The “Treasonous” Trajectory of Trumpism

3,428 words

The Rise of Trumpism 1.0

“But we — Communists, the party — will not divide power with anyone.”

Thus spoke Anatoly Lukyanov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1987, four years before the Soviet workers’ paradise collapsed.

“Pride goeth before destruction,” as Proverbs warns us — a piece of wisdom apparently lost on the aging Bolsheviks perched on the precipice of a Communist version of “Chapter Eleven.”

Lukyanov’s chest-thumping boast suitably edited could be the subject heading of an internal Democrat National Committee (DNC) party memo. They have long channeled Vladimir Lenin, who had only one rule: There are no rules. Whatever keeps you in power — lying, cheating, political assassination — stays in the playbook.

Two former Democrat presidents, when their internal filters were switched to “off” for recharging, are on the record for talking like mafia capos: “You gotta do what you gotta do,” Bill Clinton quipped to an aggrieved Bob Dole after he whipped him in 1996. Or, as President Obama put it during his reign, “If they bring a knife, we bring a gun.”

Better yet, click on the archived phone conversation of Lyndon Johnson from 1966 where he is trying to persuade Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy to back off his criticism of LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War. The President was ruminating on his difficulties with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, and how, Tony Soprano style, he got rid of him.

From the audio recording:

He [Diem] was corrupt and he oughta be killed, so we killed him. We all got together and got a bunch of goddamn thugs and we went in and assassinated him.

LBJ omitted that the “goddam thugs” also killed Diem’s brother.

Today’s Democrats have dropped any pretense in their aim for a one-party state and complete ownership of power, no competition allowed. We are almost there.

Some recent history to make this point. I call it, “The era of Trumpism 1.0.”

After eight years of Obama bloviating about such things as “racism in our DNA,” hobknobbing with the likes of Al Sharpton, siccing the Internal Revenue Service on his critics and meeting with and endorsing Black Lives Matter thugs, his party decided to ramp up his 2008 promise to fundamentally transform the United States of America. To move closer to what appeared to be his goal of turning America into North Zimbabwe, the Democrats in 2016, with no shame or conscience, surrendered completely to Obama the Second — Obama minus the charm, but with more testosterone:  Hillary Rodham Clinton. A soulless grifter, a Brezhnev-like mummy minus the General’s jacket and 40 pounds of fake medals, she could have come straight out of a dark political satire — perhaps Erich Honecker in drag. She was cheered on by the propaganda organs of the media syndicates, Wall Street, and the Hollywood idiots.

At the time of her nomination, she was a target of a “federal criminal investigation” conducted by her cronies in the FBI as a front for a coverup. Still, the “Crooked Hillary” moniker that Donald Trump would attach to her had an immediately powerful resonance given her shady history reaching back to scandals such as Whitewater, Travelgate, and the Vince Foster suicide in the early 1990s.

No matter. This humorless kleptocrat, waddled — and on occasion, staggered — through her uninspired campaign, struggling and then finally giving up on coming up with a rationale for why she should be President — other than the fact that being President (“I get to boss everyone around and manage their lives”) is what she always wanted to be.

The Republicans, a pretend party of loyal opposition, could no longer cover the stench of their faithlessness — or rather their faithful devotion to their own sinecured backsides. During the Obama administration’s eight years, in spite of rolling over for him like pet poodles hoping he would scratch their tummies, the bearer of Hope and Change called Congressional Republicans his “enemies” and treated them with the contempt they so richly deserved. Obama normalized the Bolshevik-inspired Alinsky approach to politics by employing his favorite Alinsky rule number five:

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

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Republicans were nothing if not the consummate patsies, making concessions at every turn, Pavlovian in taking the bait of the Democrats and their propagandists and loudly howling: “No, we’re not the mean-spirited, ignorant bigots and racists that you Democrats unrelentingly ridicule us for being. Please, we’re not racists! We celebrate Martin Luther King Day. We’re nice. How can we show you?”

Donald Trump, unlike the Republican Grandees and previous candidates, Mitt Romney and John McCain, refused to play the role of the mainstream media’s bootlicker and court stooge. The 15 or so Republican stiffs in the 2016 presidential primary who huffed and puffed about how unfit Trump was to be President got the backhand from the rank-and-file, who finally had a candidate who didn’t wilt and start vomiting apologies when some airhead CNN nobody or a New York Times Clinton bum-kisser such as Nicholas Kristof called him a “racist.”

