Ukrainegate is the new Russiagate. The 'whistleblower complaint' is the new 'dirty dossier'. The 'former' MI6 spy Christopher Steele wrote the dossier. The current CIA spy Eric Ciaramella wrote the 'complaint':

Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Further, Ciaramella (pronounced char-a-MEL-ah) left his National Security Council posting in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

“He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” said a former NSC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Also, Ciaramella huddled for “guidance” with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, including former colleagues also held over from the Obama era whom Schiff’s office had recently recruited from the NSC. Schiff is the lead prosecutor in the impeachment inquiry.

And Ciaramella worked with a Democratic National Committee operative who dug up dirt on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, inviting her into the White House for meetings, former White House colleagues said. The operative, Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American who supported Hillary Clinton, led an effort to link the Republican campaign to the Russian government. “He knows her. He had her in the White House,” said one former co-worker, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

The whole impeachment show the Democrats launched is a major political mistake.

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The Democrats have chosen the wrong issue, Ukraine, where they themselves have a lot of ballast. The choice of a Trump phonecall with the Ukrainian president as the item to hang the impeachment on is especially dumb. Trump's call was less incriminating than Biden's pressure on the Ukrainian president to help his son's paymaster. It is also a mistake to let the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff run the impeachment process. Schiff already flip-flopped over requesting the 'whistleblower' to testify after it was reported that two members of his staff, who knew Ciaramella from working with him at the Obama National Security Council, had advised him.

The process will create a lot of collateral damage. It will hurt a number people involved in it, but it will not hurt Trump with his electorate. It will not end with impeachment. I believe, like Noam Chomsky, that it will, in the end, even help Trump:

"Is it politically wise? I frankly doubt it. I think it’ll turn out pretty much like the Mueller report, which, that I thought was also a political mistake. What’ll happen is probably the House will impeach, goes to the Senate. The Republican senators are utterly craven. They’re terrified of Trump’s voting base. So they’ll vote to turn down the impeachment request. Trump will come along, say I’m vindicated. Say it was the Deep State and the treacherous Dems trying to overturn the election. Oh, vote for me."

Trump can be beaten by good policies. Instead of offering any the Democrats try to defeat him with theater. But Trump is a much better showman than Schiff or any other Democrat. It almost looks as if they want Trump to win.

Since Donald Trump became president many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies. Instead of implementing Trump's idea and preferences they have tried to implement their own. Some have done so because they believed that it is the "right thing to do" while others have ignored Trump's wishes to play their own game.

A recent example can be found in a Washington Post Ukrainegate story:

Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said.
...
The efforts to poison Trump’s views toward Zelensky were anticipated by national security officials at the White House, officials said. But the voices of Putin and Orban took on added significance this year because of the departure or declining influence of those who had sought to blunt the influence of Putin and other authoritarian leaders over Trump.
...
American policy has for years been “built around containing malign Russian influence” in Eastern Europe, a U.S. official said. Trump’s apparent susceptibility to the arguments he hears from Putin and Orban is “an example of the president himself under malign influence — being steered by it.”

The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.

Trump's policies look chaotic. But one big reason for that is that some of his staff, like the 'U.S. official' above, are trying to subvert them. They have tried and still try to cage him in on nearly every issue. When Trump then wields his Twitter sword and cuts through the subversion by publicly restating his original policies the look from the outside is indeed chaotic. But it is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his pleasure" are there to implement them.

Instead they have tried (and try) to make their own ones:

White House and State Department officials had sought to block an Orban visit since the start of Trump’s presidency, concerned that it would legitimize a leader often ostracized in Europe. They also worried about Orban’s influence on the U.S. president.

“Basically, everyone agreed — no Orban meeting,” said a former White House official involved in internal discussions. “We were against it because [we] knew there was a good chance that Trump and Orban would bond and get along.”

The effort to keep distance between Trump and Orban began to fray earlier this year with the departures of senior officials and the emergence of new voices around the president. Among the most important was Mulvaney, who became acting chief of staff in January and was seen as sympathetic to Orban’s hard-right views and skepticism of European institutions.

One "senior official" who tried to sabotage the Orban visit was Fiona Hill who until recently served as the Russia analyst at the National Security Council.

One wonders if Ms. Hill ever read her job description. The people in the NSC do not get hired to implement their own policy preferences. The task of the National Security Council is to "advise and assist" the president and to "coordinate" his policies within the administration. That's it.

The same rules apply to the Pentagon and other agencies.

Aaron Stein points out that those aides who disregarding the declared policy of the president are responsible for the current chaotic retreat from Syria:

Trump has been clear about his intentions in Syria. As he told the world in April 2018, after years of fighting foreign wars, in his view it was time for the United States to withdraw from Syria, passing responsibility for the mission to hold territory taken from the Islamic State to regional states. I was listening, and wrote in War on the Rocks that the longer the president’s own staff continued to treat the world’s most powerful man like an infant, the more likely it became that he would simply order a hasty withdrawal. This chaotic U.S. exit from Syria was obviously coming, for anyone paying attention to the opinion of the man who matters most in the United States: the president.
...
For over a year, it was obvious Trump wanted to leave Syria and, as I wrote in April 2018, Trump “has made his preferences for U.S. policy in the Middle East clear” and it was time “for his national security staff to listen to him and to devise a sequential drawdown policy that fits with the spirit of the president’s demands, but takes deliberate and uncomfortable steps to protect U.S. interests.” This did not happen.

Rather than plan and begin to implement a coordinated withdrawal, the president’s appointed envoy for Syria and the Department of Defense worked to ensure Washington could stay, and ignored the reality that Trump would eventually order an American withdrawal. Such delusions have not served the United States and its friends well.

The lack of planning for the option the commander in chief had already decided on led to the current mess. The Pentagon practically sabotaged trump's announced policies by continuing to build up bases in Syria and by falsely telling the Kurds that the U.S. would stay. It should instead have planned and prepared for the announced retreat from the country.

