Is this the Beginning of the End for the Trump presidency?

April 17th, 2018

Awake Goy

By BOYD D. CATHEY and PAUL CRAG ROBERTS

BOYD D. CATHEY: Friday night, April 13, in conjunction with Great Britain and France, President Donald Trump ordered an attack on Syria. And the unleashed war hawks were elated.

Just to cite one example, Sebastian Gorka (who had been in the administration last year during the first Syrian “false flag” operation) literally proclaimed the coming of the Eschaton and America’s “divine role” to set right everything that is wrong in the world. Like an Abolitionist preacher of old, Gorka demanded a “moral cleansing” and, sounding like Osawatomie John Brown, proclaimed America’s destiny to go round the world, impose equality, and stamp out evil.

And the question follows: Is this the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency?

Is the tiny door ajar, that very small and always endangered opportunity that millions of Americans believed might possibly lead us back as a nation from the precipice of total domination by the Deep State and its panoply of global political, economic and cultural destruction of our Western Christian civilization—is it now closing?

Those feverish and frenzied evangelical partisans, those diehard enemies of everything that Donald Trump professed throughout 2016 campaign, have now apparently triumphed, at least in foreign policy. Despite their scarcely-hidden disdain for “that interloper from Manhattan” and their hatred for—and fear of—his America First agenda, they managed early on to ingratiate themselves into his inner circle.

First came the iniquitous Nikki Haley who had, during 2016, likened our future president to a KKK fellow traveler, a racist and a bigot:

I know what that rhetoric can do. I saw it happen [and] I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK. That is not a part of our party, that is not who we want as president. We will not allow that in our country.

Yet, largely through the counsel of his Republican advisers Trump named the former Waffle House waitress to be our ambassador to the UN (and the voice not of Trump, but of the unbridled war hawk Neoconservative Lindsey Graham).

Then came the possible selection of ultra-Neocon globalist, Never Trumper Elliott Abrams to be Deputy Secretary of State under Rex Tillerson. Again, the GOP advisers and Establishment types who had immediately surrounded Trump after his election pressed for Abrams to fill the post, and only last minute lobbying and critical information passed to the president about Abrams’ virulent attacks on him prevented his naming.

Here is how The New York Times reported Abrams’ Never Trumpism in February 2017:

“Do not allow the Republican convention to be a coronation wherein Trump and Trumpism are unchallenged,” Abrams wrote in a piece for the conservative Weekly Standard. “The party needs to be reminded that there are deep divisions, and Trump needs to be reminded of how many in the party oppose and even fear his nomination.”

Abrams’ selection was knocked down. But the resilient and persistent Neocon foreign policy establishment—which had been so violently anti-Trump, almost to the point of paroxysm during the campaign—now had a toehold, indeed, increasingly a stranglehold within the president’s foreign policy team, and they were not about to give it up—even if it meant swallowing their pride and denying all the critical and malicious things that they had said about the president, all the acerbic and hysterical criticisms they had launched against him, during the previous campaign.

This attitudinal “change” became readily apparent in watching the prominent Neocons on Fox or in reading the pages of The Wall Street Journal, or The Weekly Standard and other mouthpieces of Neocon globalist zealotry.

John Bolton, another fierce globalist opponent of the president’s America First agenda, was the latest conquest by the Establishment internationalists. And once again Donald Trump was convinced that Bolton—whose history of vigorous support for unsuccessful foreign interventions is noteworthy—was the right man for the right job.

There is, needless to say, a lesson here: in 2016 Americans wanted an outsider, a man not stained by the grimy and infectious politics of the Deep State and the contagion that rages continually along the Potomac, to come in and clean house, to, as it were, “drain the swamp,” to restore America to its citizens: in short, to Make America Great Again.

But just as there are major advantages to an outsider, a self-made billionaire not beholden to anyone or any faction, entering the fray, there are also major disadvantages and pitfalls. And perhaps the biggest is not knowing, not fully understanding the philosophical and political intricacies of Washington, and the simple fact that a smile and promise of loyalty and support in our nation’s capital is worth about as much as former Vice-President John Nance Garner’s “bucket of warm spit” (I think ole’ John used another term!).

Promises along the Potomac are made to be broken—allegiances exist to further overall policy aims. And in the case of the Neocon ideologues, to quote King Henry of Navarre, a Protestant who wanted to become king of Catholic France, “Paris is worth a Mass.”

Call it naivete’—call it trust in a man’s word—call it what you may, but Donald Trump’s worst enemies, those who wish to undo his America First agenda enunciated during the 2016 campaign, are now in charge of American foreign policy, and they apparently have convinced the president not only that they are on his side, but that he is actually following through on his promises when in fact he is being used as a stalking horse, a vehicle, for their agenda, which is inimical to his.

And the result may well mean the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, or, at the very least, the fact that the Washington elites, the managerial state, those globalists who have always opposed the program announced by the president, have regained the momentum. And it may also mean that the slight door ajar, the small opportunity that millions of Americans hoped and prayed for back in November 2016, has now closed.

And if that be the case, then we as a nation are just one more step on the seemingly inevitable road to something that will make George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen-Eighty-Four, seem like a church picnic on a sunny spring afternoon.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: Is it insane to push for war with Russia, a major nuclear power?

Is it insane to threaten Russia and bring false charges against her?

Is it insane to brag about killing “hundreds of Russians”?

A normal person would answer “yes” to the three questions. So what does this tell us about Trump’s government as these insane actions are the principle practice of Trump’s government?

Does anyone doubt that Nikki Haley is insane?

Does anyone doubt that John Bolton is insane?

Does anyone doubt that Mike Pompeo is insane?

Does this mean that Trump is insane for appointing to the top positions insane people who foment war with a nuclear power?

Does this mean that Congress is insane for approving these appointments?

These are honest questions.

Assuming we avoid the Trump-promised Syrian showdown, how long before the insane Trump regime orchestrates another crisis?

The entire world should understand that because of the existence of the insane Trump regime, the continued existence of life on earth is very much in question.

People such as Stephen Cohen and myself, who were actively involved throughout the entirety of the Cold War, are astonished at the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the US government and its European vassals toward Russia. Nothing as irresponsible as what we have witnessed since the Clinton regime and which has worsened dramatically under the Obama and Trump regimes would have been imaginable during the Cold War. In this brief video, Stephen Cohen describes to Tucker Carlson the extreme danger of the present situation: