{"id":87745,"date":"2017-03-06T12:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=87745"},"modified":"2017-02-28T19:44:05","modified_gmt":"2017-02-28T19:44:05","slug":"the-art-of-the-trumpaclysm-how-the-u-s-invaded-occupied-and-remade-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/03\/the-art-of-the-trumpaclysm-how-the-u-s-invaded-occupied-and-remade-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of the Trumpaclysm: How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

26 Feb 2017 – <\/em>It\u2019s been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds?\u00a0Tens<\/a>?) A spectacular production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it’s been! It\u2019s driving people back to newspapers<\/a> (online, if not in print) and ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24\/7 cable news shows, never lack for \u201cbreaking news\u201d or audiences<\/a>. It\u2019s a smash in both the Hollywood and car accident sense of the term, a phenomenon the likes of which we\u2019ve simply never experienced. Think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and<\/em> the cameras rolled. It\u2019s proved, in every way, to be a giant leak<\/a>. A faucet. A spigot. An absolute flood of non-news, quarter-news, half-news, crazed news, fake news, and over-the-top actual news.<\/p>\n

And you know exactly what — and whom — I\u2019m talking about.\u00a0 No need to explain.\u00a0 I mean, you tell me: What doesn\u2019t it have?\u00a0 Its lead actor is the closest we\u2019ve come in our nation’s capital to an action figure.\u00a0 Think of him as the Mar-a-Lego version of Batman and the Joker rolled into one, a president who, as he told us<\/a> at a news conference recently, is \u201cthe least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life\u201d and the \u201cleast racist person\u201d as well.\u00a0 As report after report indicates, he attacks, lashes out, mocks, tweets, pummels, charges, and complains, showering calumny on others even as he praises his achievements without surcease.\u00a0 Think of him as the towering inferno of twenty-first-century American politics or a modern Godzilla eternally emerging from New York harbor.<\/p>\n

As for his supporting cast?\u00a0Islamophobes<\/a>, Iranophobes, white nationalists; bevies of billionaires<\/a> and multimillionaires; a resurgent stock market gone wild; the complete fossil fuel industry and every crackpot<\/a> climate change \u201cskeptic\u201d in town; a press spokesman immortalized by Saturday Night Live<\/a><\/em> whose afternoon briefings are already beating<\/a> the soap opera General Hospital<\/em> in the ratings; a White House counselor whose expertise<\/a> is in \u201calternative facts\u201d; a national security adviser who (with a tenure of 24 days) seemed to sum up the concept of \u201cinsecurity\u201d; a White House chief of staff and liaison with the Republicans in Congress who\u2019s already being sized up<\/a> for extinction, as well as a couple of appointees who were \u201cdismissed\u201d or even frog-marched<\/a> out of their offices and jobs for having criticized<\/a> The Donald and not fessed up… honestly, you couldn\u2019t make this stuff up, or rather only Trump himself can do so.\u00a0 And by the way, just so you know, based on the last weeks of \u201cnews\u201d I could keep this paragraph going more or less forever without even breaking into a sweat.<\/p>\n

Among so many subjects I haven\u2019t even mentioned, including Melania<\/a> and former wife Ivana — is it even possible that she could become<\/a> the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic? — there are, of course, the Trump kids<\/a> and their businesses and the instantly broken promises on (such an old-fashioned phrase) their conflicts<\/a> of interest and the conflicts<\/a> about those conflicts<\/a> and the presidential tweets<\/a>, threats, and bluster that have gone with them, not to speak of the issue of for-pay access<\/a> to the new president.\u00a0 And how about Trump\u2019s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (another walking conflict<\/a> of you-know-what), who reputedly had a role in the appointment <\/a>of the new ambassador to Israel, a New York bankruptcy lawyer known<\/a> for raising millions of dollars to fund<\/a> a West Bank Jewish settlement and for calling<\/a> supporters of the liberal Jewish group J Street \u201cfar worse than kapos\u201d (Jews who aided the Nazis in their concentration camps). Kushner has now been ordained<\/a> America\u2019s ultimate peacemaker in the Middle East.\u00a0 And don\u2019t forget that sons Donald and Eric are already saving<\/a> memorabilia for the future Trump presidential library, a concept that should take your breath away. \u00a0(Just imagine a library with those giant golden letters over its entrance to honor a man who proudly doesn\u2019t read<\/a> books and, as with presidential executive orders<\/a> and possibly even volumes he\u2019s \u201cwritten<\/a>,\u201d signs off on things he\u2019s barely bothered to check out.)<\/p>\n

