743 Be scared, very scared: Trump's America
Little more than two weeks to go, and Trump's campaign is imploding. My theory is that he has given up on the presidency long ago and is now working on plan B, i.e. monetising his celebrity status and his notoriety in a big way: America is likely to see very much more of Trump after Clinton has become president; quite likely in the shape of some media company or another. But what will come after Trump on the conservative / Republican side? This answer to that question is beyond scary ...
The read below is mind-boggling. It admittedly is lengthy, but bear with it ... it is an un-imaginably horrific account of the arch-conservative, extreme right-wing mindset of sooo many Americans (and how many Australians?). Before we get into it, here, for you to ponder, from a post on the extreme, Trump supporting website, Breitbard:
This betrayal of the party’s presidential nominee by top echelons of party leadership can only be called overt sabotage. Whether successful or not in denying Trump a victory on November 8, it undoubtedly is the opening shot in a civil war that will erupt full scale on November 9.
So ... if Trump will not get elected, there will be civil war. Be scared, very scared; because that's democracy for you, Trump-style.
OK, Trump, the most insidious, reprehensible smearer in living memory, reckons:
I am the victim
of a great smear
Republican
presidential nominee Donald Trump says he's a "victim of one of the great
political smear campaigns in the history" of the US.
Donald Trump's true
believers ride the conspiracy train
SMH article by Nick O'Malley
Ocala,
Florida: Even if you ignored the allegations of Donald Trump's predatory
behaviour – and his boasting about such behaviour – the Republican
candidate's campaign this week has veered into dark and uncharted waters.
In speeches across
Florida, Trump not only denied the allegations, but he described to his huge
cheering crowds a vast conspiracy that was out to get him, one that included
the media, the Clintons, the FBI, the NSA, Congress – including
congressional Republicans – the UN and "global financial
powers".
The election, he said,
was being rigged. He and his supporters were in a fight to save civilisation.
Even in the context of
the current campaign, these speeches, coming from the nominee of a major
American political party, were shocking, and to many Americans, confounding.
Inside Trumpland
though, this sort of paranoid language is not so weird. It reflects a
world view that has existed on the right-wing fringes for years, propelled
in large part by a new conservative media ecosystem.
To understand why it
has seeped into the Trump campaign – and hence seized control of the
Republican Party – helps to understand some of the people who have come to
populate Trump's war cabinet.
The man who can
perhaps lay claim to being Trump's political svengali is Roger Stone, a
right-wing operative who cut his teeth working for Richard Nixon and who is now
known as much for the Nixon tattoo between his shoulder blades as he is for his
natty suits.
Stone has long hated
the Clinton political machine. Back in 2008 he created a registered political
outfit called Citizens United Not Timid, a name that is less clumsy but more
ugly when you consider it as an acronym. It was designed specifically to attack
Hillary Clinton.
Stone is a noted
conspiracy theorist. You can see his fingerprints in Trump's claims in the
dying days of the primary campaign that Ted Cruz's father had a hand in the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He has successfully monetised his
claims and his notoriety. His Twitter feed is a mix of slander of Trump's
opponents and spruiking of his own books, Jeb and the Bush Crime Family
and The Clintons' War on Women, from which Trump is now cribbing his
attacks on Hillary Clinton for Bill Clinton's alleged rapes.
Stone is close to Alex
Jones, the gravel voice behind the fringe-right web news outfit Infowars
and a nationally syndicated radio show. Jones believes – or at least tells
his listeners he believes – that the government conducted the Sandy Hook
massacre in order to justify gun confiscations and that the moon landing was faked.
He and Stone received
an ovation at a fringe event they hosted in Cleveland during the Republican
National Convention attended by Fairfax Media. He leapt on stage and began his
speech yelling "Hillary for prison". That night the chant "Lock
her up" thundered around the convention arena for the first time. This
week after the chant broke out at a rally in Florida, Trump snarled into his
microphone, "She should be locked up".
Stone was bumped from
the campaign after calling a CNN personality a "stupid negro" and a
"fat negro", but he remains close to Trump and claims to be the
organisation's back channel to WikiLeaks, which is publishing damaging private
emails hacked from the Democratic Party. He boasted in a recent interview that
his plan for victory was to have Trump win the debates and leave it to
WikiLeaks to finish Clinton off.
Trump's first campaign
manager was Corey Lewandowski who was also sacked from the campaign, in his
case after he was charged with battery after forcefully grabbing a young female
reporter who was seeking to ask a question of Trump. (The prosecution did not
proceed.) The reporter happened to work for another far-right conspiracy-prone
news outfit that backed Trump, Breitbart News, which attracts more
than 20 million unique users a month.