In Trump’s improbable path to the Presidency from his entry into the race, one can look back and see how his opposition — the mainstream media, the entertainment moguls, the Democrats, the neoconservatives — upped the ferocity of attack at each step of his ascent. He started out as a joke: “Trump as President?”, followed by derisive laughter. It was inconceivable. Once Trump refused the politically-correct manacles that bound both parties and helped lift him into a position of serious contender for the GOP nomination, however, the derisive laughter gave way to the Alinsky rule of ridicule. Never had a national candidate been bombarded with such a massive, sustained barrage of ridicule and insult from all the major powerful interest groups. The Republican establishment, now in full panic, threw in with Hillary’s motley crew. They peddled the howler that their party would survive a Clinton presidency. But beyond a gaggle of well-heeled Washington, DC insiders, who would care one way or another?

Once Trump had secured the nomination and moved into a head-on collision course with Lady Brezhnev of Chappaqua, the Democrats suddenly embraced the Hindu faith and were talking about reincarnation. Trump’s earlier incarnation was sometimes Hitler, or sometimes Mussolini. Presto! Parachuted into the US in 2016 from 1930s Europe. Or, was he the KKK Grand Kleagle from 1920s America? Who knows? But whoever he had been, Trump was now above all a virulent racist, impossible to conceive as a legitimate contender for power, a chauvinist yahoo who had crashed a party reserved for royalty.

As the election pushed into the fall, in spite of the 24/7 proclamations by leading pundits of Trump’s utter loathsomeness and Hillary’s electoral invincibility and inevitability, there was some unease among the neophyte Hindus.

On September 21, speaking to the Laborer’s International Union of North America, Hillary let it slip with her characteristic whine: “Why aren’t I 50 points ahead?” Excellent question, Madam Goldman Ca-ching-ca-ching Sachs, given the conventional wisdom of Orange Man’s impending electoral doom. For Hillary and her retinue of feminist banshees and beta males, the answer was obvious. When you embody the politics of goodness, wisdom, and perfection, the doubters and naysayers have to be defective, seriously morally defective — and thus, the moment of truth. No longer did she need to mince words: Trump’s momentum and support came from that “basket of deplorables” — the “racist,” “sexist,” “you name it” bigots. These were apparently the folks who refused to relish a future of unemployment. They failed to grasp the intricacies of transgenderism and its pronoun assignations, and remained convinced that “Black Lives Matter” was just a euphemism for a bunch of cop-hating, white-people-bashing, riot-fomenting bullies.

In the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Castro’s Cuba, or any of the other socialist workers’ paradises long admired by the parlor Bolsheviks on American university campuses, shadows cast on how the “progress” engineered by the party bosses was working out was dismissed as the discontent of those pesky fascists, who were, of course, “irredeemable” and thus completely beyond the pale.

“Racism” is the American, go-to version of fascism for Stalinist Democrats. If you oppose them, you are a fascist, which is generic for racist, and racists are not legitimate competitors. They are enemies, “haters of people not like themselves.” They are, as Hillary so graciously put it, “thankfully not America.” “Racism” is the ultimate “Orwellianism” of our time, invoked wherever and whenever needed by the ideologues to smear the opposition and keep the rabble on a slow boil.

Stalin had consigned his one-time arch-rival, Leon Trotsky, to the ranks of the fascists. Hillary’s campaign took on a Stalinist modus operandi and, as you will recall, reduced Trump and his supporters to Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. You don’t do business or share power with people such as these. You don’t become the loyal opposition to Nazis: you resist, then eliminate them.

The elimination envisioned before November 8 was a massive electoral triumph for Hillary. That “basket of deplorables” would then no longer be a problem. With a Hillary-packed Supreme Court; an Al Sharpton guest room in the White House; some hefty, no-nonsense “hate speech” laws such as those in Europe, and a few million more third-world immigrant dependents to import and turn the remaining red states blue, Obama’s “bitter clingers” that he complained about in 2008 would, indeed, no longer be much of a part of America. Poof! Goodbye, red-state America. Welcome to Hillary-Land, where boys who want to can be girls, where only good intentions are allowed, and where no suspected racist, sexist, homophobe, or Islamophobe will go unpunished.

With Trump’s astonishing upset victory, incredulity gave way to derangement and then desperation. “Elimination” became delegitimation: massive protests featuring vagina-ware failed. We saw attempted baseless recounts, Electoral College subversion, immediate impeachment chatter, invocation of the 25th Amendment, and charges of Russian collusion. The “Trump as Nazi” motif of the Left transitioned into “the Resistance,” and “America under occupation.”

