Then on Tuesday, he announced the most Trump-brained scheme imaginable. Welcoming indicted war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu to the Oval Office the president announced his scheme for lasting peace in the Middle East: expel all Palestinians from Gaza. Under this "initiative", Israeli troops would withdraw and US troops would come in to facilitate the relocation of the remaining population to neighbouring Arab states. Not having consulted the governments of these countries, and Amman making it clear that such an expulsion would mean Jordan going to war with Israel, it's fair to say the proposal hasn't landed well. White House pressers and Trump's State Department stooge, the ultra-Zionist Marco Rubio, found this too much to stomach. Any transfer would be "temporary", he said and wouldn't involve any American troops. Unfortunately for little Marco, the boss has other ideas.
On his Truth Social vanity site, Trump restated his support for removing Palestinians. Gaza should be turned over to the US after they've been resettled. And how is this going to happen? Presumably, by Israel. Which would can the pause in the massacre and the exchange of hostages and spark off another round of bloodletting. But all Trump can see are the beach front real estate opportunities, of turning the site of this century's live-streamed genocide into a tourist trap. What a moral blank of a man. And one unlikely to get his way.
It was far from intentional, but Israel's indiscriminate "revenge" for the 7th October Hamas offensive sparked off a series of events that consolidated the State Department's Middle Eastern objectives. Hamas and Hezbollah, severely weakened. Iran's military capacities diminished. Supply routes from Tehran to Beirut curtailed. Al-Assad gone. Russian bases removed. And client Arab regimes safe from the backlash against their craven acceptance of the massacre, for the moment. Trump's comment alone threaten to reverse the strong US position by uniting Arab publics and governments against America. And the only way such an operation could be achieved is by a US occupation, which would lead to hundreds if not thousands of US soldiers heading home in body bags, an even more febrile Middle East, and undoubtedly a turn away from America to China. And, for that matter, a global distancing from the US. It would be an unparalleled and grimly ludicrous failure of statecraft.
And there's the home front too. No one among the MAGA base are keen to see American lives expended in Palestine. No Republican member of Congress wants to bleed votes. And that's before we get to the humongous anti-war movement Trump's stupidity would touch off. The new White House might want to bury politics-as-usual under a blizzard of unhinged and vindictive executive orders, but not even the Donald's tangerine dream world can ignore political realities.
Following the Steve Bannan play book of "flooding the zone with shit", the into-everywhere-at-once chaos of Trump's presidency has discombobulated and demoralised swathes of bourgeois opposition that fashionably associated with "the resistance" between 2016-2020. Which itself takes advantage of the zero preparation the Democrats have undertaken for life in opposition to Trump since their miserable failure in November. But doing so much at once threatens opposition on all fronts too. Despite this, the administration cannot help itself. That having re-won the presidency by something of a sliver, different sections of the Trump coalition are going fast and hard on meeting their own individual objectives. It's every oligarch for themselves with little sense of a common project or for things like maintaining popular consent for their rule. In Musk's case, it's dismantling regulators and shaking down the state, and smashing up other agencies as red meat for the base. Presently, this behaviour has stunned domestic politics and has left America's allies/satraps aghast and consequences there will be for the US in general and Trump's presidency in particular. The retreats on tariffs and welfare cheques, and the speed at which decisions are made are demonstrative of a fundamental weakness in the Trump project. It is not time for opponents to give up or, worse, bend the knee. Amid the razzmatazz of reaction lies a regime vulnerable to elite and mass opposition. Trump and his acolytes are testing their limits, which makes now the best and potentially most decisive moment for fighting back.
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4 comments:
What entity within the US is going to lead a unified fightback? The Democratic Party is visibly incapable.
The Trumpists' strategy for suppressing a widespread, disorganised fightback is to make it very clear that individuals within the US who resist the regime in any substantive way will face unrestrained revenge backed by every resource available to the Presidency. That will probably work.
The only entities which can stand up to that kind of pressure are those which are outside the White House's jurisdiction, and big enough to be targeted in the first place. Thus Columbia, Canada, Mexico, Jordan, China are able to tell the Orange One where to shove it. Nobody within the US itself who actually possesses any power or standing enjoys that privilege. Therefore I'm sure that his puppeteers would REALLY prefer it if he would stick to a script of purely domestic crockery-smashing.
The only group within the US that can stop it - before it crosses hard red lines, requiring significant catastrophe to breach - is the Republican Party; and only by getting sufficiently cold feet that they will band together to replace the regent. The regent himself (and some of his closest allies) seem determined to test what it will take to make that happen.
Nobody messes with the pub nutter...
For all the shock and awe, the actual damage had been minimal. The point is a lot of dubious actors out there who've been able to exploit liberal complacency and decadence for their own ends for a long time are now seriously worried they can't just slide back into exploitative ways. Whether it's Iran's Imperialist puppets, DEI grifters, drug cartels, environmentalist charlatans, activist lawyers, the identity politics business... ad infinitum... they are all genuinely worried he might smash them to pieces with his tantrums where previously they could rely on the old order to ultimately let their hustles slide.
I doubt he will do even a fraction of the damage he is threatening to, but the threat of it is serious enough now that they'll temper how much shit they will try and pull. For all his crudity and vulgarity Trump is a hardnosed businessman and he can see where the US was getting it's pants pulled down, either domestically or internationally, and there's a lot of piss takers out there who will probably reign it in rather than risk everything for a show down. Not great of you're sympathetic to the pisstakers, even worse if you're one of them, but it will settle down.
Unless it's a chatbot hallucination which has hoodwinked journalists into repeating it, this idea is apparently called "the madman theory"; named by Nixon, when he advocated using a similar strategy to try and win the Vietnam war.
Nixon did not, of course, win the Vietnam war. Nor am I aware of any historical examples of "the madman theory" actually being successful.
There seems to be a pattern emerging in how the more literate of those right wingers who have pinned their own egos to Trump's wagon are scrambling to rationalise his clearly deranged behaviour. Variants of "the madman theory" are a common theme, and so I'm not surprised in the slightest to find this blog's resident Telegraph zombie Kamo coming up with that.
Trump and his supporters are already getting bogged down in the mire of the capitalist state's obstruction, just as Bojo found in Britain with Brexit. The courts have blocked a lot of his Executive Orders, he has already failed on most of his election promises on Ukraine, China, Mexico and so on.
The resistance is the capitalist state, and that is before any action by financial markets to tank US bonds, if he comes back with more tariffs etc.
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