In a twist of fate
– or circumstance – that could only make sense in this election, he
was replaced by that reporter's boss, Breitbart News executive chairman Steve
Bannon. Many of Bannon's staff were disgusted and some quit, complaining that
"Breitbart's unabashed embrace of Mr Trump, particularly at the
seeming expense of its own reporter, struck them as a betrayal of its
mission,"The New York Times reported.
Bannon, who left the
navy only to make his fortune as a Goldman Sachs banker, was described in a
Bloomberg profile
last year as the most dangerous political operative in America. Bannon is an
unabashed populist conservative, as mistrustful of establishment Republicans as
he is of those in the Democratic Party.
Through Breitbart
News, Bannon managed to stir up the Republican insurrection that saw the
party's most senior figure, John Boehner, ousted as Speaker of the House of
Representatives. It is not hard to see his words in Donald Trump's mouth as
Trump attacks the current house speaker, Paul Ryan in his current speeches.
According to emails
obtained by the Daily Beast, Bannon actively sought to have a grass
roots movement take off to destroy the Congressional leadership of the
Republican Party in 2014.
"Leadership are
all c---s," he wrote. "We should just go buck wild."
And later, "Let
the grassroots turn on the hate because that's the ONLY thing that will make
them do their duty."
For months now
Republican Party elders have struggled to find a way to manage Trump's takeover
of their party. it must have dawned on them by now that he is not
running what they would recognise as a Republican political campaign. Indeed
Trump himself keeps telling his audiences that they are part of a "a
movement, a beautiful movement".
Trump's arrival might
have appeared sudden, but the party itself prepared the ground for it. For
years it pandered to the far right, and it enjoyed the narrative created by
conservative media like Fox News that the Obama administration was entirely
corrupt, wrong in each of its actions, in thought and deed. It opposed all
administration legislation as a matter of strategy.
This worked to block a
number of President Barack Obama's initiatives, but as Congress ground to a
halt it served also to further damage the faith of the American electorate in
the political process. Today congressional job approval stands at 14.5 per
cent.
The general mistrust
of politics and politicians that was established by the strategy of obstruction
damaged the Republican Party as much or more than it did the Democratic Party,
at least at the congressional level.
Through the fissures
in trust that opened up poured the likes of Donald Trump, along with his
advisers and enablers, men like Jones and Lewandowski and Bannon. Over the same
period the power of the old media waned, victim not only to its own failings
but to changing technology.
The new media
– outfits like Breitbart News – secured sections of the
fragmented audience.
The news they served
that audience reinforced a vision of out-of-touch elites working against the
interests of everyday Americans, the vision that Trump has so effectively
harnessed under the tutelage of Bannon.
On Thursday afternoon
in Ocala in rural northern Florida, Trump's language took on an even more dark
and apocalyptic tone.
"This election
will determine whether we remain a free country in the truest sense of the word
or we become a corrupt banana republic controlled by large donors and foreign
governments," he told the crowd. "The election of Hillary Clinton
would lead to the destruction of our country."
Dark forces, he said,
were behind not just claims about his own behaviour, but Clinton's lead in the
polls.
"There's a whole
deal going on there. I mean, you know. There's a whole deal going on and figure
it out. I always figure things out. But there's a whole sinister deal going on.
"Crooked Hillary
wants to end forever the American independence that our founders gave us. Our
great founders are spinning in their graves, our founders are spinning in their
graves."
After Trump laid out
his conspiracy theory to an audience of around 12,000 I asked a woman if she
truly believed what she had heard, that every institution from the Commission
for Presidential Debates, to the FBI, to Paul Ryan himself, The New York
Times, unnamed global financial interests, were somehow out to get Trump
because he was the only hope of the common people.
"Yes", she
said, "the media is all bought and paid for. You don't know what is really
going on."
The Republican Party
is in shock. It is one thing to traduce political enemies, another to disrupt
the smooth transfer of power distinctive to advanced Western democracies.
Only obscure members
of Congress appeared on Thursday and Friday's news programs to defend Trump and
his theories.
Some prominent party
figures, including Senator Lindsey Graham, have called upon Trump to stop
claiming the election was being rigged unless he could provide evidence.
"I believe that
the country will survive long after I'm gone but the country really is a
process and the election process I think we need to respect it rather than
create doubt about it. Americans have enough to worry about already," he
told CNN last week. "Let's don't suggest the election's rigged."
But Trump shows no
sign letting up, and nor does his war council.
"If you can't
have an honest election, nothing else counts," Stone said in an interview
with Breitbart News, predicting widespread pro-Trump protests should
Clinton win the election.
"I think he's got
to put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical – and
when I mean civil disobedience, not violence – but it will be a bloodbath.
The government will be truly shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear
Hillary in. No. We will not stand for it."