Inauguration Day, January 2017 bore little resemblance to any other in American history since the Civil War. Consider for a moment the state of the union when Donald Trump took the oath of office. Against staggering odds, a populist, establishment outsider pilloried, Pravda-like, by the Left’s propaganda organs had defeated the most powerful, corrupt political machine in post-war history: the Clintons. Moreover, he had done this against the machinations of back-stabbing Conservative Inc. Along with the Presidency, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and were in the Governors’ mansions in 33 states. The Supreme Court was likewise majority conservative, with two aging Leftist judges leaning on the exit door.

Not since the end of the Second World War had American electoral political forces suddenly, unexpectedly aligned to present an unprecedented opportunity for the patriotic Right to turn back the Left’s seemingly unstoppable juggernaut.

Never, however, was there such a gulf between appearance and reality. Trump proved utterly incapable of wielding the power of his office. Unlike his immediate predecessor, Obama, he was totally oblivious to what distinguished his friends from his enemies. Instead of becoming the Caesar who, as he had promised, would “lock Hillary up,” “drain the swamp,” and “build a wall,” he twittered his four years away, unleashing the COVID terror lockdown led by Tony Lysenko Fauci, letting Black Lives Matter gangs plunder American cities, and helplessly watch the Democrats rig his 2020 ouster. Our American Fuhrer couldn’t even scare a creepy little nerd like Jack Dorsey, who cancelled his Twitter account. The appearance of power was a chimera that quickly collapsed, displaying the reality of the uniparty that closed ranks to protect “the swamp.”

Four demoralizing years later, on Inauguration Day 2021, naked reality was on display: masked-up myrmidons of the junta huddled behind concertina wire, guarded by federal troops. Taking the oath of office was a decrepit serial plagiarizer, fabulist blowhard who reeked with the stench of the swamp after almost 50 years of burrowing inti its muck — and a man that you would not leave alone with your young daughter. The farce took place, of course, in Washington, DC; the event, however, looked more like a ceremonial regime change in Tegucigalpa.

Biden’s junta quickly moved to show Americans what twenty-first century Stalinism would look like — or better, feel like.

His Justice Department began to function like Stalin’s Cheka, rounding up and incarcerating enemies of the state – aka “white supremacists” from January 6 — and staging show-trials of white policemen for “murdering” black criminals. The mainstream media, just as the Soviet propaganda organs, were howling with self-righteous fury about “racist cops” and their selective brutality aimed at black men simply for being nice black men. Cabinet appointments were strictly Affirmative Action-based, plus Jewish neocons crooning the John and Yoko hippie classic with a neocon spin: “All we are saying is give war a chance.” Russia, why not? China, bring it on! Then, on to “Bomb, bomb Iran.” What could go wrong?

Trumpism 2.0

Now on to the current era of Trumpism 2.0, or, “Trump as treasonous Trotsky.”

Donald Trump never went away after the 2020 Presidential Election debacle, and maybe that was the plan. He’s turning out to be useful, even comedic in his inimitable Trumpesque fashion. Since his ouster from office, Trump looks like the cocky Road Runner cartoon character taunting Wile E. Coyote (the uniparty) on the chase. It can never quite catch him and turn him into roadkill. Every new indictment only animates him and raises his popularity with the deplorables. What is the future of Orange Road Runner with the Stalinist Wile E. Coyotes hot on his trail?

To understand the unfolding of twenty-first century American Stalinism and its engagement with Trump, it’s useful to go to the fons et origo. This brings us back to Trotsky and his role as the evil-personified enemy of the “democracy” Stalin had guaranteed in the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, of which he personally supervised the drafting. Stalin recognized the largely approbative function of the word “democracy.” It is inherently wonderful, so whatever verbiage you attach to it, and whatever it pretends to represent must also be wonderful. This is why “our democracy” is sprinkled so frequently in the boilerplate banalities churned out for public consumption by our oligarchs, who despise the demos and live like Ottoman pashas.

The Russian people’s support for the Stalinist regime worked in two ways. First, it was sold to them as a regime of virtue, a society that emerged heroically out of a brutal struggle against a corrupt old order. It had conquered greed, exploitation, and inequality. Its continued existence was a promise of a future free of very bad people, which meant the eventual disappearance of all those “isms” behind “inequality” and the elimination of “privilege” enjoyed by the underserving exploiters of the good people.

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Second, the progress of this regime of virtue had elevated the envy and hostility of those very bad people, the “ists” who perpetuate the “isms.” They, of course, were plotting to destroy it. Many of the Russian “ists,” moreover, like our own “racists,” were ordinary citizens, unaware that they were enemies of the people until the Chekists came calling.