One can clearly see that this current withdrawal was not prepared for, neither politically nor militarily, in any orderly way. Yesterday the Pentagon said it would pull the troops out of Syria but station them nearby in west Iraq. But no one had asked the Iraqi government what it though of that idea. The inevitable outcome is that Iraq now rejects it:

U.S. forces that crossed into Iraq as part of a pull-out from Syria do not have permission to stay and can only be there in transit, the Iraqi military said on Tuesday.
...
The Iraqi military statement contradicted the Pentagon’s announcement that all of the nearly 1,000 troops withdrawing from northern Syria are expected to move to western Iraq to continue the campaign against Islamic State militants and “to help defend Iraq”.

“All U.S. forces that withdrew from Syria received approval to enter the Kurdistan Region so that they may be transported outside Iraq. There is no permission granted for these forces to stay inside Iraq,” the Iraqi military said.

There was also the idea that some 200 soldiers would be left behind in Syria to deny the Syrian government access to its own oil fields in east Syria. Not only would this be obviously illegal but nobody seems to have given a thought on how the logistics for such remote unit could be sustained. The oil fields are geographically large and the 200 strong unit would have to be dispersed into tiny outposts within a hostile country and resupplied over unsecured roads. To defend them from surprise attacks the U.S. would need to put combat air patrols above them for every hour of each day.

One hopes that the Pentagon and State Department recognize that the high political and financial costs of such a deployment are not justified for making a minor political point that will not change the inevitable outcome of the war.

Trump ordered that all U.S. troops leave Syria. An illegal occupation of Syria's oil fields would keep the U.S. in Syria but in an clearly indefensible position. Whoever came up with or supported that idea needs to be fired.

Here is a sign that the Pentagon has finally recognized that its utter lack of planning for the implementation of Trump's decision to leave Syria resulted in a bad outcome. It is now trying to avoid being (again) be caught with its pants down with regards to Afghanistan:

The Pentagon recently began drawing up plans for an abrupt withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in case President Donald Trump surprises military leaders by ordering an immediate drawdown as he did in Syria, three current and former defense officials said.
...
Ending wars like the one in Afghanistan was one of Trump's chief campaign promises in 2016, and administration officials have privately expressed concern that as the 2020 election approaches, he'll be more likely to follow through with threats of troop withdrawal, as he did last week in Syria.

Trump has made clear to his advisers that he wants to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the 2020 election, NBC News reported in August.

Trump made his decision in August but the Pentagon is only now reacting to it. That is too slow.

Trump should have been and should be more rigorous with his staff. Those who sabotage his policies need to be fired early and often. It would make his polices look much less chaotic than they currently seem to be.

Donald Trump’s main campaign commitment to end the offensive Rumsfeld/Cebrowski military strategy and replace it with a policy of Jacksonian cooperation is met with strong internal US and external opposition from US allies. More than ever, the President appears alone, absolutely alone, in the face of the transatlantic political class.

It was all a foregone conclusion

As with his predecessor, Barack Obama, everything seemed to be a set up. Upon his election in 2009, Obama was hailed as the "first black president of the United States" and then proved unable to solve the problems of this community, leaving police violence against them to reach new heights. In the early days of his term, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize for his efforts "for a world without nuclear weapons"; a subject he immediately stopped addressing. Although his record is the exact opposite of his campaign promises, he is still popular around the world. It does not matter if jobs are relocated to China, Guantánamo continues, thousands of targeted killings are carried out, or Libya is destroyed.

Conversely, as soon as he was elected and even before the transfer of power in 2017, Donald Trump was presented as a manic-depressive narcissist, a weak and authoritarian personality, a crypto-fascist. As soon as he joined the White House, the press called for his physical murder and the Democratic Party accused him of being a Russian spy. It obtained that an investigation be opened against him and his team with a view to his dismissal. His chief advisor, General Michael Flynn, was forced to resign 24 days after his appointment and then arrested. When Donald Trump lost the mid-term (November 2018) elections to the House of Representatives, he was forced to negotiate with some of his opponents. He reached an agreement with the Pentagon, allowing certain military actions as long as they did not involve the country in a spiral, and in exchange obtained the closure of the Russian investigation. For eight months, he tried to force march to stop the annihilation of the Great Middle East and preparations for the destruction of the Caribbean Basin. He hoped to be able to announce the realization of peace at the United Nations General Assembly. Crash! The same day, the USIP (alter ego of the NED, but for the Department of Defense), submitted its report on Syria, advising to relaunch the war. And, again on the same day, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced the opening of impeachment proceedings against him, this time in connection with his fight with the Ukrainian authorities against the corruption of the Clinton clan.

It is therefore unlikely that Donald Trump will be able to carry out his program before the end of his mandate as the election campaign for his possible re-election begins. However, his supporters point out that he is never as good as when he is cornered.

Few media have explained Jacksonism, an ideology that no one has promoted since the Civil War. Almost all of them claimed for two years that Donald Trump was incoherent and unpredictable, before admitting that he acted according to a given worldview.

In any case, he has already managed to repatriate many offshore jobs and put an end to the massive support of the Departments of State and Defense for the jihadist armies, although there are still some ongoing programs.

No matter what Barack Obama and Donald Trump did as presidents, we will only remember how the media presented them on the day of their induction.

The role of the deep state

It is now clear that opposition to Donald Trump is not only constituted by the bulk of the American political class, but also by most foreign leaders of countries allied to the United States. This may seem strange to the latter, who would have everything to gain from its success. But that is not how politics works. One after the other, these leaders became convinced that no one could change US policy. The interest of their states in the face of the powerful USA was therefore not to sink with a Donald Trump isolated in his country, but to remain faithful to the destructive policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

It remains to be seen who among the tens of thousands of civil servants is pulling the strings and why they are opposed to Trump’s project. The "deep state" whose president cannot influence politics may only be a sociological phenomenon as it can represent structured interests. President Trump believed he had neutralized the opposition of the committees responsible for implementing the more or less secret treaties of the United States with its allies. He believed he had negotiated with the alternative government constituted as a preventive measure in the event of a nuclear war. He was obviously wrong.

