, this agenda seemed to  be outlandish pie in the sky to most people, but guess what: it is all becoming a reality. Four more years of Trump will seal the deal. So is the Ignoramus in Chief a Useful Idiot? I don’t know, but somehow he has made Putin and Koch – and Steve Bannon – very happy.