The current change in U.S. regime has certainly been different from the pattern of most of the last century or so. The usual practice is for the power structure to be at least outwardly respectful to the new Leader, and formally deferential. Media fawn over the new chief executive of the U.S. Government. The honeymoon can last for years in the case of an arch-reactionary like Reagan. Nixon had a second honeymoon in 1972 when he ran for reelection, when except for the Washington Post, the Watergate burglary was virtually ignored by the media- to the disgruntlement of Senator George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for president that election year.
The New York Times spent the first year of Jimmy Carter's presidency putting his smiling visage on their front pages almost daily, in a strenuous effort to repair the damage to the public esteem for the presidency in the wake of Nixon's forced resignation and his hand-picked successor Gerald Ford's pardoning of Nixon to protect him from criminal charges. But by the last year of Carter's rule, the Times was smitten by Reagan, and did its best to sabotage Carter's reelection, such as by putting a photo of him on the front page running a marathon and looking exhausted, and describing him as panting and weak. The media also ginned up a fake "rabbit attack" on Carter to make him look ridiculous.
With Trump, the media assault has been unrelenting. It began after he won the Republican nomination, when it apparently dawned on the media czars and their minions that Trump would be dangerously destabilizing an unpredictable with presidential power. (Until then they had made him the center of mostly benign media attention for months.) The assault increased in intensity and virulence after he "won" the presdiential election November 8, with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, by winning in the Electoral College, that extremely peculiar U.S. version of electoral "democracy." A shabby piece of libel, an alleged "dossier" or "report," cooked-up by a former British secret policeman from MI6 (Christopher Steele, currently in hiding) who was hired by Republican primary opponents of Trump to come up with derogatory information about Trump, and then peddled by the Brit to the Democratic camp, was used by the so-called "intelligence community" and U.S. media to smear Trump as a pervert who had hired Russian prostitutes to piss on a hotel bed in Moscow in which one of the Clintons had slept, and the Russian secret police covertly videoed the whole thing and are now using it or are going to use it to blackmail or control Trump. That such a cheap spy-novel fantasy is taken seriously shows the desperation of part of the U.S. power elite, including the main secret police agencies, to hobble Trump.
And when Trump refuses to buckle, and instead denounces the "intelligence" agencies for this tawdry behavior, he is attacked by the commentariat for "attacking" "his own" intelligence agencies and "siding with Putin," and admonished by "experts" (various secret policemen, secret police veterans, and members of the established nomenklatura) that he'll have to learn to "work with" the CIA, FBI, et al, and sit at their knees to learn from them.
Now, Trump is awful, for sure, and his cabinet appointments are the worst in modern history, worse even than the egregious ones of Reagan. But this tawdry propaganda campaign throws into stark relief the unethical nature of the power establishment. It also proves once again that the Deep State agencies, in particular the CIA, FBI, and NSA, truly are states within a state that care first and foremost about their own power and prerogatives. Their loyalty to the state as a whole, to the U.S. government, and certainly to the president, to whom they are nominally pledged to serve, is far less important to them than their own self-aggrandizing schemes. After all, the CIA arranged the assassination of the president in 1963, with the FBI as a full participant in aiding and abetting the crime by helping cover it up. And the entire U.S. media played along, and still do to this day by maintaining the absurd fictional account of the assassination by the Warren Commission. (By the way, Gerald Ford, the guy who pardoned Nixon, was one of the Commissioners and functioned as FBI spy on the Commission.)
It's unfortunate that "alternative" media and public figures have so lost perspective and are so incapable of objectivity that they are playing right along with every propaganda assault on Trump. Between Trump's distortions of reality, and the distortions of reality being fostered by the elements of the power establishment desperate to undercut Trump on foreign policy mainly, (they seem not too troubled by what he threatens to do domestically), people will be disoriented without a lodestar of objective truth to turn to.
