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.

“America first” and “to hell with the rest of the world”! One single stroke of hand, one signature, and over 1,000 hardworking people in Bali, Indonesia, suddenly ended up on the pavement. No second thoughts, no mercy. American savage capitalist ways met and embraced that fabled Indonesian feudalism, which was implanted into this country several decades ago, precisely after the 1965 military coup sponsored by the West.

U.S. President Donald Trump, always on the lookout for some great business opportunities, finally found one in Bali (and one more in West Java), a tropical, once paradise-like Indonesian island. And not just somewhere in Bali, but right next to the holiest and the most spectacular Hindu temple in the country, Tanah Lot.

It is true that he was not the first one determined to destroy the area. An enormous hotel and golf resort, Le Meridien teamed up with several Indonesian businesses, and perpetrated a land grab, forcing out thousands of local people. That was a long time ago. Then the Pan Pacific hotel chain moved in, purchased the property, and is running it to this day.

However, Mr. Trump is now planning something truly monumental here, in the middle of the iconic rice fields and dormant rural countryside: a shout of hedonism, a 6-star opulent, a concrete monstrosity, which will certainly and irreversibly dwarf the local culture and the traditional Balinese aesthetics.

Mr. Trump teamed up with Hary Tanoesoedibjo, an unsavory and ruthless Indonesian businessman. It is actually feared by many that Mr. Tanoesoedibjo (and others around him) are now manipulating Indonesian politics, on behalf of the West, trying to eliminate progressive elements that have managed to enter (some say ‘miraculously’) the Indonesian government. It is also no secret that Mr. Tanoesoedibjo himself has high political ambitions, and will most likely be running for the post of president.

The US geopolitical interests, as well as the interests of the local business “elites”, have always been directly antagonistic to the interests of the Indonesian poor (still the great majority of the country’s population).

I spoke to Ms. Ni Luh, working in the Guest Relations Department of the Pan Pacific Hotel:

“I have been employed by this property for more than 20 years. First it was Le Meridien, now it is Pan Pacific. Soon the hotel will be closing down. I was told this on the February 14, 2017, on Valentine’s Day. I was devastated. I just took a bank loan of Rp. 60 million (US$4.000), for the education of my child, and I had only managed to pay one single installment, before hearing ‘the news’. How will I be able to repay that loan if I lose my job in July? I feel very scared and very sad.

I am a single mother; my child is still in junior high school. I cannot rely on anybody else.”

“I heard that we would only get severance pay of Rp. 40 millions (US$3.000). And that is after 20 years of service. Our union here is still trying to negotiate to get at least Rp. 100 millions, but I’m not sure they will succeed.”

“This land is now owned by Hary Tanoe and Donald Trump. It is big – 103 hectares. I heard that they want to expand, to acquire more land that is still owned by the villagers. This new hotel will be huge, with 125 suites. They call it a 6 star property. And they’ll create a totally new golf course here.”

There was a deal, between the first owners and the employees. I checked. This deal will be now fully ignored by the new owners: Trump/Tanoe. I went to the surrounding villages, where everyone appears to be in total distress.

Ms. Ketut, who works at a small eatery, Warung Bu Dini, on the main road leading to the Tanah Lot temple, appears to be angry and desperate:

“The biggest problem with the change of ownership of the Nirwana Bali Resorts is that there will be more than 800 villagers who will lose their jobs.”

Some say over one thousand.

Ms. Ketut continues:

“When Nirwana Bali acquired our lands, we signed agreements that said: with each ‘ownership of land certificate’, the owners will provide 2-4 jobs to the families of the certificate holders. The new owners, Hary Tanoe and Donald Trump, simply do not intend to honor those agreements anymore. There is obviously nothing we can do about it.”

“Our ‘warung’ will also suffer, when they close the hotel in July 2017. Some golfers are actually our customers. Now, for 3 years almost no one will be eating here.”

