“Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
-Retired General James Mattis (attributed)
Donald Trump, Viceroy for Russian North America, has lost his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, and he’s also engineered a government shutdown for Christmas that nobody wanted. The two events are quite likely related.
In regard to the first event, it’s interesting that the consensus of the Trump apologist media is incredulity that Trump is being criticized for something that a lot of his own critics wanted all along. One of the columnists in Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative pointed out, “It is telling and not to Mattis’ credit that ending an illegal war in Syria was the one policy disagreement with Trump that Mattis couldn’t stomach.” As even Andrew Sullivan says, “Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies.”
For quite some time, libertarians, leftists and the Buchanan Right have been skeptical of the American establishment continuing to set this country up as the World’s Policeman. Some of us are more skeptical of Trump (and Republicans in general) than others. But then many of Trump’s fans are in the foreign policy establishment, and it’s telling that even many of them are uneasy with the current direction, especially since the closest thing to consistency in the Trump foreign policy was hostility to Iran, and removing American forces (and by extension, the Kurds) as a buffer zone in the region cannot help but assist the Iranians’ strategy of breaking American containment.
Yes, all the Rachel Maddows of the Left are suddenly complaining now that the Evil Empire of the United States is retrenching rather than expanding its commitments. But then, 20 years ago, the same camp was okay with a president being involved in shady real estate deals and cover-ups of consensual affairs that may have been a political liability. At the time, “conservatives” were screaming like it was a second Holocaust. Now their boy is doing the same thing in spades, and they don’t even blink.
But partisanship is to be expected. In this case, it’s not even the point. The reason that Maddow and others who study history are suspicious of everything Trump does, regardless of what it is, really IS because Trump is the one doing things. Because unless you have foolishly pinned all your hopes on the Republican Party and/or Trump, you have seen enough of him to know that nothing he says or does can be taken on good faith. You have to look for an ulterior motive in everything – because there always is.
This is why the resignation letter of Jim Mattis is important. For while it is professionally worded, it targets the areas of disagreement that he had with the president, and why Trump’s positions cannot be taken as the good-faith actions of an executive acting in the national interest. Simply reciting what a Defense Secretary (or President) needs to do merely displays where Trump as a statesman is deficient. Mattis says, “While the US remains the indispensable nation of the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.” As opposed to selling out the Kurds and strengthening Iran at the expense of Iraq and Israel. “It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model-” and if this needs to be pointed out to Trump, he is either not clear about this or is on board with what China and Russia are doing.
“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.” Experience that Trump does not have. In any event, Trump does not treat allies with respect, nor is he clear-eyed about malign actors, because he does not see an interest outside his own ulterior goals, nor does he have the temperament to shape his behavior towards diplomacy.
Donald Trump has only two postures toward the outside world: Either bossy arrogance or bottom-bunk submissive.
General Mattis told Trump, “you have the right to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects”. Unfortunately, Floyd R. Turbo died in 2005.
After the fact, reporters revealed that “President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was made hastily, without consulting his national security team or allies, and over strong objections from virtually everyone involved in the fight against the Islamic State group, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.” Specifically on December 14, the White House took a phone call from Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which Erdogan pressured Trump to withdraw our forces from the Kurdish part of the Syrian front, by threatening to attack Kurdish forces while Americans were still camped with them. Despite Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary Mattis being in on the call, despite both men counseling Trump to stand firm, and despite the fact that Trump had previously sided with his advisors, he suddenly decided to agree with Erdogan.
The fact that people were still taking Trump on good faith when they should have known better is the reason for the other clusterfuck of the moment. After not only refusing to negotiate with Democratic leaders in Congress but saying to Chuck Schumer’s face that he would take credit for a government shutdown, most of Congress, not wanting to be blamed for yet another shutdown over the holidays, made plans to avoid it. On December 19, the Senate took a voice vote to pass a bill without Trump’s wall. But then the same day the true believers saw which way things were going and they LOST THEIR SHIT. In her feed, conservative attack Whippet Ann Coulter said:
“Trump is doing exactly what I
feared he would do in the worst conceivable way. He’s not building
the wall, while making ridiculous promises right up until the second
before he folds.
“…The basic factory setting on the
perception of Trump is: gigantic douchebag. This is a man who
manufactured fake Time magazine covers featuring himself with the
headline, “Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television
smash!” so that he could put framed copies of it on the walls of
his clubs. “His business is convincing people with lowbrow taste
to give him their money.
“…It’s not as if a majority of
his voters weren’t clear-eyed about what kind of man he is. If
anything, Trump’s vulgar narcissism made his vow to build a wall more
believable. Respectable politicians had made similar promises over
the years — and they always betrayed the voters. Maybe it took a
sociopath to ignore elite opinion and keep his word.
“On the
basis of his self-interest alone, he must know that if he doesn’t
build the wall, he has zero chance of being re-elected and a 100
percent chance of being utterly humiliated.
“But when Trump
is alone with Ivanka, they seem to agree that the wall has nothing to
do with it. The people just love him for who he is! In a country of
320 million people, I’m sure there are some, but I have yet to meet a
person who said, Yeah, I don’t really care about immigration or
trade, I just love his personality!
“What else were we
going to do? He was the only one talking sense. Unfortunately, that’s
all he does: talk. He’s not interested in doing anything that would
require the tiniest bit of effort.
“In the end, we’ll
probably find out “wall” was Trump’s “safe word”
with Stormy Daniels. It’s just something he blurts out whenever he’s
in trouble.”
Coulter and Rush Limbaugh may be bigoted and unhinged, but unlike Trump, they’re not actually idiots. They might swallow their qualms to a certain extent, but they’re not going to let Trump piss on their heads and tell them it’s raining. At the same time, they are proof that intelligence is not a barrier to being a Trump cultist, if one is sufficiently bigoted and unhinged. Coulter just proves that such cultists are not limited to the working class in “flyover country” that the coastal media love to look down on. Some of them, like Coulter and Tucker Carlson, ARE in the coastal media. And then you have the Kochs and the Mercers and a whole bunch of people who are supposed to be “experts” in the same way that the Beltway interventionists are “experts” on everything but getting us out of war. When Trump fans say that they care about immigration and trade and don’t care about his personality, that’s BS. Personality is all Trump offers, and that’s all they got. Really, they want to be lied to. But even a couple of them are wondering how much unreality they can take.
So because some of the people who brought the Republican Party to this state not only noticed they were being had, but were willing to say so, we had a situation where House Republicans were literally waiting for Trump’s say so before voting on a budget measure. And that’s how we got to where we are. Not because Trump is pressuring Republicans, but because Republicans, through Trump, are being pressured by their “base.”
However, Trump displays an idiot savant level of skill (emphasis on the idiot) when it comes to grifting, conniving, and self-preservation. In fact, the longer this bullshit goes on, the more he reminds me of Ray Donovan’s dad. And vice versa. Have you noticed, for instance, that even now, Trump has never said anything bad about Michael Flynn, and not much of anything about Paul Manafort, when he’s done everything he could to badmouth Michael Cohen? Have you ever noticed that Trump only compliments another person when he needs something from them? And that as soon as he doesn’t need them anymore, he treats them like one of his ex-wives?
You look at the big picture and you see that there is a sort of cornered-rat strategy to what Trump is doing. Even he could notice that that the odds were not good on a president keeping the House in the midterms, while there was still an outside chance that Democrats could retake the Senate. Where politics is local and people talk about “kitchen table” issues, Democrats win. Where politics is national and conservatives can focus on the “culture war”, they win. Knowing that he would more than likely get investigated by the House next year, prompting demands for impeachment, Trump pulled stunts like militarizing the border in order to mobilize the bigots to come out of statewide Senate races and other races (like DeSantis’ campaign for Florida Governor) where those votes were critical. In so doing, Trump saved the Senate, which is the main reason he can’t just be removed from office. Trump certainly isn’t acting in the best interest of the nation, and he isn’t even acting in the best interest of the Republican Party, otherwise he would have been more help in close House races. Everything Trump does as president is for the same reason he did everything as a civilian: loot the suckers while staying out of jail.
There’s just one problem with all of Trump’s conniving: It is only made necessary by Trump being Trump, and it is critically undermined by the fact that Trump continues to be Trump. For all his unpleasant yowling, Trump is not operating from a position of strength, but of weakness. If Trump hadn’t made promises to Russia and Turkey (possibly after they called in their chips), he wouldn’t have lost Mattis, which might alienate hawk Republicans. And after constantly whining about a wall and having nothing to show for it, Trump proactively demanded a government shutdown, which cooler heads were trying to avoid, but if Trump went along with them he would be alienating the grievance media and red-meat Republicans who are finally starting to admit to themselves that they were conned. But to pacify them, he has to risk alienating the Republican Senate – in whose hands his fate will rest after an impeachment.
Look, imagine you’re Mitch McConnell. And as leader of the Senate Republicans, you’ve been engaged in a mostly successful campaign to stymie Washington Democrats at every turn. Then imagine that Donald Trump – your leader – has given Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer a propaganda coup that they never could have scored through the liberal media. (Except insofar as HE invited them there to film the whole thing live.)
Now imagine, as McConnell, you’ve gotten your Senate to take a voice vote on a bill without a wall, because you realize “the Wall” is just political theater that isn’t going to resolve this country’s real immigration problems as well as e-Verify and other measures that put the pressure on the employers of illegal labor, where it belongs. You’re getting Paul Ryan to count his votes in the House. Now imagine that your precious little boy tosses the building blocks all over the floor because he and his Ann Coulter constituency didn’t get their lolly.
And you wonder why Paul Ryan announced his retirement before the primaries even started.
But that’s what happens when policy is made from the bottom bunk.
Happy Festivus, everybody! Remember, the shutdown isn’t over until Trump is pinned to the floor.