Trump is spearheading a global movement against status quo governance. From Patrick Lawrence at unz.com:
President Putin with Trump (2019) (by Presidential Press and Information Office (Михаил Метцель, ТАСС) | Wikimedia Commons
This is the second of two essays considering President Trump’s unfolding offensive against the institutions and agencies comprising the deep state — the permanent state or the invisible government, as it is also commonly known. The first in this series is here.
Trump’s telephone conversation with the Russian president, which he disclosed at noon Wednesday, Feb. 12, lasted 90 minutes. Trump was quick to note that the exchange marked the start of negotiations to bring the Biden regime’s proxy war in Ukraine, three years running as of Feb. 24, to an end. But there was much more to the conversation, as Trump and the Kremlin described it. Here is how Trump cast the call on his Truth Social platform:
I just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. We discussed Ukraine, the Middle East, Energy, Artificial Intelligence, the power of the Dollar, and various other subjects. We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II, remembering that Russia lost tens of millions of people, and we, likewise, lost so many! We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together. But first, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine. President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, “COMMON SENSE….”
Since the telephone call, of course, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump officials have met in Riyadh with Russian counterparts, effectively serving as sherpas in advance of a Trump–Putin summit at some point this spring, if all goes to plan. I read this as a preliminary but important consolidation of Trump’s demarche: The more progress, the better the president is protected from deep state subversions. Trump’s swiftly advancing demarche in relations with Russia, we ought to note, requires that we cast his campaign against the deep state in a broader context. Sunday’s elections in Germany are the most immediate case in point. Exit polls available at writing indicate that, as long and widely expected, the Christian Democratic Union under the leadership of Friedrich Merz, a committed Europeanist, will form the next government.
But Merz will not form it alone. The CDU and the Christian Social Union, its conservative cousin with its strongest base in Bavaria, appear to have commanded a combined 29% of the vote. To understand this likely result, we have to put it against the 19% to 20% — again, according to the polls — that goes to Alternativ für Deutschland, the party of conservative populists that stands against precisely the neoliberal ideology Trump and his people are attacking at home. The CDU, like the Social Democrats (who lost big Sunday) and other mainstream parties, has vowed never to invite AfD — now Germany’s No. 2 party — into a coalition government. This means the CDU will either have to relent on this commitment — unlikely at the moment — or German politics are about to drift, messily enough, further in the post-democratic direction. Either way, the political representatives of Germany’s version of the deep state will remain under siege. “We have won it,” Merz declared in Berlin Sunday evening. Not quite, I would say. Not really. Not at all, actually.
