For anyone who still thinks Donald Trump does not represent the interests of what is called “the deep state” but is actually the shallow or official U.S. state, it is time to think again. If he is not a figurehead for those alleged hidden forces, then he will agree to a Russia-Ukraine settlement on Russia’s fundamental terms – that is, a mutual security agreement that stipulates the pulling back of U.S./NATO forces encircling Russia, etc. – when he meets with Putin in Alaska this Friday. There will be no further delay.
This, however, is extremely unlikely. Trump knows little but bullying and the use of the English language as a hammer. “I’m very highly educated,” he has said, without a scintilla of irony, “I know words, I know the best words. But there’s no better word than stupid.”
On the latter assertion he is right: there is no better word than stupid when it’s applied correctly.
During his campaign for the presidency, Trump used words more than fifty times to say that he would end the war in Ukraine “within twenty-four hours” of assuming the presidency. He could have accomplished this on day one by issuing an executive order (besides all those he did issue), stopping all military aide to Ukraine, but he didn’t. Seven months of game-playing have elapsed and the war goes on with Trump’s backing laced with doubletalk about how he is seeking peace in Ukraine, is a man of peace, is bringing all American troops back home, and of course he gave a grateful ah-shucks when his brother-in-genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu, showed him a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
He fully supports the destabilization of Russia, overtly or covertly, as have his predecessors, and this in incompatible with any deal Russia can agree to when he meets with Putin in Alaska.
This past weekend, and starting up again late Tuesday in the more conservative corporate media, August 12 as I write, CNN, the NY Times, and the Washington Post, three prominent establishment media (organs of propaganda) published their usual reminders to all presidents that they are watching:
CNN: “Trump-Putin summit in Alaska resembles a slow defeat for Ukraine”
The New York Times: “After Almost Losing Trump, Putin Gets His Ideal Summit”
Max Boot op ed, the Washington Post: “Putin is setting up Trump for another Munich”
For these media know that the Russians are coming still, as they have been for nearly a century, so don’t swim too far out into the Atlantic or Pacific, for they are waiting with Jaws to seize you. They are red and ravenous and have huge teeth.
Some claim these articles, and many more to come, are an example of how the “deep state” is pressuring Trump to continue to encircle Russia and degrade its military and economic strength (even try to oust Putin, as Biden said) despite Trump’s sincere desire to end the U.S./NATO war against Russia as a means to peaceful cooperation. This would assume Trump is radically different from every U.S. president in the last eighty years (with the exception of JFK in the last year of his presidency) whose policies were all malignantly opposed to the USSR and then Russia.
In one respective way Trump is different, for he has stepped straight out of an updated version of a Twain bitter satire or Melville’s Confidence Man, a dangerous ignorant liar whose mask hides yet reveals the agenda he serves so faithfully. The man, after all, was a reality-television star and has long reveled in radical reversals of previous statements and intentions.
For example, in his first term, he often talked of withdrawing from NATO but never did; NATO, in fact, expanded under his watch. He talked about ending the U.S./NATO support for Ukraine’s bombing of Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine, only to withdraw from the Minsk Accords and send military equipment to Ukraine to bomb those areas. A mimic of the severest neurotic, he reverses himself so often that it is obvious that it is a part of the strategic script he is performing. Confuse, confound, keep the audience is constant anticipation of the switch-back.
It assumes as well that Trump’s support for Israel and its genocide of the Palestinians is somehow divorced from the U.S.’s overall geopolitical strategy throughout the Middle East, West Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia, and its desperate efforts throughout the world to counter the ascendancy of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) as the U.S. debt skyrockets and its world dominance diminishes.
Trump’s recent flim-flam plan is to pull a Richard Nixon Vietnamization hoax with NATOization of the war against Russia through Ukraine. I am convinced that the US/NATO war against Russia will not be ending unless NATO is dissolved, which Trump is not proposing. He only wishes to strengthen NATO with European money, not that of the US. NATO’s only current raison d’être is to destroy Russia as an independent country and create regime change there through multiple means. This has long been so. It is why the Obama administration engineered a coup d’ état in Ukraine in 2014. It is why NATO has existed for so long and has expanded. Open warfare in Ukraine is just one means among many they have used over the years. You can even “end” the overt war and continue the covert.
If NATO is not dissolved, the undermining of Russia will continue under Trump, who may – I emphasize “may” – recognize that the proxy war is lost on the battlefield, a fact obvious for years despite U.S. government and mainstream media propaganda to the contrary – propaganda so blatantly false that it raises questions about people’s gullibility, but not about the mainstream media’s lies. How many foreign leaders does such media need to call the new Hitler before people wise up?
As the man said, “There’s no better word than stupid.”
The post Trump Said It: “There’s No Better Word Than Stupid.” first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.