The lessons of this story

Two lessons can be drawn from this history. First, all historians agree that George W. Bush did not really hold the presidency, but aligned himself with his entourage, first with his vice-president, Dick Cheney, and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. It is also clear that Barack Obama had very little power other than targeted assassinations. It now appears that Donald Trump is not in a position to change US policy. It must be said that, since 11 September 2001, the office of President of the United States has been almost exclusively in the media. And, if the president does not make policy, those who do so in the shadows are not elected.

Secondly, the United States’ allies do not obey the US President, but its deep state. They are the toys of an invisible actor. Only Russia and China are truly independent. Russia is the only one of these three states whose president is democratically elected and who exercises power on behalf of its people. China is a transparent system, but only members of the single party participate in its political life. The United States system is perfectly opaque.

For the past few days, our president — back at work after a busy August spent golfing and rage tweeting — has been making stuff up about Hurricane Dorian, the deadly storm currently battering the Southeast.

Late-night comedians have been roasting Donald Trump for his lies, including Seth Meyers, who aired a segment this week about Trump’s meteorological ignorance.

The segment is supposed to be funny, obviously. But as I watched Trump repeat the exact same phrase about various “Category 5” storms — sounding each time as if he was uttering this phrase for the first time — I felt a familiar sense of dread.

I remembered the same experience in dealing with my late mother, who struggled with cognitive decline for years before her death.

To be clear: nobody knows for sure if our sitting president is experiencing cognitive decline, which is why so many psychiatrists and mental health experts have called for him to be tested.

What I do know is that if you examine the Trump presidency through the lens of cognitive decline, some of its more bewildering aspects start to make a lot more sense.

Observers — particularly those troubled by the cruelty of his regime — tend to view Trump as lazy, incompetent, demagogic and mendacious. But it seems increasingly possible that the president’s behavior is also a function of his desperate attempts to mask serious cognitive struggles.

Anyone who has dealt with a friend or relative in cognitive decline can tell you that the person in question almost never admits to their struggles. Instead, they go to elaborate lengths to hide their impairment.

Maybe the reason our president is reported to spend up to nine hours per day engaged in “unstructured executive time” isn’t just because he’s lazy. Maybe he’s trying to duck parts of the job he can’t handle. Maybe the reason he doesn’t read anything — including briefings — is because he can’t absorb or retain complex concepts.

Maybe the reason his unscripted speech is so often incoherent and littered with vagaries (relying on placeholder words such as “thing” and “they”) is because he cannot summon the specific vocabulary he wants to use.

Maybe the reason Trump seeks out friendly media outlets and rallies is because he can only function in venues that feel safe and familiar, where no one will expose his struggles, where he can ramble and repeat the same slogans and stories and still receive applause.

In her own way, my own mother employed similar forms of subterfuge. She sought out familiar environments, and routines. As she struggled to track conversations, her responses became more confused and confusing. And the more cognitive function she lost, the more irritable and defensive she became.

...

AARON MATÉ: So we’ve just been through this two-year ordeal with Russiagate. It’s in a new phase now with Robert Mueller rejecting the outcome that so many were expecting, that there would be a Trump-Russia conspiracy. Your sense of how this whole thing has gone?

GABOR MATÉ: What’s interesting is that in the aftermath of the Mueller thunderbolt of no proof of collusion, there were articles about how people are disappointed about this finding.

Now, disappointment means that you’re expecting something and you wanted something to happen, and it didn’t happen. So that means that some people wanted Mueller to find evidence of collusion, which means that emotionally they were invested in it. It wasn’t just that they wanted to know the truth. They actually wanted the truth to look a certain way. And wherever we want the truth to look a certain way, there’s some reason that has to do with their own emotional needs and not just with the concern for reality.

And in politics in general, we think that people make decisions on intellectual grounds based on facts and beliefs. Very often, actually, people’s dynamics are driven by emotional forces that they’re not even aware of in themselves. And I, really, as I observed this whole Russiagate phenomenon from the beginning, it really seemed to me that there was a lot of emotionality in it that had little to do with the actual facts of the case.

There is no question that for a lot of people in this country, the election of Trump was a traumatic event. Now, when a trauma reaction happens, which is to say you’re hurt and you’re pained and you’re confused and you’re scared and you’re bewildered, there’s basically two things you can do about it. One is you can own that I’m pained and I’m hurt and I’m bewildered and I’m really scared. And then try and look at what happened to bring me to that situation.

Or you can instead of dealing with those emotions come up with some kind of explanation that makes me feel better about them. So that I’ve got this pain. I’ve got this bewilderment. I’ve got this fear. So what I’m looking at, what does it say about American society that a man like this could even run for office, let alone be elected?

What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?

You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.

So I really believe that really this Russiagate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.

I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.

AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?

GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.

What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak

AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.

GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.

And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.

Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.

...

Given that most people have already taken a position on the topic, it seems a bit late in the day to be pointing this out, but there is now clear evidence to suggest that the ‘Russia hacked our election’ claim is not only entirely false. But the people who made the claim in the first place – members of the US intelligence, political and corporate establishment (as well as other ideologues) – were and are themselves the creators of the only “Russian troll” social media accounts that have actually been shown to have done any ‘hacking’.

A December 19th 2018 NY Times article reveals that a group of “Democratic tech experts” decided to use “similarly deceptive tactics” (as those imputed to Russian trolls) in the Alabama Senate race contested by Roy Moore in December 2017. An internal report on what is called the ‘Alabama effort’, obtained by The Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.” The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. And how was the division sown?

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

⋮

What is clear at this point is that, as soon as Trump was elected president (if not before), a cabal of former and serving intelligence and government operatives, along with some ideologically-possessed dupes like Jonathon Morgan, decided to launch a campaign to undermine Trump’s election win by smearing him as Russia agent (the now infamous Clinton/Steele Dossier) and accusing Russia of ‘subverting American democracy’ directly by both hacking the DNC emails and running a social media disinformation campaign on social media.

Over the two years since Trump’s election, the campaign has been expanded to include efforts to do precisely what the Washington establishment falsely accuses Russian of doing: subverting American democracy. It seems reasonable at this point to suggest that this was the plan all along. After all, increasing control over the thoughts and beliefs of the US population has always been the ‘bread and butter’ of the US ‘deep state’.

At the end of last month, someone working on the ASD’s ‘Alabama project’ leaked a copy of the project’s after-action report. It details that ASD:

• Used a strategy to “radicalize Democrats, suppress persuadable Republicans and faction moderate Republicans”, the operation sought to “move 50,000 votes”. That’s more than double the winning margin of 22,819 votes of Roy Moore’s opponent, Doug Jones.
• Over a 5-month period, the operation used a carefully crafted strategy including deploying non-attributable memes “targeting white, African-American and women voters”
• Targeted 650,000 Alabama voters with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification and targeted advertising.
• Manufactured approximately 45,000 twitter followers, 350,000 retweets, 370,000 tweet favorites, 6,000 FB comments, 10,000 FB reactions, 300,000 Imgur upvotes and 10,000 Reddit upvotes.
• The report concludes: “In spite of its impact in the press and in voting outcomes, not a single story about our activities appeared in the any press outlet, including far-right internet conspiracy sites like infowars and Breitbart, prone to speculation about liberal interference in Republican politics.”

The project’s ‘Strategic Overview‘ states:

Our strategy was anchored on 3 goals:

• Enrage and energize Democrats using targeted messaging to likely voters in left-leaning districts across Alabama. Make sure they believe a victory in Alabama is possible.
• Suppress die-hard Republicans using relentless memes intended to provoke disgust and apathy coupled with targeted promotion of stories claiming a safe Republican victory. Either way, encourage them not to vote.
• Divide or persuade moderate Republicans by tackling Roy Moore’s extremism head on and promoting write-in candidates as principled alternative candidates

The report concludes with this:

Our sustained targeting of these likely voters had enormous effect on R[epublican] turnout in these countries. The R[epublican] depression in these countries was measurably higher compared to the rest of the State.

During the US mid-term elections, voters were asked to pronounce themselves collectively for the renewal of all members of the Federal House of Representatives and one third of the members of the Federal Senate. Besides that, at the local level, they nominated 36 governors with numerous other local responsibilities, and answered 55 referendums.

These elections are considered far less catalysing than the Presidential elections. US politologists take little notice of the voter turnout, since it is possible to participate only in certain elections and not others.

While since the end of the Cold War, the turnout for Presidential elections has been between 51 % and 61 % (with the exception of the vote for Bill Clinton’s second mandate, which interested only a minority of electors), the mid-term elections attract between 36 % and 41 % (with the exception of 2018, which apparently reached 49 %). So, from the point of view of citizen participation, the rules of the game are democratic – however, in practice they are anything but. If there were a quorum [1], the members of Congress elected would be few and far between. Representatives and Senators are usually chosen by less than 20 % of the population.

The researchers who analyse election results with a view to predicting the careers of the candidates do so through the lens of partisan differences. This time, the majority in the House of Representatives will be Democrat, and in the Senate, mostly Republican. This analysis makes it possible to anticipate how much elbow room the President will have when dealing with Congress. But in my opinion, it is of no use whatever in attempting to understand the evolution of US society.

During the Presidential campaign of 2016, an ex-Democrat, Donald Trump, presented himself as a candidate for the Republican Party. He represented a political current which had been absent from the US landscape since the resignation of Richard Nixon – the Jacksonians. A priori, he had no chance of obtaining the Republican investiture. Nonetheless, he eliminated his 17 rival candidates one by one, won the nomination, and then won the election in opposition to the opinion poll favourite, Hillary Clinton.


Andrew Jackson, whose portrait is shown on the 20 dollar bill, is the most controversial President of the United States.
The Jacksonians (from the name of President Andew Jackson, 1829-1837) are the defenders of popular democracy and individual freedom against both political and economic power. On the contrary, the dominant ideology of the time, both for the Democrat and the Republican Parties, was that of the Puritans - moral order and imperialism.

During this campaign, I observed that the powerful ascension of Donald Trump marked the resurgence of a fundamental conflict – on one side the descendants of the « Pilgrim Fathers » (the Puritans who founded the British colonies of America) and on the other, the descendants of the immigrants who fought for the independence of their country [2].

OK … here’s a question for you.

Let’s assume, strictly for the purposes of argument, that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, or at least a proto-Hitlerian fascist, like the neoliberal ruling classes and the corporate media have been saying he is. And let’s go ahead and also assume that he’s a treasonous Russian intelligence asset working in league with Vladimir Putin to destroy the very fabric of Western democracy, and that he isn’t even legitimately President, because he stole the election from Hillary Clinton with all those Russian bots and Facebook posts, and all that other stuff they’ve been accusing him of, which would make him the most monstrously evil villain in the history of monstrously evil villains, not to mention an existential threat to the nation, and Americans, and … well, the rest of humanity. And so, basically, what I want to know is, why don’t they just kill this guy?

Seriously, if Trump is really Hitler, and a traitor, working for a foreign enemy, like The New York Times and more or less every other organ of the corporate media has been telling us he is for the last two years, well, how about getting SEAL Team 6 to storm the White House in the dead of night and shoot him in the face or something? That seems to go over pretty well with people. Or what about a simple heart attack? Don’t our spooks have some kind of heart attack juice that they could slip into his Diet Coke, or smear onto the doorknob of the Oval Office?