Instead of becoming foot soldiers in one side of an intra-ruling class power struggle, progressives should chart an independent course, a principled course, and ultimately the actually pragmatic course of declaring a pox on both houses of the power elite and devise ways to take advantage of their conflict. Playing them off against each other, for example, not legitimizing the slanders of the anti-Trump faction. Heaven knows, there is plenty of legitimate information about Trump to use against him, without trying to paint him as a Putin puppet who engaged in a lurid defilement ritual involving urination.
The New York Times spent the first year of Jimmy Carter's presidency putting his smiling visage on their front pages almost daily, in a strenuous effort to repair the damage to the public esteem for the presidency in the wake of Nixon's forced resignation and his hand-picked successor Gerald Ford's pardoning of Nixon to protect him from criminal charges. But by the last year of Carter's rule, the Times was smitten by Reagan, and did its best to sabotage Carter's reelection, such as by putting a photo of him on the front page running a marathon and looking exhausted, and describing him as panting and weak. The media also ginned up a fake "rabbit attack" on Carter to make him look ridiculous.
With Trump, the media assault has been unrelenting. It began after he won the Republican nomination, when it apparently dawned on the media czars and their minions that Trump would be dangerously destabilizing an unpredictable with presidential power. (Until then they had made him the center of mostly benign media attention for months.) The assault increased in intensity and virulence after he "won" the presdiential election November 8, with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, by winning in the Electoral College, that extremely peculiar U.S. version of electoral "democracy." A shabby piece of libel, an alleged "dossier" or "report," cooked-up by a former British secret policeman from MI6 (Christopher Steele, currently in hiding) who was hired by Republican primary opponents of Trump to come up with derogatory information about Trump, and then peddled by the Brit to the Democratic camp, was used by the so-called "intelligence community" and U.S. media to smear Trump as a pervert who had hired Russian prostitutes to piss on a hotel bed in Moscow in which one of the Clintons had slept, and the Russian secret police covertly videoed the whole thing and are now using it or are going to use it to blackmail or control Trump. That such a cheap spy-novel fantasy is taken seriously shows the desperation of part of the U.S. power elite, including the main secret police agencies, to hobble Trump.
And when Trump refuses to buckle, and instead denounces the "intelligence" agencies for this tawdry behavior, he is attacked by the commentariat for "attacking" "his own" intelligence agencies and "siding with Putin," and admonished by "experts" (various secret policemen, secret police veterans, and members of the established nomenklatura) that he'll have to learn to "work with" the CIA, FBI, et al, and sit at their knees to learn from them.
Now, Trump is awful, for sure, and his cabinet appointments are the worst in modern history, worse even than the egregious ones of Reagan. But this tawdry propaganda campaign throws into stark relief the unethical nature of the power establishment. It also proves once again that the Deep State agencies, in particular the CIA, FBI, and NSA, truly are states within a state that care first and foremost about their own power and prerogatives. Their loyalty to the state as a whole, to the U.S. government, and certainly to the president, to whom they are nominally pledged to serve, is far less important to them than their own self-aggrandizing schemes. After all, the CIA arranged the assassination of the president in 1963, with the FBI as a full participant in aiding and abetting the crime by helping cover it up. And the entire U.S. media played along, and still do to this day by maintaining the absurd fictional account of the assassination by the Warren Commission. (By the way, Gerald Ford, the guy who pardoned Nixon, was one of the Commissioners and functioned as FBI spy on the Commission.)
It's unfortunate that "alternative" media and public figures have so lost perspective and are so incapable of objectivity that they are playing right along with every propaganda assault on Trump. Between Trump's distortions of reality, and the distortions of reality being fostered by the elements of the power establishment desperate to undercut Trump on foreign policy mainly, (they seem not too troubled by what he threatens to do domestically), people will be disoriented without a lodestar of objective truth to turn to.
Instead of becoming foot soldiers in one side of an intra-ruling class power struggle, progressives should chart an independent course, a principled course, and ultimately the actually pragmatic course of declaring a pox on both houses of the power elite and devise ways to take advantage of their conflict. Playing them off against each other, for example, not legitimizing the slanders of the anti-Trump faction. Heaven knows, there is plenty of legitimate information about Trump to use against him, without trying to paint him as a Putin puppet who engaged in a lurid defilement ritual involving urination.
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