Former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Director and future Trump National Security Advisor Mike Flynn with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on December 10, 2015. Flynn was Putin’s special guest at the 10th anniversary dinner of the RT (Russia Today) channel. In the foreground are, with his back to camera, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein.
There’s a pattern, if not a method, to his madness. When Donald Trump gets nervous — or, more accurately, more nervous — he gets weirder. This is part and parcel of the syndrome-as-strategy of the erratic megalomaniac with pronounced know-nothing, neo-fascist tendencies whose political ascendance I began warning about in summer 2015.
Several articles in the immediate aftermath of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn being turned by Trump/Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller dutifully recounted the supposed shock of President Trump and his associates, who purportedly had no idea that the hardcore Trump campaigner and advisor was about to cop a plea and turn state’s evidence. But the signs were there for weeks that Flynn might well give in to Mueller’s obvious threat to throw the book at not only the retired three-star general but also his wacky conspiracy theorist son. And so too were the telltale signs of Trump reacting to the mounting threat by acting even more oddly than usual.
In the few days before Friday’s bombshell announcement, Trump re-tweeted vicious anti-Islam videos from a far right fringe British party (one of whose adherents murdered a British Member of Parliament, screaming the party slogan as he did so), attacked the Conservative British prime minister when she criticized him for it, egged on North Korea’s nuclear missile program, and privately pushed the Big Lie claims that Barack Obama wasn’t really born in the U.S. and that his own notorious ‘Access Hollywood’ recording bragging about sexual assault was faked.
Since he’s previously copped to reality on those two scores, this is more than a little striking. And alarming, since most of his vast reactionary base would probably buy into such errant nonsense if they thought the alternative was hatefully objectionable modernity. Which they do.
Today, in another pre-dawn Twitter storm, he attacked the FBI, vowing to “return it to greatness.”
In between, of course, Mueller, the legendary former FBI director, revealed that Flynn had pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia and is cooperating in the wide-ranging probe into Russian interference in our presidential elections.
As I’ve been writing for months, there is very much a “there” there in the Trump-Russia entanglement. That's why Il Duce Donald and his people keep lying about it. It is wide-ranging and, at best, highly embarrassing. And it is some sort of gamy business dealings and collusion and collaboration around the presidential election, though whether it was determinative is quite a different question. I continue to expect something seamy, sleazy, seedy, and half-assed out of Trump and his circle.
As for the Russians, who have for decades had a legitimate bone to pick with American moves — starting with the Clinton strategy of NATO encirclement of Russia in the 1990s and including the U.S.-backed regime change in Ukraine which featured Hillary’s former State Department spokesperson showing up on-site as a U.S. subcabinet official to urge on pro-coup demonstrators in Kiev — they have become far too emboldened.
As Gary Hart warns, the Kremlin looks like it is out to disrupt the Western alliance. And Trump is certainly doing his part to disrupt not only the immediate Western alliance but also its role in helping to manage new world chaos.
Here’s the latest. The U.S. just pulled out of a looming United Nations summit on migrants. Migration, due to conflict, resource problems, pollution, poverty, is a huge problem in world politics which will only get bigger as climate change increases. But Trump’s only solution is no solution at all. He wants to build his little wall and tell the rest of the world to buzz off.
Which is beyond idiotic.
But certainly more than matched in its shamefulness by Trump’s refusal to offer real leadership in the Middle East by moving to settle Saudi Arabia’s disastrous and Iran’s problematic interventions in the Yemen civil war. Thanks largely to Saudi bombardment (from high altitude, which eliminates Saudi risk but exacerbates civilians casualties) and a blockade of the country which has only slightly eased despite Riyadh’s promises to the contrary, millions of people are now at risk in what continues to be the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster.
As for North Korea, all Trump’s bluster and persistent undermining of any diplomatic role have only served to push dictator Kim Jong-un forward. North Korea just tested its longest-range ballistic missile yet.