Not that there’s really any need for subtlety. After all, if he’s actually a Russian operative, and a proto-Hitlerian genocidal dictator, there’s no reason to run a covert op or attempt to cover anything up. On the contrary, you would want do it openly, proudly, where all Americans could see it. Which is why I’d go with the DEVGRU option. They could waste him live on CNN. The bloodier the better. Just imagine the ratings! They could march into the Oval Office in that cool-looking kill squad body armor and beat him to death with a gold-plated golf club. It’s not like he’d put up much of a fight. What is he, like seventy years old or something?

Mister President,

The crimes of 11 September 2001 have never been judged in your country. I am writing to you as a French citizen, the first person to denounce the inconsistencies of the official version and to open the world to the debate and the search for the real perpetrators.

In a criminal court, as the jury, we have to determine whether the suspect presented to us is guilty or not, and eventually, to decide what punishment he should receive. When we suffered the events of 9/11, the Bush Junior administration told us that the guilty party was Al-Qaïda, and the punishment they should receive was the overthrow of those who had helped them – the Afghan Taliban, then the Iraqi régime of Saddam Hussein.

However, there is a weight of evidence which attests to the impossibility of this thesis. If we were members of a jury, we would have to declare objectively that the Taliban and the régime of Saddam Hussein were innocent of this crime. Of course, this alone would not enable us to name the real culprits, and we would thus be frustrated. But we could not conceive of condemning parties innocent of such a crime simply because we have not known how, or not been able, to find the guilty parties.

We all understood that certain senior personalities were lying when the Secretary of State for Justice and Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, revealed the names of the 19 presumed hijackers, because we already had in front of us the lists disclosed by the airline companies of all of the passengers embarked - lists on which none of the suspects were mentioned.

From there, we became suspicious of the « Continuity of Government », the instance tasked with taking over from the elected authorities if they should be killed during a nuclear confrontation. We advanced the hypothesis that these attacks masked a coup d’état, in conformity with Edward Luttwak’s method of maintaining the appearance of the Executive, but imposing a different policy.

Trump will tell his people to open up to Mueller . He’s already done this, but will do it again, loudly and publicly, citing the need to wrap up the Mueller investigation ASAP. That will be the target: stop the ‘inquisition’. Mueller has talked for 30 hours over the past nine months to White House lawyer Donald McGahn II, and at some point enough is enough.

As I cited a few days ago, Trump’s legal team has given Mueller until September 1 to talk to the president, and that’s it. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, Giuliani again said he doesn’t want to rush Trump into a perjury trap, but Mueller has had plenty time to have that talk. The investigation risks being used as a political tool in the midterms, and that can’t happen. 

Moreover, since US District Court Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that the FBI must release documents pertaining to what it knew about the ‘veracity’ of the Steele dossier, the most consequential reason to start the Special Counsel investigation in the first place may well soon be going going gone.

The FBI offered to pay Steele $50,000 for evidence that what was in his report was true, and they never paid that money. Ergo, it is reasonable to conclude that he never delivered the evidence. This points to huge potential problems for the FBI, the DNC -which financed the dossier-, Steele himself, and various other parties. How about James Comey?

Since the judge’s ruling was a direct effect of Trump declassifying the Nunes and Schiff memos in February, count on one thing: Trump will declassify many more documents . Judge Mehta ruled in January that the FBi didn’t have to “disclose the existence of any records containing the agency’s efforts to verify the dossier”, but now says that after Trump declassified the memos ‘the ground shifted’.

In other words, once docs are declassified, intelligence services no longer have a place to hide. Trump is thinking: why didn’t I do this much more and much sooner? Note: it still took 6 months for the judge to rule on the FBI and the memos, but next time this could go much faster. And there are thousands of files that could be de-classified.

Finally, Trump will push for Julian Assange to testify -with immunity- to probably the Senate Intelligence Committee (but there are alternative options) on what he knows about -potential- Russian involvement in US election meddling and hacking of DNC or RNC servers and computers. There’s no-one who know more on this than Assange, and he has evidence.

That his deal with the DOJ was killed by James Comey will be all the more impetus for Trump to hear what he has to say. For many people, it will appear ironic, but this may be Assange’s best bet to regain freedom.

The one person who can prove that there was never any collusion between Trump and Russia is locked up in a tiny embassy in London. And the one person who can get him out of there lives in the White House.

At war with current and former intelligence officials since before he was elected, Donald Trump on Wednesday moved to strip Barack Obama’s CIA chief of his security clearance, though worse may be in store for John Brennan, says Ray McGovern.

There’s more than meets the eye to President Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the security clearances that ex-CIA Director John Brennan enjoyed as a courtesy customarily afforded former directors. The President’s move is the second major sign that Brennan is about to be hoisted on his own petard. It is one embroidered with rhetoric charging Trump with treason and, far more important, with documents now in the hands of congressional investigators showing Brennan’s ringleader role in the so-far unsuccessful attempts to derail Trump both before and after the 2016 election.

Brennan will fight hard to avoid being put on trial but will need united support from from his Deep State co-conspirators–a dubious proposition. One of Brennan’s major concerns at this point has to be whether the “honor-among-thieves” ethos will prevail, or whether some or all of his former partners in crime will latch onto the opportunity to “confess” to investigators: “Brennan made me do it.”

Brennan: Called Trump a ‘traitor.’ Now Trump’s taken away his security clearances.
Well before Monday night, when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani let a small bomb drop on Brennan, there was strong evidence that Brennan had been quarterbacking illegal operations against Trump.  Giuliani added fuel to the fire when he told Sean Hannity of Fox news:

“I’m going to tell you who orchestrated, who was the quarterback for all this. … The guy running it is Brennan, and he should be in front of a grand jury.  Brennan took … a dossier that, unless he’s the biggest idiot intelligence agent that ever lived … it’s false; you can look at it and laugh at it. And he peddled it to [then Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid, and that led to the request for the investigation. So you take a false dossier, get senators involved, and you get a couple of Republican senators, and they demand an investigation—a totally phony investigation.”

After eight years of enjoying President Barack Obama’s solid support and defense to do pretty much anything he chose—including hacking into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee—Brennan now lacks what, here in Washington, we refer to as a “Rabbi” with strong incentive to advance and protect you.  He expected Hillary Clinton to play that role (were it ever to be needed), and that seemed to be solidly in the cards. But, oops, she lost.

