Thank You, Mr. Trump, Part 2, by Robert Gore

This is Part 2 of Thank You, Mr. Trump. Link to Part 1.

Hillary Clinton; her friends, sycophants, and supporters in government, the media, and the general populace; the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the Republicans who have announced they will support her are desperately wishing that much of her past would just go away. During the 1990’s, the Clintons’ low-bar goal was to elude criminal justice for their many scandals. They never answered inquiries unless compelled, or proved their innocence. Instead, they besmirched the inquirers, floated conspiracy theories (conspiracy theorists are only kooks when they challenge the government, not when they’re the president and his wife), stonewalled investigations, threatened, blackmailed, hid or destroyed evidence, and fed exculpatory material to their friends in the media. Everybody then moved on, until the next scandal: lather, rinse, repeat.

The Clinton’s 1990s scandals never really went away, and they have added to them since then. Bill pals around with a pedophile billionaire who procures underage females for consensual and allegedly nonconsensual sex on his private plane and island. Hillary has Libya and the emails. Jointly they have the Clinton Foundation. The usual suspects have labored assiduously not to investigate these new scandals and keep the old ones down the memory hole. However, the stench persists, as stenches do, and many Americans have neither forgiven or forgotten. Trump pushed Clinton criminality to the forefront with one adjective: “crooked.” Only Clinton’s most blindly deluded supporters have called this one outrageous. Hillary is crooked, and Trump deserves credit for not avoiding the issue, as many Republican hopefuls did when they still had hopes.

Compare the lack of mainstream outrage at Hillary and Bill’s transgressions and crimes, stretching back decades, to the hypocritical, hyperventilating, hysterical, and endlessly recycled outrage over anything Trump. Turning mountains into molehills and vice versa, the mainstream media, politicians, and commentators’ only real outrage is reserved for those, including Trump, who point out the obvious bias. Their over-the-top broadsides against Trump have, like the violence against his supporters, backfired spectacularly and confirmed his charges.

The latest contretemps concerns a judge whom Trump has accused of prejudice against him because of his Mexican heritage. Heaven forbid anybody impugn a judicial system that has twisted itself into tortured, illogical pretzels to find Obamacare constitutional! Some of the same people who swear the judge in question wouldn’t let his ethnicity affect his rulings—notwithstanding “understandable” Latino outrage at Trump—also swear that white judges’ “whiteness” and heritage of privilege renders them prejudiced per se. They can’t have it both ways—another backfire.

If Trump is elected and he’s able to implement policies implied by some of his criticisms of US foreign and military policies, his visage may get chiseled into Mount Rushmore. Back in December 2014, the only criticisms the anointed candidates had about those policies were that the US had not intervened enough, and where it had intervened, it had not dropped enough bombs or killed enough people. The operative word was “tougher”: everybody, including Clinton, was going to be tougher than the current inhabitant of the White House.

Then, crazy Donald reminded us that he had been against the 2003 Iraq war, didn’t see why the US had to be in Syria, didn’t see why our allies couldn’t pick up more of the tab for their own defense, and that he would negotiate, maybe do some deals, with the leader of the country with the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal. He hasn’t likened that leader to Hitler or equated his own manhood with killing terrorists, drone strikes, or ordering other people’s children into war.

Trump understands that you can do quite well in business with nowhere near 100 percent market share, and trying to attain such dominance is often ruinous. He has questioned whether the US can or should maintain unipolar dominance, the geopolitical equivalent of 100 percent market share. Even during its supposed heyday at the end of World War II and through the Cold War, US power was not absolute. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by the USSR, China, and lesser powers, the US’s string of inconclusive or losing military engagements since World War II, and the rebuilding of European and Asian economies devastated by that war chipped away at US dominance. The government refused to recognize it then, and still doesn’t.

It’s hard enough to maintain a confederated empire when its leader has clear military, economic, and financial superiority. When it doesn’t, the effort is dangerously delusional. For the government—deep in hock and unable to realize its objectives in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and Ukraine, among others—to even contemplate confrontation and conflict with China and Russia would be farcical if the potential consequences weren’t so deadly.

The US sends its warships into the South China Sea, the Baltic and Black Seas, essentially Russian lakes; pushes NATO, which lost its raison d’être when the Soviet Union collapsed, to Russia’s western border; foments revolution in Ukraine, Napoleon and Hitlers’ welcome mat to Russia, and decries Russian and Chinese aggression. Russia and China are nuclear powers, and even if the US had a nuclear first strike capability to wipe them both out, which it probably does not, the ensuing fallout and nuclear winter would make the global warming we’re all supposed to be worrying about irrelevant. If the US does not have first strike capability, or Russia and China, singly or jointly, launched the first strike against the US, the nuclear devastation would wipe out US cities and infrastructure, rendering vast regions, perhaps the entire country, uninhabitable.

It is commonplace to ascribe the darkest motivations to your enemies, and credit yourself with the best of intentions, but based on their respective actions—not conjectures and hypotheticals about designs to rule the world—Russia and China seek control of their spheres of influence consistent with notions of multipolarity, while the US seeks unipolarity and Russian and Chinese submission. All indications are that Russia and China will not submit. Nor will the US back away from unipolarity. Certainly Hillary Clinton will not.

The US government’s misbegotten drive for unipolarity is the most important issue Trump has raised. Humanity’s survival may be at stake. Call it the military-intelligence-industrial-media-complex, the powers that be, or the Deep State, if Trump follows through on his rhetoric he will be fighting the most lucrative and powerful cabal on the planet, a far greater threat to American liberties and lives than that which President Eisenhower warned of in 1961. Simply raising the issues he has accounts for the lion’s share of the fang-baring hostility towards him, especially from members of his own party. If his only accomplishment is to splinter the cabal “into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds,” as President Kennedy reportedly wanted to do with the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Trump will have earned his place on Mount Rushmore.

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