Everything Trump has done, including undermining the Iranian nuclear deal, convinces the Hermit Kingdom that it should not only press forward in its nuclear missile program but accelerate it.
As Trump plays his patented “agent of chaos” role in these late-breaking developments, he continues to egg on far right ethnic/Christian fundamentalist forces out to undermine the fabric of civil society in longtime American allies such as Britain and Germany as well as in newer European Union and NATO members from the late Soviet bloc.
So is Trump a real life “Manchurian candidate?” Or is he just a “useful idiot” by virtue of his being an erratic megalomaniac with pronounced know-nothing, neo-fascist tendencies?
Trump, naturally, doesn’t want to talk about this sort of thing. While he enjoys complaining about illegal immigrants, or the sophomoric reaction by some of the media to First Lady Melania Trump’s quite elegant White House Christmas decor, what he really wants to talk about is his only legislative achievement of real note, the passage late Friday night of a massive tax cut bill.
Perhaps sensing that Trump’s presidency is imperiled, Republican congressional leaders jammed through a hurriedly-written bill, some of it hand-written, designed to feed the rich and big corporations while busting the budget.
A shameful display of greed and subservience to Republican money people angry about receiving so little return on their political investments, it reminds once more that the one-time party of Lincoln has only one absolutely unifying principle — big tax cuts for the very wealthy and large corporations.
But people should be careful what they wish for, for this could be a very large boomerang. Especially in an era in which economic rewards go in such dramatic, and increasing, disproportion to the very few.
And so much for Trump’s faux populism. As I noted early on, Trump’s populism really consists of stirring up anger about “the other.” Let them eat hate!
Of course, all of this is a distraction from the Mike Flynn plea deal.
I think Flynn is something of a tragic character. As I always say about him, he deserves a great deal of credit for correctly identifying Isis as an enormous problem very early on as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The Obama administration certainly didn’t want to hear about that, as I know all too well after spending months writing columns fruitlessly urging U.S. air strikes against Isis units while they rampaged across the open countryside of Iraq and Syria as vulnerable motorized infantry. By the time Obama finished with his ultimately pointless diplo-stall and dialed up some air strikes, it was too late. Isis was already in place.
Before that, Flynn was a great operational intelligence director for JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, working in tandem with its then commander, General Stan McChrystal. Obama later fired McChrystal, probably the best American general of the era, as Afghan War commander when he and his staff made some rude comments about the White House to a Rolling Stone writer.
What Obama should have done is publicly reprimand McChrystal, then have a full and frank discussion with him and challenge him to carry out his strategy. Both McChrystal and Flynn had been Democrats.
After Obama fired Flynn, who reportedly also had some bad management issues, Flynn went off an exaggerated Islamophobic tangent. He also foolishly ended up in Moscow, appearing publicly with President Vladimir Putin. (As an intelligence agent, Flynn stinks.)
Flynn picked as co-author of his book, ‘The Field of Fight’, a neo-conservative ideologue and Iran/Contra scandal figure named Michael Ledeen who is, quite oddly enough, a one-time colleague of mine.
Now that Flynn is back at the heart of things, there is plenty of time for me to get into things that his 24-day tenure as U.S. National Security Advisor did not allow. For now, suffice it to say that I know just how unsound Ledeen’s reporting and thinking really is.
Ledeen’s wife Barbara, by the way, works for Senator Charles Grassley’s Senate Judiciary Committee, which is supposedly conducting its own investigation of Russian interference and the TrumpWorld connections.
Since she and Michael Ledeen brought Flynn the young National Security Council intel chief who played a leading role in turning the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into a bad joke, I doubt she’s been playing a positive role on the committee.
I wonder why Senate Judiciary Democratic ranking member Dianne Feinstein — who I like but always felt was miscast in the past as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee — hasn't done something with this. She can’t believe there is a real bipartisan investigation underway.
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