An answer was needed, so one was created: the Russians. As World War II ended with the U.S. the planet’s predominant power, dark forces saw advantage in arousing new fears. The Soviet Union morphed from a decimated ally in the fight against fascism into a competitor locked in a titanic struggle with America. How did they get so powerful so quickly? Nothing could explain it except traitors. Cold War-era America? Or 2018 Trump America? Yes, on both counts.

To some, that fear was not a problem but a tool—one could defeat political enemies simply by accusing them of being Russian sympathizers. There was no need for evidence, so desperate were Americans to believe; just an accusation that someone was in league with Russia was enough. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy fired his first shot on February 9, 1950, proclaiming there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working for the Department of State. The evidence? Nothing but assertions.

Indeed, the very word “McCarthyism” came to mean making accusations of treason without sufficient evidence. Other definitions include aggressively questioning a person’s patriotism, using accusations of disloyalty to pressure a person to adhere to conformist politics or discredit an opponent, and subverting civil and political rights in the name of national security.

Pretending to be saving America while he tore at its foundations, McCarthy destroyed thousands of lives over the next four years simply by pointing a finger and saying “communist.” Whenever anyone invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence, McCarthy answered that this was “the most positive proof obtainable that the witness is communist.” The power of accusation was used by others as well: the Lavender Scare, which concluded that the State Department was overrun with closeted homosexuals who were at risk of being blackmailed by Moscow for their perversions, was an offshoot of McCarthyism, and by 1951, 600 people had been fired based solely on evidence-free “morals” charges. State legislatures and school boards mimicked McCarthy. Books and movies were banned. Blacklists abounded. The FBI embarked on campaigns of political repression (they would later claim Martin Luther King Jr. had communist ties), even as journalists and academics voluntarily narrowed their political thinking to exclude communism.

John Brennan, Melting Down and Covering Up
Real Takeaway: The FBI Influenced the Election of a President
Watching sincere people succumb to paranoia again, today, is not something to relish. But having trained themselves to intellectualize away Hillary Clinton’s flaws, as they had with Obama, about half of America seemed truly gobsmacked when she lost to the antithesis of everything that she had represented to them. Every poll (that they read) said she would win. Every article (that they read) said it too, as did every person (that they knew). Lacking an explanation for the unexplainable, many advanced scenarios that would have failed high school civics, claiming that only the popular vote mattered, or that the archaic Emoluments Clause prevented Trump from taking office, or that Trump was insane and could be disposed of under the 25th Amendment.

After a few trial balloons during the primaries under which Bernie Sanders’ visits to Russia and Jill Stein’s attendance at a banquet in Moscow were used to imply disloyalty, the fearful cry that the Russians meddled in the election morphed into the claim that Trump had worked with the Russians and/or (fear is flexible) that the Russians had something on Trump. Everyone learned a new Russian word: kompromat.

Donald Trump became the Manchurian Candidate. That term was taken from a 1959 novel made into a classic Cold War movie that follows an American soldier brainwashed by communists as part of a Kremlin plot to gain influence in the Oval Office. A Google search shows that dozens of news sources—including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Salon, The Washington Post, and, why not, Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti—have all claimed that Trump is a 2018 variant of the Manchurian Candidate, controlled by ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.

It seems unfair that the earnest polymath Elon Musk should go broke in the electric car business while Kylie Jenner becomes a billionaire at age 20 hawking lip gloss on Snapchat, but that’s how the American Dream rolls these late days of empire. Perhaps the lesson here, for all you MBA wannabes, is that Mr. Musk could switch his production facilities from cars to lip gloss. Of course, to successfully market his new line of cosmetics on social media, Elon might have to consider sexual “reassignment” surgery — unless he could persuade American men via Facebook and Twitter, that lip enhancement boosts male self-esteem almost as much as the purchase of a Ford F-450 pickup truck at a laughable fraction of the cost.

Which raises an interesting question: if President Donald Trump’s most winning personal feature is that magnificent golden hair-do, why doesn’t he (or his family) get out of the pain-in-the-ass hotel business, with all its construction and maintenance issues and dirty sheets, and just put out shampoo? He is obviously adept at Twitter marketing and surely scores high in global brand recognition.

Which raises any number of other major questions about the proper functioning of the US economy. For instance, millions of Americans, especially of Kylie J’s gen, are wasting their lives working dead-end minimum wage jobs manning (personing?) the nation’s fry-o-lator stations when they could start billion dollar cosmetic companies. After all, if you really want to be successful in this land of success stories, don’t you have to first look and feel successful? Perhaps that’s all you really need… forget all those pain-in-the-ass products with their vexing assembly-line, packing, and shipping problems. Just get America feeling great about itself, starting with the most important person in the room: YOU!

If you have a serious interest in politics, you should be reading columnist Thomas Edsall in The New York Times. He’s a liberal, but he’s much more interested in deep data analysis than in making ideological points. In his most recent column, he writes about research findings showing that liberals who are quick to call whites racist actually drive them into Trump’s arms. 

It’s fascinating stuff. Excerpts:

“Our thing is to throw gasoline on the resistance,” Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to Trump, told Vanity Fair last December. “I love it. When they talk about identity politics, they’re playing into our hands.”

Trump and his allies are capitalizing on a decades-long fight over immigration policy that they believe will galvanize more voters on the right than on the left, generating sufficient enthusiasm among Trump’s supporters to counter an energized Democratic electorate. The unpleasant reality is that a number of recent analyses based on psychological, sociological and political research provide a logical basis for the incendiary Trump-Miller-Bannon strategy.

Here’s the gist of that strategy:

Trump’s rhetoric — migrants “infest” and “invade our country” — is intended not only to intensify the anti-immigrant views of his supporters, but also to encourage liberals and Democrats to accuse him and his supporters of bigotry. Trump’s tactics are based on the conviction of many of his voters that opposition to immigration is not a form of racism. They deeply resent being called racist for anti-immigrant views they consider patriotic and, indeed, principled.

