Die Essenz von Trump... Soup To Nuts

War against Iran is a wet dream for Bolton

In December of 2016, John Bolton hadn't infiltrated the Trumpist Regime yet. When Alex Campbell predicted a war, it was Bannon, a war of civilizations kind of maniac, who was telling Trump what to do. He's gone and now Bolton is running the show and, if anything, m he's even worse than Bannon-- and even more likely to steer Trump into a war. Yesterday John Marshall noted that "Looking at the escalating (US-created) crisis with Iran, one thing I realize is that a lot of people do not quite know who John Bolton is. They assume-- rightly-- that anyone in the Trump orbit must be either a moral weakling, a crazy person or someone with one foot out the door. All true. But John Bolton is a unique and uniquely dangerous character."

Bolton is a caricature of a militarist and warmonger. He is sometimes classed with the so-called “neo-conservatives” who played the central role getting the country into the Iraq War. This isn’t really correct, either in classification or historical terms. For all their shortcomings many of the leading neoconservative policy hands and intellectuals were big on democracy promotion-- often in foolish ways, usually only when it was convenient and mainly in Europe. But this is at least part of the worldview... In really every context he is for hard US dominance, unilateralism and war as the preferred course of action. Again, he’s really the caricature of a militarist, the kind of one-dimensional, clownishly hawkish type who gets described in small circulation left-wing magazines but can’t possibly exist in real life, only he does exist and his name is John Bolton.

...As I said earlier, there’s really no one left in the Trump national security world to say no to him or ignore intemperate orders. But there is Bolton who is precisely the kind of person who to goad the President into issuing such orders. He’s also precisely the kind of player who would architect together a series of fait accompli that would deprive Trump over much choice of the matter. What seems to have been happening over the last year is that Bolton has been trying to push Iran into a corner and force a military confrontation. That hasn’t worked. So now they appear to be cooking up ‘threats’ from Iran to force the confrontation they’ve been unable to force to date. (I suspect the ‘threats’ are just the garden variety background noise of intelligence, now churned up to provide a pretext for escalation.) Bolton is also highly political in the partisan sense. It would not surprise me in the least if he is pushing Trump on the idea that a war or limited military engagement with Iran would ensure his reelection next year.

Bolton is that bad-- a comically caricatured militarist, an extremely effective and smart bureaucratic player and entirely capable of lying the country into war or playing on the enthusiasms and insecurities of an ignorant President.

Do you remember Larry Lindsey? Chubby guy who was George W. Bush's chief economic advisor? Tuesday he spoke to both the House Republican leadership and, separately, to top committee Republicans. Politico explained why his presentation about China and trade turned a lot of heads. "Lindsey said he enlisted two psychiatrists to analyze the president from afar. China views Trump as a 'total narcissist'-- 'a 10-out-of-10 narcissist,'" he said. Lindsey attributed this to the president’s upbringing and said his mother didn’t pay him adequate attention in childhood... Lindsey said Trump has no long-term plans or ability to think ahead. He said the president has the long-term decision-making ability of an 'empty chair.'" So GOP heads weren't so much turning as they were spinning.




There's an exhaustive piece on Trump's bigotry-- a team effort-- in the June issue of The Atlantic, which I recommend highly. They began by reminding us that "the first quotation from Donald Trump ever to appear in the New York Times came on October 16, 1973. Trump was responding to charges filed by the Justice Department alleging racial bias at his family’s real-estate company. 'They are absolutely ridiculous,' Trump said of the charges. 'We have never discriminated, and we never would.' In the years since then, Trump has assembled a long record of comment on issues involving African Americans as well as Mexicans, Hispanics more broadly, Native Americans, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, women, and people with disabilities. His statements have been reflected in his behavior-- from public acts (placing ads calling for the execution of five young black and Latino men accused of rape, who were later shown to be innocent) to private preferences ('When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,' a former employee of Trump’s Castle, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, told a writer for the New Yorker). Trump emerged as a political force owing to his full-throated embrace of 'birtherism,' the false charge that the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States. His presidential campaign was fueled by nativist sentiment directed at nonwhite immigrants, and he proposed barring Muslims from entering the country. In 2016, Trump described himself to the Washington Post as 'the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.' Instances of bigotry involving Donald Trump span more than four decades. The Atlantic interviewed a range of people with knowledge of several of those episodes." You should read them here if you needed to be reminded about what a racist sack of shit is living in the White House.