And speaking of Rome (remember Nero fiddling?), have you noticed that these days all news roads lead back to… well, Donald Trump?\u00a0 Take my word for it: nothing happens in our world any longer that doesn\u2019t relate to him and his people (or, by definition, it simply didn\u2019t happen).\u00a0 Since he rode that Trump Tower escalator<\/a> into the presidential race in June 2015, his greatest skill has, without any doubt, been his ability to suck up all the media air in any room, whether that \u201croom\u201d is the Oval Office, Washington, or the world at large.\u00a0 He speaks<\/a> at a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, amid angry outbursts<\/a> on leaks from the intelligence community and attacks on \u201cthe dishonest media\u201d for essentially firing his national security adviser, he suddenly turns his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian issue and says, \u201cSo, I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.\u201d\u00a0 And the world as we\u2019ve known it in the Middle East is suddenly turned upside down and inside out.<\/p>\n

Generalizing<\/strong><\/p>\n

In its way, even 20 months after it began, it\u2019s all still so remarkable and new, and if it isn\u2019t like being in the path of a tornado, you tell me what it’s like.\u00a0 So no one should be surprised at just how difficult it is to step outside the storm of this never-ending moment, to find some — any — vantage point offering the slightest perspective on the Trumpaclysm that\u2019s hit our world.<\/p>\n

Still, odd as it may seem under the circumstances, Trump\u2019s presidency came from somewhere, developed out of something.\u00a0 To think of it (as many of those resisting Trump now seem inclined to do) as uniquely new, the presidential version of a virgin birth, is to defy both history and reality.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump, whatever else he may be, is most distinctly a creature of history.\u00a0 He\u2019s unimaginable without it.\u00a0 This, in turn, means that the radical nature of his new presidency should serve as a reminder of just how radical the 15 years after 9\/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics, and governance.\u00a0 In that sense, to generalize (if you\u2019ll excuse the pun), his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the America we\u2019ve been living in for some years now, even if we\u2019d prefer to pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n

After all, it\u2019s clearly a government of, by, and evidently for the billionaires and the generals, which pretty much sums up where we\u2019ve been heading for the last decade and a half anyway.\u00a0 Let\u2019s start with those generals.\u00a0 In the 15 years before Trump entered the Oval Office, Washington became a permanent war capital; war, a permanent feature<\/a> of our American world; and the military, the most admired institution of American life, the one in which we have the most confidence<\/a> among an otherwise fading crew, including the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, banks, television news, newspapers, big business, and Congress (in that descending order).<\/p>\n

Support for that military in the form of staggering sums<\/a> of taxpayer dollars (which are about to soar yet again<\/a>) is one of the few things congressional Democrats and Republicans can still agree on.\u00a0 The military-industrial complex rides ever higher (despite Trumpian tweets<\/a> about the price of F-35s); police across the country have been armed like so many military forces, while the technology of war on America\u2019s distant battlefields — from Stingrays<\/a> to MRAPs<\/a> to military surveillance drones<\/a> — has come home big time<\/a>, and we\u2019ve been SWATified<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This country has, in other words, been militarized in all sorts of ways, both obvious and less so, in a fashion that Americans once might not have imagined possible.\u00a0 In the process, declaring and making war has increasingly become — the Constitution be damned — the sole preoccupation of the White House without significant reference<\/a> to Congress.\u00a0 Meanwhile, thanks to the drone assassination program run directly out of the Oval Office, the president, in these years, has become an assassin-in-chief<\/a> as well as commander-in-chief.<\/p>\n