From the pardoning of Nixon and whitewashing of Watergate on through the failure to punish anyone for Iran-Contra and dozens of such outrages, and the refusal to impeach any recent president for any of their major abusive policies (while impeaching one for sex), a bipartisan swarm of swamp creatures has consistently closed ranks against any serious change in the systems of legalized bribery, war profiteering, and wealth concentration. Trump’s unprecedented financial corruption, one of numerous indisputable grounds for impeachment, is so far off limits as to be effectively erased by virtually all media discussions of impeachment, which instead focus on Russiagate conspiracy theories (in the dubious use of that phrase to refer to allegations that are dubious, not just activities that involve two or more people).

When you want to know what threatens those who have normalized permawar, concentrated wealth and power beyond medieval levels, and ravaged this poor planet possibly beyond the point of recovery, one reliable approach is to listen to what they say threatens them. Nothing has elicited as many warnings from powerful political players since the Occupy movement as has the possibility of the impeachment of Donald Trump. To take one typical example of thousands, a column in The Hill recently warned:

“Democratic voters overwhelmingly want to impeach Trump. A Quinnipiac poll last month found that the vast majority, 71 percent, of Democratic voters want the party to begin the impeachment process if they win control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Moreover, Democratic voters are willing to prove their desire for a Trump impeachment come Election Day by favoring candidates that would make it a reality. . . . Yet, if the Democrats do win back the House and pursue impeachment against the president, there is little on the record to suggest House Democrats have enough evidence to get a conviction in the Senate.”

The above ridiculous claim is based on two factors. First, the author, like some other authors, seems to mean by “evidence” the slightly different concept of “Senate seats held by Democrats.” Second, the author, like virtually all other authors, clearly means by “evidence” the limited concept of “evidence of working with Vladimir Putin to steal a U.S. election.”

Over the past year, facts have emerged that suggest there was a plot by high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in the Obama administration, acting under color of law, to exonerate Hillary Clinton of federal crimes and then, if she lost the election, to frame Donald Trump and his campaign for colluding with Russia to steal the presidency. This conduct was not based on mere bias, as has been widely claimed, but rather on deeply felt animus toward Trump and his agenda.

In the course of this plot, FBI Director James Comey, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI Deputy Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, Strzok’s paramour and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, FBI General Counsel James Baker, and DOJ senior official Bruce Ohr—perhaps among others—compromised federal law enforcement to such an extent that the American public is losing trust. A recent CBS News poll finds 48 percent of Americans believe that Special Counsel James Mueller’s Trump-Russia collusion probe is “politically motivated,” a stunning conclusion. And 63 percent of polled voters in a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll believe that the FBI withheld vital information from Congress about the Clinton and Russia collusion investigations.

I spent my early legal career as a federal prosecutor. I later supervised hundreds of prosecutors and prosecutions as a U.S. Attorney and as an Independent Counsel. I have never witnessed investigations so fraught with failure to fulfill the basic elements of a criminal probe as those conducted under James Comey. Not since former Acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray deep-sixed evidence during Watergate has the head of the FBI been so discredited as Comey is now.

Not a lot of people remember this, but George W Bush actually campaigned in 2000 against the interventionist foreign policy that the United States had been increasingly espousing. Far from advocating the full-scale regime change ground invasions that his administration is now infamous for, Bush frequently used the word “humble” when discussing the type of foreign policy he favored, condemning nation-building, an over-extended military, and the notion that America should be the world’s police force.

Eight years later, after hundreds of thousands of human lives had been snuffed out in Iraq and Afghanistan and an entire region horrifically destabilized, Obama campaigned against Bush’s interventionist foreign policy, edging out Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries partly because she had supported the Iraq invasion while he had condemned it. The Democrats, decrying the warmongering tendencies of the Republicans, elected a President of the United States who would see Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq and raise him Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, along with a tenfold increase in drone strikes. Libya collapsed into a failed state where a slave trade now runs rampant, and half a million people died in the Syrian war that Obama and US allies exponentially escalated.

Eight years later, a reality TV star and WWE Hall-of-Famer was elected President of the United States by the other half of the crowd who was sick to death of those warmongering Democrats. Trump campaigned on a non-interventionist foreign policy, saying America should fight terrorists but not enter into regime change wars with other governments. He thrashed his primary opponents as the only one willing to unequivocally condemn Bush and his actions, then won the general election partly by attacking the interventionist foreign policy of his predecessor and his opponent, and criticizing Hillary Clinton’s hawkish no-fly zone agenda in Syria.

Now he’s approved the selling of arms to Ukraine to use against Russia, a dangerously hawkish move that even Obama refused to make for fear of increasing tensions with Moscow. His administration has escalated troop presence in Afghanistan and made it abundantly clear that the Pentagon has no intention of leaving Syria anytime soon despite the absence of any reasonable justification for US presence there. The CIA had ratcheted up operations in Iran months into Trump’s presidency, shortly before the administration began running the exact same script against that country that the Obama administration ran on Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

Maybe US presidents are limited to eight years because that’s how long it takes the public to forget everything.

After one year of Trump presidency, America looks more and more the same as Italy was when Berlusconi ruled it. I am not going to list the similarities between Berlusconi and Trump: it has already been done and everyone knows about the sex scandals, the outrageous behavior, the offensive way of speaking, all that.

For Silvio Berlusconi, this kind of behavior led him to be prime minister for a total of 9 years, over more than 20 years in which he strongly influenced Italian politics. Today, it looks perfectly possible that, at 81, he may become prime minister again with the coming national elections, in March, replacing the fading star of his heir, Matteo Renzi (aka "Berlusconi 2.0").

