The new 'one of us'

Following the ins and outs of the White House should be turned into a new board game. It would certainly be an unpredictable game of chance. Who will be next for the chop? Speculation in the last week suggests that Gen. H.R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor is headed for the door. This despite what the New York Review of Books has described as McMaster’s abandonment of his reputation for speaking truth to power and supplanting it with “Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ jingoism.” But privately McMaster finds Trump an ‘idiot,’ and a ’dope’ with the ‘mind of a kindergartener.’ The sacked Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of course earned some credit for acknowledging that Trump was a moron. Meanwhile, the man himself finds McMaster condescending and pedantic. When McMaster was appointed he sacked a number of senior officials – mostly those who had been hired by his predecessor, Gen. Michael Flynn, who had to go after lying to Vice President Pence about his dealings with Russia.

It’s possible that one of those that McMaster sacked could make a comeback. Rich Higgins, who worked on the Trump campaign and landed a job in the national security office wrote a seven page memo analysing a campaign to destroy the president. What is the motivation for this? Here is a flavour of the memo:

While there is certainly a Marxist agenda and even lslamist motivations that must be seriously addressed in their own right, these motivations alone seem inadequate to explain the scope and magnitude of the effort directed against the president. The economic drivers behind the Marxist and Islamist ideologues are enormously influential and seek to leverage these ideological movements for their own self interests. While beyond the actual scope of this document, the benefactors of these political movements include; Urban Real Estate who depend greatly on immigrant tenants, International Banking who seeks to maintain US debtor status so as to control the application of American power, and elements of the business sector that depend upon immigrant labor or government infrastructure. The overall objective of these economic forces is the forced urbanization of the populace, thereby necessitating a larger, more powerful government. In summary, this is a form of population control by certain business cartels in league with cultural Marxists/corporatists/lslamists who will leverage Islamic terrorism threats to justify the creation of a police state.
(The full memo is at http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/10/heres-the-memo-that-blew-up-the-nsc/)

Apparently Trump read the memo and reportedly ‘gushed’ over it, only for his rapture to turn to fury when he heard McMaster had fired its author. I wonder if Trump actually did read it – the memo after all is seven pages long. If he had he might have been shocked to discover that amongst the benefactors of the war against him was ‘Urban Real Estate.’ After all, his father Fred’s big helping hand developing his construction business was ‘powerful government’ itself, as the New York Times reported:

His establishment as one of the city’s biggest developers was hardly free of controversy: The Senate Banking Committee subpoenaed him in 1954 during an investigation into profiteering off federal housing loans. Under oath, he acknowledged that he had wildly overstated the costs of a development to obtain a larger mortgage from the government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html

Then we might consider the international banking community seeking to ‘maintain US debtor status’ in the light of the Trump appointed US Treasury Secretary, ex Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin telling an audience of students that there is no problem with US debt (see my blog 11/3/18) So there is some confusion in Higgins’ thinking, even if it is dressed up in some pseudo political science mumbo-jumbo. We might ask why even bother paying attention to it? The answer lies in the fact that whilst it was seen as a bit OTT, many in the administration thought it was correct. Everyone is out to get the president, even senior Republicans themselves who don’t understand Trump’s revolution.

Perhaps in some ways Trump resembles an early Margaret Thatcher, who had the worst approval ratings of all time before the Falklands war, and who had yet to develop what became ‘Thatcherism.’  ‘One of us’ eventually became the motif of her administration and not merely in terms of sacking ‘wets.’ Thatcher is the last PM we’ve had who relished her divisiveness and even prospered from it. Trump is following suit and it’s futile to hope that there aren’t other parallels.

​It’s an astonishing world when one considers – in the context of Trump – that even people like Rex Tillerson could be a voice of reason or moderation. Watch out Gen. McMaster. You’re next.