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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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Donald Trump is part of the peculiar breed Herman Melville described in his novel “The Confidence-Man,” in which the main character uses protean personas, flattery and lies to gain the confidence of his fellow passengers to fleece them on a Mississippi River steamboat. “Confidence men,” as Melville understood, are an inevitable product of the amorality of capitalism and the insatiable lust for wealth, power and empire that infects American society.
Trump’s narcissism, his celebration of ignorance—which he like all confidence men confuses with innocence—his megalomania and his lack of empathy are pathologies nurtured by the American landscape. They embody the American belief, one that Mark Twain parodied in “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” F. Scott Fitzgerald excoriated in “The Great Gatsby” and William Faulkner portrayed in the depraved Snopes clan, that it does not matter in the crass commercialism of American society how you obtain wealth and power. They are their own justifications.
American culture is built on a willful duplicity, a vision we hold of ourselves that bears little resemblance to reality. Malcolm Bradbury wrote “that in America imposture is identity; that values are not beliefs but the product of occasions; and that social identity is virtually an arbitrary matter, depending not on character nor an appearance but on the chance definition of one’s nature or colour.”
We founded the nation on genocide and slavery, ravage the globe with endless wars and the theft of its resources, enrich an oligarchic elite at the expense of the citizenry, empower police to gun down unarmed citizens in the streets, and lock up a quarter of the world’s prison population while wallowing in the supposed moral superiority of American white supremacy. The more debased the nation becomes, the more it seeks the reassurance of oily con artists to mask truth with lies.
Trump, like most con artists, is skilled at manufacturing self-serving news and a fictional persona that feed the magical aura of his celebrity. ...
The Grinch’s dream. The National Christmas Tree in Washington switched off because of the government shutdown.
"Again Winston's heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable that this was anything other than a reference to Syme. But Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any identifiable reference to him would have been mortally dangerous." George Orwell - 1984 - Part 2, Chapter 6
Trump’s abrupt decision on Syria is even riskier. Tumult in Syria’s northeast could trigger a wider and uncontrolled regional confrontation. The vacuum left by the departure of U.S. troops will open a deadly race for control. Washington’s closest allies in the fight against the Islamic State have long been the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces.
Turkey, another key player in the region, considers the Kurds a threat to its own government and will finally have a golden opportunity to try to crush its Kurdish foes with the departure of their U.S. protectors. This new front in the war will pull forces away from the fight with the Islamic State—creating an opening for the group and increasing violence in the region.
The withdrawal holds wider geopolitical risks as well. Russia will see this as a chance to boost its role as an arbiter of the Syrian conflict. This will further strengthen the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Russia’s ally. The U.S. presence was supposed to avoid this exact outcome.
But the risks do not end here. Like all decisions by this administration, this strategy must be seen in the larger context of its obsession with Iran. U.S. military presence close to the Syrian-Iraqi border was meant to curb increasing Iranian influence in the region. Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about his decision to withdraw from Syria a few days ago.
In a first reaction to the U.S. public announcement, Netanyahu acknowledged the change to Israel’s strategic environment. He said that “we will take care to maintain the security of Israel and to defend ourselves in this area.” Does this mean that the Trump administration has approved Israel expanding its air raids, so far concentrated in the Damascus area, and its military engagement to directly counter Iran?
The result of withdrawing a few thousand troops to fulfill a campaign promise, against the advice of Trump’s own domestic advisers and allies in the region, will have huge consequences for the region. The Syrian conflict has become a proxy for the regional power struggle in the Middle East. The United States’ withdrawal leaves this battle raging with no end in sight and contributes to increased regional instability.
Nobody has given us a better road map for understanding Trump’s America than Martin Scorsese. Thread—
An important observation—note that Mattis reportedly inserted himself at the point *before* an alert went to POTUS. That’s because THERE IS NO TIME AFTER.