Under the circumstances, no one should have been surprised when Donald Trump turned to the very generals he criticized<\/a> in the election campaign, men who fought 15 years of losing wars that they bitterly feel should have been won.\u00a0 In his government, they have, of course, now taken over — a historic first — what had largely been the civilian posts of secretary of defense, secretary of homeland security, national security adviser, and National Security Council chief of staff.\u00a0 Think of it as a junta light and little more than the next logical step in the further militarization of this country.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s striking, for instance, that when the president finally fired his national security adviser, 24 days into his presidency, all but one<\/a> of the other figures that he reportedly considered for a post often occupied by a civilian were retired generals (and an admiral<\/a>), or in the case of the person he actually tapped to be his second national security adviser, a still-active Army general<\/a>.\u00a0 This reflects a distinct American reality of the twenty-first century that The Donald has simply absorbed like the human sponge<\/a> he is.\u00a0 As a result, America\u2019s permanent wars, all relative disasters<\/a> of one sort or another, will now be overseen by men who were, for the last decade and a half, deeply implicated<\/a> in them.\u00a0 It\u2019s a formula for further disaster, of course, but no matter.<\/p>\n

Other future Trumpian steps — like the possible mobilization of the National Guard, more than half a century after guardsmen helped desegregate<\/a> the University of Alabama, to carry out<\/a> the mass deportation of illegal immigrants — will undoubtedly be in the same mold (though the administration has denied<\/a> that such a mobilization is under serious consideration yet).\u00a0 In short, we now live in an America of the generals and that would be the case even if Donald Trump had never been elected president.<\/p>\n

Add in one more factor of our moment: we have the first signs that members of the military high command may no longer feel completely bound by the classic American prohibition from taking any part in politics.\u00a0 General Raymond “Tony” Thomas, head of the elite U.S. Special Operations Command, speaking recently<\/a> at a conference, essentially warned the president that we are \u201cat war\u201d and that chaos in the White House is not good for the warriors. \u00a0That\u2019s as close<\/a> as we\u2019ve come in our time to direct public military criticism of the White House.<\/p>\n

The Ascendancy of the Billionaires<\/strong><\/p>\n

As for those billionaires, let\u2019s start this way: a billionaire is now president of the United States, something that, until this country was transformed into a 1% society with 1% politics, would have been inconceivable.\u00a0 (The closest we came in modern times was Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, and he was appointed<\/a> by President Gerald Ford in 1974, not elected.)\u00a0 In addition, never have there been so many<\/a> billionaires and multimillionaires in a cabinet — and that, in turn, was only possible because there are now so staggeringly many billionaires and multimillionaires in this country to choose from.\u00a0 In 1987, there were 41<\/a> billionaires in the United States; in 2015, 536<\/a>.\u00a0 What else do you need to know about the intervening years, which featured growing inequality<\/a> and the worst economic meltdown since 1929 that only helped strengthen the new version of the American system?<\/p>\n

In swift order in these years, we moved from billionaires funding<\/a> the political system (after the Supreme Court\u2019s 2010 Citizens United<\/em> decision opened the financial floodgates) to actually heading and running the government.\u00a0 As a result, count on a country even friendlier to the already fantastically wealthy — thanks in part to whatever Trump-style \u201ctax cuts<\/a>\u201d are put in place — and so the possible establishment of a new \u201cera of dynastic wealth<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 From the crew of rich dismantlers and destroyers Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet, expect, among other things, that the privatization of the U.S. government — a process until now largely focused on melding warrior corporations<\/a> with various parts of the national security state — will proceed apace in the rest of the governing apparatus.<\/p>\n

We were, in other words, already living in a different America before November 8, 2016.\u00a0 Donald Trump has merely shoved that reality directly in all our faces.\u00a0 And keep in mind that if it weren\u2019t for the one-percentification of this country and the surge of automation<\/a> (as well as globalization) that destroyed so many jobs and only helped inequality flourish, white working class Americans in particular would not have felt so left behind in the heartland of their own country or so ready to send such an explosive<\/a> figure into the White House as a visible form of screw-you-style protest.<\/p>\n

Finally, consider one other hallmark of the first month of the Trump presidency: the \u201cfeud\u201d between the new president and the intelligence sector of the national security state. \u00a0In these post-9\/11 years, that state within a state — sometimes referred to by its critics as the \u201cdeep state<\/a>,\u201d though given the secrecy that envelops it, \u201cdark state\u201d might be a more accurate term — grew by leaps and bounds.\u00a0 In that period, for instance, the U.S. gained a second Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security with its own security-industrial complex, while the intelligence agencies, all 17<\/a> of them, expanded in just about every way imaginable.\u00a0 In those years, they gained a previously inconceivable kind of clout, as well as the ability<\/a> to essentially listen in on and monitor the communications of just about anyone on the planet (including Americans).\u00a0 Fed copiously by taxpayer dollars, swollen by hundreds of thousands<\/a> of private contractors from warrior corporations, largely free of the controlling hand of either Congress or the courts, and operating under the kind of blanket secrecy<\/a> that left most Americans in the dark about its activities (except when whistle-blowers<\/a> revealed its workings), the national security state gained an ascendancy in Washington as the de facto<\/em> fourth branch of government.<\/p>\n

Now, key people within its shadowy precincts find Donald Trump, the president who is in so many ways a product of the same processes that elevated them, not to their liking — even less so once he compared<\/a> their activities to those of the Nazi era — and they seem to have gone to war with him and his administration via a remarkable stream<\/a> of leaks of damaging information, especially about now-departed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.\u00a0 As Amanda Taub and Max Fisher of the New York Times<\/em> wrote<\/a>, \u201cFor concerned government officials, leaks may have become one of the few remaining means by which to influence not just Mr. Flynn\u2019s policy initiatives but the threat he seemed to pose to their place in democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, of course, represented a version of whistle-blowing that, when directed at them<\/a> in the pre-Trump era, they found appalling<\/a>. \u00a0Like General Thomas\u2019s comments, that flood of leaks, while discomfiting Donald Trump, also represented a potential challenge to the American political system as it once was known. \u00a0When the fiercest defenders of that system begin to be seen as being inside the intelligence community and the military<\/a> you know that you\u2019re in a different<\/a> and far more perilous world.<\/p>\n

So much of what\u2019s now happening may seem startlingly new and overwhelming. In truth, however, it\u2019s been in development for years, even if the specifics of a Trump presidency were not so long ago unimaginable.\u00a0 In March of 2015, for instance, two months before The Donald tossed his hair into the presidential ring, in a post at TomDispatch<\/em><\/a> I asked if \u201ca new political system\u201d was emerging in America and summed the situation up this way:<\/p>\n

\u201cStill, don\u2019t for a second think that the American political system isn\u2019t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security state. Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending it\u2019s not happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019re now living in Donald Trump\u2019s America (which I certainly didn\u2019t either predict or imagine in March 2015); we\u2019re living, that is, in an ever more chaotic and aberrant land run (to the extent it\u2019s run at all) by billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state.\u00a0 That, in a nutshell, is the America created in the post-9\/11 years.\u00a0 Put another way, the U.S. may have failed dismally in its efforts to invade, occupy, and remake Iraq in its own image, but it seems to have invaded, occupied, and remade itself with remarkable success.\u00a0 And don\u2019t blame this one on the Russians.<\/p>\n

No one said it<\/a> better than French King Louis XV: Apr\u00e8s moi, le Trump<\/em>.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a> and the author of <\/em>The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, <\/em>The End of Victory Culture<\/a>. He is a fellow of the <\/em>Nation Institute<\/em><\/a> and runs <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/a>. His latest book is <\/em>Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re now living in Donald Trump’s America (which I certainly didn’t either predict or imagine in March 2015); we’re living, that is, in an ever more chaotic and aberrant land run (to the extent it’s run at all) by billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}