To put things into perspective: to protest or to defend one’s rights in Indonesia is extremely dangerous. People who dare to go against the ‘big interests’, often get beaten, they disappear, their houses are burned, wives and daughters raped.

Three years is a long period of time, especially in a country where many are living from day to day, with no ‘reserves’ and no savings.

Mr. Trump must know it, and of course he doesn’t care.

Ms. Ni Luh concludes:

“They are not going to re-hire us, at least not people they will consider to be already ‘too old’ (I’m 43 years old now). They don’t care that we have worked here for 20 years and that this is in a way our second home. I’ll have to find another job. How, I don’t know, but I have to: I have a child to feed.”

Ms. Indra, her colleague at the Pan Pacific Hotel, seems to be in a same boat:

“We are all very sad and feel very uncertain. My son will go to university this year, but I am losing my job very soon.”

*

In the meantime, Bali is collapsing, like the rest of Indonesia. It is already ruined environmentally; it is infested by notorious traffic jams, pollution and lack of public spaces. During and after the Financial Crises of 1997-98, most of the Balinese families in the tourist areas were forced to sell their land. Instead of running their own businesses as before, local people are now mostly employed by big companies, either Javanese or foreign. Living conditions are tough.

Idyllic, artistic and sensual Bali is basically gone. In a predominantly Muslim country, it still functions as some sort of a duty-free island, where alcohol and pork are widely available, and where clubs are open until the wee hours. There are also a few beautiful rice fields between the terrible urban sprawls with no sidewalks and no public transportation to speak of (still a norm for most of the cities in Indonesia).

Instead of artists, writers and dreamers, Bali is now catering to mass tourism.

One chain 5-star hotel after another is opening its doors, on the beaches and in the spectacular ravines. Instead of integrating themselves into the cultural and traditional landscape, these hotels are creating huge luxury “bubbles”, fully separated from the rest of the island.

Now Donald Trump has found his niche.

Confidently, the Trump International Hotel & Tower Bali site declares:

“Trump Hotels has exciting plans to open the collection’s first resort in Asia as Trump International Hotel & Tower Bali. When completed, the luxurious resort will be the largest and most integrated lifestyle resort destination in Bali.”

But what about the island, what about the villages and what about the people? All that, obviously, matters nothing!

The site further boasts:

“Built atop a sheer cliff along a sweeping coastline, the development will offer breathtaking views of the Indian Ocean and Tanah Lot, the most popular tourist and cultural icon of Bali.”

What will soon come up will be an enormous golf resort, next to the iconic temple, which is totally unique, in fact it is an island during high tide, accessible only during those times of the day when the tide is low. But even the temple is already damaged; it is reinforced by badly poured concrete. It is surrounded by horrible eateries on the ‘shore’. Right before the sunset, hundreds of huge buses are bringing thousands of indifferent tourists for a quick glimpse. Nothing is serene in Bali, anymore.

Paradoxically (but in a way logically by turbo-capitalist Indonesian standards), the greatest views of the temple will be ‘reserved’ for the richest of the rich, for those who will be able to afford to stay and to play at the luxury hotel and golf course owned by Mr. Trump.

Somehow, at least to me, the advertisements of the future hotel look more like a requiem for the island of Bali.

*

My history with Bali is long. I used to come here, periodically, to shut myself off from the world, and to write. Even when I used to live in my beloved Chile, I would fly to Bali, to the other side of the world, via Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Kuala Lumpur.

Bali used to be serene. It used to have soul – capricious, unpredictable, but soul nevertheless.

I wrote my revolutionary novel, Point of No Return, in Ubud. Exile or Terasing! Di negeri sendiri, a book with Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the greatest Indonesian writer, and with Ms. Rossie Indira, was actually edited in Tanah Lot.

I avoid the island now; I have done so for many years. I only come when some calamity occurs, or something truly significant.

This time, the symbolism is clear: what is happening in Tanah Lot is indicating, brutally, although on a small scale, how the world and Indonesia will be governed from Washington, in the upcoming years.

Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, a writer of revolutionary novel Aurora and several other books. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”