Trump's Game -- Addendum

My previous post featured four pretty much symbiotic theories as to why Trump doesn’t just walk in the door of the Justice Department and go wild with a machete.  But there’s another theory -- Number Five -- that is also symbiotic with the rest, and for which evidence mounts daily.  It is that as the “probe” drones on it keeps coming up against evidence that, yeah, there was “collusion” and all kinds of other high-jinks around the 2016 election, but that much of it can be traced to the Democrats/liberals/”progressives” and their allies and facilitators in the Deep State.  (And I’m not just talking about the shabby treatment the Democratic powers-that-be handed out to poor old Bernie.)

In other words, once you’ve decided to go after the “bad guys” (i.e. Trump and his supporters) you’re going to ensnare some of the “good guys” as well.  (Kind of reminds me of the parable of the wheat and the tares; I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which in this case.)  Of course it would be natural enough if Mueller & Co. would slam on the brakes every time they looked under a rock and found a Democrat lurking there -- but that would be asking too much.  I guess they figure that uncovering a little bit of Democratic hanky-panky is a small price to pay if the ultimate payoff is a moving van pulling up to the White House and removing all of Trump’s stuff, while Trump himself is led away in handcuffs and leg irons -- well, that is their vision at any rate; this is what they live for, after all.  Their noble vision for America is to invalidate the results of a presidential election; how far we’ve come!  Plus, a bit of collateral damage done to the other side might be seen as a way of boosting the probers’ credentials as “impartial” (assuming there is anyone left on the planet who seriously believes that).

So, of course, anything as ham-handed as the Mueller probe is going to spread destruction in all directions, so that’s another reason why Trump & Co. might not be all that anxious to see it come to an end.  To put it another way, Mueller and his staff of witch hunters have already made up their minds, and the hard-core Opposition/Resistance has made up its mind, so those parties can be written off.  What cannot be written off so readily is the independents, who are, occasionally, amenable to actual facts -- unlike the hard core on the left.  So the gradual exposure of Democratic wrongdoing can only count as a plus as far as the Trump camp is concerned.  Why step in and mess things up at this point?   

But the broader problem is that corruption, however defined and of any degree of seriousness one cares to focus on, is pretty much endemic in politics -- in our time at least, and I daresay things were never any different.  So if you’re going to “root out” corruption in, and by, one party or one faction, it’s going to be very difficult to, at the same time, shield the other side from any suspicion.  Add to this the fact that the “Resistance” and the anti-Trump Republicans have been in cahoots from the beginning -- at least since the legendary escalator ride which kicked off Trump’s campaign.  (We have only to recall the number of mainstream Republican politicians who openly declared that they would rather lose the election to Hillary than have Trump elected.)  The age-old saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has never applied more strikingly than it is doing in American politics, right now today, before our very eyes.  For -- think about it -- the one thing that all of the opposition agrees on is that Trump has to go.  Stranger alliances have been forged in times of existential peril, the best-known example being the alliance between us and the Soviets in World War II (although even that has to be “nuanced” in that a substantial part of the administration and the Deep State of that era had already been mesmerized and co-opted by Uncle Joe Stalin long before the war broke out). 

The mistake would be in assuming that there is an unbridgeable divide between the “left” and the “right” in American politics -- between “socialists” and “capitalists”, or between “collectivists” and “free market” advocates, etc.  What they have in common is more important than their -- usually superficial -- differences.  They are all pretty much globalists, for one thing -- and they are all still committed to the notion of the U.S. being the world’s policeman, although what, and whom, needs policing is still a subject for debate.  A “vigorous foreign policy” is something that they pretty much all agree on -- for, again, slightly different reasons.  And they are all pretty much statists; domestic policy debates generally boil down to how much socialism, how much collectivism, and who has to make way while still paying for it all by way of taxes.  But it’s a matter of degree rather than kind; no one dares ask the tough questions, most of which amount to “Is this any of the government’s business?”  The implicit answer is that of course it is; all of the political turmoil occurs at the margins -- in the gray areas, of which there are fewer and fewer.  (If wedding cakes can be politicized, nothing is safe.)  And to give up America’s preeminence in world affairs -- its hegemony -- well, that’s not up for debate either.  Way too risky.  Way too much at stake. 

And it’s not even as if Trump & Co. have taken any major steps to alter the basic premises or the trajectory of our foreign policy, because they haven’t.  There were some hints, during the 2016 campaign, that they might -- but those hopes were soon quashed, and the last dying gasp was heard when John Bolton was appointed National Security Advisor.  How “America first” can survive or mean anything when the administration is full of people who never met a war -- or “police action” -- or whatever -- they didn’t like is beyond me. 

And -- getting back to domestic policy -- the question is never “whether” but, again, “how much”.  Has a single federal agency been disbanded since Trump took over?  That would be a “whether” issue, but so far his batting average is zero.  The departments of education, labor, commerce, etc. are alive and well, and as meddlesome as ever.  And Trump’s attempts to de-fang some of the more obtrusive agencies and programs invariably run up against the courts, which are, one might say, the deepest part of the Deep State, while being the least hidden.  The Executive Branch, which supposedly “runs the country”, only runs as much of it as the courts allow it to -- which is typically the least important parts.  Everything that really counts has to wait upon the pleasure of the various circuit, appeals, and district courts, which are the real power centers of the Republic.  (Notice how I didn’t mention Congress in all of this, and for good reason.) 

So I say again -- the presidency in our time is, in many ways, DOA.  A new administration takes over and immediately starts begging and pleading with Congress to approve its “program”… and then what little actually gets approved is subject to court decisions, which typically render the bulk null and void.  This is what “separation of powers” amounts to these days, boys and girls -- a lot of vain hope and delusion, endless posturing and acrimonious debate, and what little gets all the way through the meat grinder is a gray, tasteless mass of incoherence which, nonetheless, requires a vast army of bureaucrats, AKA the Deep State, to “implement”.  And I suppose that the task of implementing something that barely exists, and from which all vestiges of principle have been removed, is good enough to keep this army employed -- and generously compensated, which is why the D.C. area is the wealthiest in the country.  One might say that any nation where the capital is rolling in wealth while the rest is scrambling to put food on the table is a nation in serious trouble.  Well, it’s that realization that energized much of Trump’s support, and continues to do so -- but how much he, or anyone else, can do about it is doubtful. 

And yet the multi-ring circus goes on without pause -- and, as the saying goes, the less there is to fight over the more ferocious the fight becomes.  Hence the current struggle, which -- when you get right down to it -- is, basically, about scraps.  That’s in the practical sense.  In the symbolic sense it seems to be about pretty much everything, and the best evidence for this is the number of people who are willing to stop at nothing, and put their reputations on the line, to erase Donald Trump from public life.  In this it bespeaks a much deeper agenda -- deeper than the Deep State.  But its outlines are becoming more clear as the struggle rages on.