Thursday, November 12, 2020

All the World's a Staged Coup

Donald Trump is at heart a showman and a provocateur, so his purging of the Pentagon and his charges of election fraud and refusal to concede are probably just the latest clumsy tools in his bottomless "make me the center of attention" toy toolbox. Or so I'd been thinking.

But now that journalists whom I respect, such as David Sirota and the writers at the World Socialist Website, are laying out perfectly plausible scenarios for how an honest-to-goodness military coup and/or the overturning of election results by Republican legislatures in such key battleground states as Pennsylvania, to be later upheld by the right-wing Supreme Court, I'm beginning to have some uncomfortable second thoughts.

And the fact that the New York Times, heretofore the mainstream media champion of #Resistance, Inc, is downplaying the coup narrative and enlisting two of its top national security reporters (a/k/a CIA mouthpieces) to do so, also makes me wonder what is really up. As long as the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff remains in charge, the Times article reassures us, there is no possible way that the right-wing ideologues and cronies that Trump has appointed to key positions will have the power to do much at all.     

And while the Republicans are making their own big show of supporting a second term for Trump, behind the scenes they reportedly are making arrangements to brief the Biden transition team on classified national security and intelligence matters. This to the ultimate benefit of the Uniparty and the military-industrial complex which each faction so slavishly serves.

Meanwhile, even if and when his physical coup fails, Donald Trump will have won in the psychological warfare category. Isn't he just taking his own page from the Clinton campaign's "we wuz robbed" playbook? Two can play the government-in-exile game as easily as one. The Trumpian restoration movement is already a done deal, and Campaign 2024 will be in full throttle before you know it.

Not that the defeated president's mischief-making doesn't have a bright side. The powers-that-be are aghast, for example, that Trump might finally order all the troops home from Afghanistan after a two-decade occupation. He is threatening to declassify documents that allegedly prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Russiagate is the fictional product of the de facto CIA/DNC Partnership. He is threatening to fire Gina Haspel, the CIA director who not only destroyed tapes documenting Bush-era torture but who allegedly presided over some of the torture sessions herself. 

Even when Trump does ultimately leave office, the permanent security state fears that he will become a walking, talking Wikileaks, spilling all kinds of state secrets and chipping away at whatever legitimacy and public support they still enjoy. If they're not also fearfully mentioning that he might pardon Julian Assange, it is probably because they don't want to give him any more ideas on how to jeopardize their reputations and careers.

Isn't it nerve-wracking enough that Trump is considered a long shot to replace Alex Trebek on Jeopardy?

Here, though, is the bottom-up coup that the oligarchs and their bickering apparatchiks are really afraid of. (warning: contains strong but very refreshing language.)



7 comments:

  1. @Mark Thomason,

    My clumsy finger just mistakenly deleted your comment. Could you post it again?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Meanwhile Obama is speaking of Trump "changing the Republican party". Good lord. I've had a front row seat to these loons. It is a short hop and skip from "We're not a democracy; we're a republic!" to fascist. Should Trump have a military coup or become the figurehead of a Bannon/Mercer/creepy libertarian-fascist government contractor extradoriniaire Peter Thiel media empire? Why not both?

    ReplyDelete

  3. After listening to unbleeped Jimmy Dore and his uncensored street crowds, I turned to the calmer NY Times. What a relief to learn that Biden is not the scoundrel Dore (and Karen) say he is.

    Jennifer Senior, inventor of straw men and the Times's band-aid dispenser for worry, assures us that the president elect is precisely what we need to survive "right now."

    (Warning: Be ye not sipping your morning coffee, tea or whatever as you come upon this headline and tease from the paper of record.)

    Stop Worrying About Biden’s Age. We Need His Wisdom Right Now.
    by Jennifer Senior
    There’s a lot to be said right now for a president with loads of experience.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jimmy Dore has a quote from Manufacturing Consent at the top of his twitter feed. He seems like the anti Chomsky to me.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Jay Ottawa,

    It takes a Senior to explain away Biden's continuous senior moments.

    ReplyDelete

  6. "Now We Have to Fight Trump’s Tin-Pot Coup — and Biden’s Worst Instincts.
    Republicans keep finding new ways to tell us that they don’t believe in democracy, and we should believe them." —
    https://theintercept.com/2020/11/13/trump-coup-republicans-biden/
    November 13, 2020 ~ by Naomi Klein

    South African Activist Kumi Naidoo: Trump is Attempting a Coup to Install Minority Rule —
    https://www.democracynow.org/2020/11/12/kumi_naidoo_biden_win_africa_reaction
    November 12, 2020

    ReplyDelete
  7. fwiw, I think that if Trump's cases ever reach the Supreme Court, Roberts and Kavanaugh will vote with the PMC, following Charles Koch's lead:they're all "Democrats" now.

    ReplyDelete