Does the person who wrote the op-ed, titled “I am part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” denouncing the president and claiming they are saving the country from Trump’s worse instinct worthy of praise? Absolutely not and here is why.
I dissected the op-ed in my blog post titled “A mole in the White House came out to the New Your Times“. Republicans from day one knew that President Trump was a clear and present danger. The op-ed is just a false attempt of atonement.
But the entire Republican Party Establishment and its supporting organizations are complicit. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) statement while truthful tells a remarkable story.
“I am not a fan of anonymous op-eds, but I don’t think those of us who have worked closely with people in the White House are surprised by the content,” Corker, a Republican who shares long-running beef with Trump, said in a statement Thursday.
Later that afternoon, amid the search within the White House for the anonymous op-ed author, Corker told CNN he believed any number of staffers could have written it.
“I think the biggest issue they’re going to have is figuring out who wouldn’t have written a letter like that,” Corker said.
Corker is fessing up to the open secret that everyone knows the White House is a joke. Most importantly they allowed it to continue without hearings or oversight for one and only one reason. While Trump distracts us all, they loot the country with tax cuts, deregulations, and unfair laws. The op-ed said as much.
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic. Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more. But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims. Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier. The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.
In effect they are admitting the country is run by unelected subjects of the President who do not get their marching orders from him, an erratic, flip-flopping, anti-democratic president.
Journalist Juan Cole’s article “Trump’s Enablers boast of Saving Nation but Reveal they’re Looting the Nation,” says it best.
That quote tells you everything you have to know. This author supported the tax scam passed by the GOP last February, which cut government services for most people and gave the super wealthy a huge and wholly undeserved tax cut. The author supports “deregulation” of a sort that has gutted the environmental regulations that had reduced poisons in our air, soil and water. This regime is literally trying to poison babies. This guy thinks that is great.
Trump raised the US war budget to $700 bn. even though the US has no peer enemy. We spend as much on our military as the next 14 countries combined. All together, the US probably spends $1 trillion a year on military-related expenses. Military spending creates few jobs, and about half of that money is given out to private contracting firms, so that it is welfare for the rich. The money could have gone to student debt relief or rebuilding Puerto Rico. This guy thinks that the bloated military budget is an accomplishment.
The conclusion is that the more corrupt sections of the ruling US business classes are perfectly willing to use Trump to achieve their Libertarian paradise of no taxes on the rich and their praetorian paradise of a military potlatch. (The dictionary defines it this way: “(among North American Indian peoples of the northwest coast) an opulent ceremonial feast at which possessions are given away or destroyed to display wealth or enhance prestige.”)
While they are taking steps to reinforce inequality, harm our health and increase instability, they are mildly worried about the erratic behavior of the big orange man who brought them to Washington. They are managing and manipulating the idiot president and achieving their fondest goals of looting the country.
More than ever, the November elections continue to take on new meaning. The looting is in full vogue. Reversing will be difficult, but we must start on November 6th, 2018.