A virtue regime always has internal enemies and needs a symbolic leader of them, a handy personification of treason. He becomes a high-profile target for justified destruction which stokes widespread virtue-signaling from the propaganda-imbibing plebeians in the form of rage — e.g., Trump Derangement Syndrome — and support for removing the deplorables who support him. Anyone associated with him gets marked as unredeemable. The treasonous leader also serves as a distraction from the regime’s ongoing failures.

Trotsky was Stalin’s treacherous personification of evil in league with the external fascist enemies of the Soviet Union. Once defrocked by Stalin and on the run, his “Rightist-Trotskyist” conspiracies exploded internally, as well as all sorts of domestic anti-Soviet crimes. Trotsky was the center of the 1930s party purge, the witch-hunts for furtive Trotskyists that included the Great Terror and the infamous show trials. The major old Bolsheviks — Bukharin, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, all of whom were former henchmen of Lenin — were framed as Trotskyists plotting to overthrow the Soviet state.

That Trotsky was a fascist and conspiring with his former revolutionary colleagues to overthrow the Communist government was utterly preposterous. But Stalin was a master dramaturgist, and with the help of gullible journalists such as the New York Times’ then-Moscow Bureau Chief, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Walter Duranty, and Franklin Roosevelt, they appointed Joseph Davies to become US Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He sold their fiction to the West. In Joe Stalin’s Russia, being labeled a “Trotskyist” was like being a “racist” in Joe Biden’s US: Denying it is an invitation to further abuse; confess and beg for mercy.

Trump is now playing the role of Trotsky for the regime with show trials in the making for him and his associates. The January 6 “insurrection” narrative makes him an outcast, an enemy of “our democracy.” Under a tsunami of criminal indictments, he faces decades in prison. Trotsky was the symbol of everything that sullied Soviet virtue, and he was the source of inspiration for the dangerous subversion of his imaginary legion of followers. Trump in 2016 was christened as the avatar of American bigotry, and his ascendency and popularity exposed the pervasiveness of “white supremacy,” the locus of domestic terror. Trumps supporters hate “diversity” and threaten the foundations of “our democracy” the same way Trotskyists threatened the end of equality and the restoration of capitalism.

In 2021, Biden’s Cheka chief, Merrick Garland, aping the Trotsky boogeyman act of Stalin’s number one sadistic enemy-hunter Nicholai Yezhov, put Trump supporters in the crosshairs of his security apparatus: “Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress on Wednesday that violence incited by white supremacists poses ‘the most dangerous threat to our democracy.’”

In that same address to Congress, Garland also played another Stalinist face card as he noted that the danger of terrorism to US citizens had shifted from foreign to domestic sources. Got that, tovarish? Our enemies are now internal, which means a serious ramping up of the surveillance state to catch the bigots you mistook as your friends. The “enemy focus” has suddenly shifted from “them” to “us.”

His remarks were summed up in a Yahoo report:

The threat of domestic terrorism receded in the public imagination after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia and other nations. But as that threat has diminished in recent years, militant white nationalism has returned as a top concern. . . . Republicans continue to insist that antifa and Black Lives Matter are as great a threat to national security as white supremacy, though research has shown that most of last summer’s Black Lives Matter-inspired protests were peaceful.

Trump’s racism and the white supremacist domestic terrorism threatened by his supporters is, like that of Trotsky’s fascism, ludicrous. See “Deconstructing Trump the Fascist” for the details of this idiocy. But American Stalinists, as their forebears, live in an alternative reality — and alternative-reality regimes, as we learned from the Russian experiment, work poorly until they stop working. The geriatric crew in the swamp and their minders haven’t figured it out yet, but “our democracy” is only firing on two of its eight cylinders. Wide-open borders, free money, non-stop foreign wars, and kleptocrats running their “anti-racist” scam to hold the demos at bay are not ingredients in a recipe for anything but eventual collapse.

The coming election cycle promises to be unlike any other in its potential for massive fraud, chaos, and even civil war. Just a few short years ago, no one could imagine a major party nominee running his campaign from a prison cell. Now it’s a distinct possibility raised by Politico, among others.

God knows how it will unfold, but in any case, what takes place in November 2024 will have no resemblance to a fair, legal election. It’s inconceivable under any circumstances that Trump could regain the White House — not with Democrat ballot-harvesting expertise, COVID lockdown options, and a corrupt media could any Republican prevail — not even if the Democrat rival is a drooling President Biden, glued to a wheelchair and recovering from a stroke. Jon Fetterman was a successful test case.

When it is over, the “treasonous” Trump will have played his last cards. Whatever his assigned fate — financial ruin, prison, or murder — his place in American history will be secure as a tragic colossus of raw ambition and inexplicable ineptitude; a man, however, who single-handedly managed to expose two big lies: that elections matter, and that the rule of law is still in place.

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