Donald Trump uses the same methods developed by Berlusconi and he seems to be attaining a remarkable political staying power. Fighting him, the American Left is making the same mistakes that the Italian left made with Berlusconi: demonizing him while aping his political choices. Actually, the American Left is doing even worse: at least the Italian Left never accused voters to be so dumb that they could be easily swayed by the propaganda tricks of a foreign power. A surefire way to win the next elections: first you tell them they are idiots, nay, traitors, then you ask for their vote.

But there is a method to this madness. The Left is making the mistakes it makes because it operates on the basis of an obsolete political paradigm. Most of the political struggle up to recent times has been based on a principle discovered first by Harold Hotelling in the 1920s (it is called the Hotelling-Downs model): he who controls the center, wins (it works also in economics and with chess).

There is a problem with this model: it works only if there is a political center. As I described in a previous post, that's not true anymore: today there are two centers and the way to win elections is to occupy one of the two, as Donald Trump perfectly understood. Hillary Clinton didn't and her defeat was unavoidable.

Here are the names and rank of the principal conspirators: John Brennan, CIA director; Susan Rice, National Security Advisor; Samantha Power, UN Ambassador; James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence; James Comey, FBI director; Andrew McCabe, Deputy FBI director; Sally Yates, deputy Attorney General, Bruce Ohr, associate deputy AG; Peter Strzok, deputy assistant director of FBI counterintelligence; Lisa Page, FBI lawyer; and countless other lessor and greater poobahs of Washington power, including President Obama himself.

To a person, the participants in this illicit cabal shared the core trait that made Obama such a blight on the nation's well-being. To wit, he never held an honest job outside the halls of government in his entire adult life; and as a careerist agent of the state and practitioner of its purported goods works, he exuded a sanctimonious disdain for everyday citizens who make their living along the capitalist highways and by-ways of America.

The above cast of election-meddlers, of course, comes from the same mold. If Wikipedia is roughly correct, just these 10 named perpetrators have punched in about 300 years of post-graduate employment -- and 260 of those years (87%) were on government payrolls or government contractor jobs.

As to whether they shared Obama's political class arrogance, Peter Strzok left nothing to the imagination in his now celebrated texts to his gal-pal, Lisa Page:
Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support......I LOATHE congress....And F Trump.
You really didn't need the ALL CAPS to get the gist.

In a word, the anti-Trump cabal is comprised of creatures of the state.

It is now held inside the mind of each individual an obvious conviction that governments can only be divided into 3 branches: the executive, the legislative and the judicial. Such division of power has become so influential among political analysts and writers in understanding government that it has often been raised to an absolute fact.

In trying to explain the American government, the famous Madison model of ‘the separation of powers’ and ‘checks and balance’ is immediately picked up. The model rests on Madison’s firm belief that dividing authority among three different branches would ultimately create equilibrium and prevent despotism. Scientifically, the model is sound and logical, for it was made perfectly plain in the medieval ages that governments without constraint slip into absolutism.

Yet it is often forgotten that just as politics is a science, it is also an art – it is a form of communication between the governed and the governors. To understand it, and to understand how ‘power’ is actually distributed, one must also use the imagination of an artist and imagine divisions beyond what is said in the literature. This is not to completely reject the former ideas of government, but to instead allow a little imagination enter the realm of politics.

Walter Bagehot, a British journalist and essayist in the 19th century, used that imagination quite well in his famous work “The English Constitution”. He argued that the real division of powers is that between the “dignified” and the “efficient” branches of government. The main task of the dignified branch is to ‘put on a show’ and win the emotions and support of the people, which for him consisted of the monarchy and the parliament during ceremonies. The efficient branch, on the other hand, simply uses the support of the people to run the country. For the British government, this usually consists of the cabinet and government ministers. To quote Bagehot, ‘every constitution must first gain authority, and then use authority’.

Two centuries later, Bagehot’s argument is used up again by scholars such as Michael J. Glennon, to explain the current American government. He starts his book ‘National Security and Double Government’ with the simple question: why does national security policy remain constant even when one President is replaced by another? Despite Obama’s criticism of Bush’s security policies before he took office as President, his administration still proceeded to walk in the same path as their predecessors. He kept the military prison at Guantanamo Bay open, pushed the United States to attack Libya without congressional approval, and also continued Bush’s surveillance policies.

To explain the huge similarities between Bush and Obama’s security policies, Glennon turned to Bagehot’s ‘disguised republic’ or ‘double government’ theory. It is what Plato would also call as the notion of the ‘Noble Lie’. Glennon contends that particularly since Truman’s National Security Act of 1947, which unified the military under a new Secretary of Defense and set up the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, power in the American government began to shift. The new ‘dignified’ institutions consisted of the President, the Congress and the courts, while the ‘efficient’ institution came under the hands of the national security. The President is there to first set ‘the show’, and then the national security uses that show to achieve its policies.

One observer, Justin Douglas, who was a family friend of the Kennedys, confirmed this, as has previously asserted that, “In reflecting on Jack’s relation to the generals, I slowly realized that the military were so strong in our society that probably no President could stand against them”.

Indeed, the public media’s reports of Obama or ‘Trump’s policies’ or that the President has ‘ordered’ the national security to act nurtures an illusion that the power is invested in his hands, when in fact these kinds of ‘top-down’ decisions are often rare.

In fast, decision-making in the Trump administration has been reported by several accounts to be far more informal than what most think. According to Paul Pillar, Trump has become more and more reliant on his military generals, particularly James Mattis, who regularly discusses national security matters with him at the dinner table. This was also common during the era of Lyndon Johnson, where a handful of the president’s top national security officials gathered over a meal to formulate decisions regarding the Vietnam War. Considering the disastrous consequences of the war, it would not be too far-fetched to see the Trump administration fall in the same hole if it proceeds with the same process.

Of course, on all great subjects, much remains to be said. It would still be too shallow to state that governments always operate in that manner, for the role of the President and other actors relatively depends from case to case. Yet it still sheds light on the extreme complexity and fluidity of government structure, and that in politics, there is perhaps far more performance than real action, and more human emotion than practicality.