Is Trump Really President?

Is Trump Really President?

Is Trump being allowed to “Play at President” for public
consumption, while the generals, spooks, and financial
pirates run the show?

By Jack Rasmus
Information Clearing House
Friday, May 5, 2017

These are strange times in U.S. politics.

And stranger still is the emerging character of the
Trump presidency.

Events are appearing with growing frequency, raising the question
who is really running the White House and the U.S. government?

Is Trump really the president?

Trump sits there on the second floor, spending late evenings
into early mornings tweeting to the world.

In itself, that’s politically weird.

But even more strange is what he’s tweeting and the next day
fallout.

We hear about the aircraft carrier task force in Asia that was
reportedly steaming at full speed to the North Korean coast a
few weeks ago, only to learn soon after it was actually headed
in the opposite direction to Australia.

Did Donald imagine that?

Was the U.S. Navy informed or requested by its titular commander
in chief to turn around and go north … and then didn’t?

Was Trump’s command to go north perhaps countermanded by
some head of Naval operations, or maybe someone else in the
White House or government?

Or did he just imagine it all and never even informed the Navy
to head to Korea?

All the possibilities are strange.

Very strange.

And then there was the announcement by Trump that his big
budget was going to be announced in a few days.

It wasn’t even prepared.

Government bureaucrats had to quickly slap something together
in a couple of pages to provide to the press.

Trump did it again, tweeted announcing his big tax cuts.

Again the bureaucrats were caught off guard and had to throw
some general outline together and issue it to the press.

All this happened after it was generally known that the tax cut
proposals were not going to be developed until late summer,
and that the Obamacare Repeal bill had to go forward first.

The Obamacare repeal was a necessary prerequisite for the
general tax cut.

Its $592 billion in tax cuts for business and investors had to
come first.

Until it was resolved, it made no sense to publicize elements of the
yet bigger tax cuts of trillions of dollars more scheduled to follow.

But Trump tweeted it anyway, and the bureaucracy jumped,
putting something down on paper.

Who’s communicating what to whom?

Is Donald just lobbing electronic policy missiles out of the second
floor of the White House, hoping some bureaucrat will catch them
before morning?

Or perhaps Trump is being allowed to sit up there on the second
floor of the White House and do his tweet thing, while others
actually run the government.

By others, perhaps it is vice-president Pence in charge, working
with some inside committee of key cabinet officers and the
intelligence spooks in the NSA-CIA-FBI?

Is Trump being allowed to, “Play at President” for public
consumption, while the generals, spooks, and Goldman Sachs
financial pirates run the show?

It’s hard to believe that the members of his administration and
the government State bureaucracy knew in advance of Trump’s
recent tweets welcoming Philippines President Duterte to the
White House.

Or that Trump would tweet recently that he’s willing to meet with
North Korea’s president, for whom he, Trump, had great respect.

You can imagine the political constipation that comment caused the
spooks and the generals in charge of State, Defense, and National
Security.

Nov. 30, 2016, this writer wrote a piece predicting that Trump the
right wing populist would be successfully ‘tamed’ by the political
elites of this country that really run the show.

I laid out some ideas how that would be accomplished,
but I didn’t think it would happen so fast and so easily.

The past month has witnessed Trump doing a total about face on
virtually all his right-wing populist proposals during the election.

He’s backtracking so fast it’s a wonder he hasn’t tripped
over himself. (Check that, he has).

What explains his 180 degree turnabout?

Was his talk of right wing populism during the campaign
all political election hype?

Tell the people whatever they want to hear to get elected, and
then go do whatever the moneybags really running the show
want from you---which is big tax cuts, massive across-the-board
deregulation, end the taxation on Obamacare and we don’t care
what happens to the rest of it, give us some infrastructure spending
deals that resurrect wheeling-dealing commercial property
investments with big tax loopholes, and just tweak and rearrange
existing free trade treaties.

So what we actually got so far from Trump during his first 100 days
is government by ‘executive orders’—i.e. repealing environmental
protections, gutting immigrants’ rights, going after sanctuary cities,
opening up national monuments and parks to mining and cattle
exploitation, subsidizing killer coal companies, attacking consumer
protection, smoke and mirror changes to H1-B skilled worker import
quotas that haven’t changed, gutting K-12 education and shifting
funds to private schools from public, opening up offshore drilling,
and so on.

But elsewhere it’s been a wholesale retreat from his election
positions, proposals, and promises.

Here’s a short list:

Trump does a reversal on China, from declaring it a currency
manipulator to offering it major concessions at the Mar-a-Lago
meeting, in exchange for help with North Korea.

One wonders if China’s offshore islands expansion is also part
of the deal.

From NATO is a waste of money and unnecessary, Trump shifts
to NATO is the great bulwark against Russia.

From Putin the great leader to Putin is responsible for Syria
using poison gas--of which still no proof thereof by the way.

Is it true, or is it all in that great American tradition of “yellow
cake” (2003), “babies thrown from incubators” (1990), “tonkin
gulf”(1965), “the war on drugs” (Panama invasion), “Soviets are
in Grenada,” and “remember the Maine” (Spanish-American War)
incidents that always precede and justify US going to war.

From Mexico is going to pay for the wall, to there’ll be no wall
(latest per Homeland Security Secretary).

From dumping NAFTA, to “I’m not going to terminate
NAFTA”’ (Trump quote).

And then there’s Trump’s staged press conferences with companies
like Carrier Corp., indicating they’re not going to export some jobs
to Mexico for now (as they continue to plan to export still others at
the same time).

And the list of companies announcing jobs they intend to hire in
the US without saying when, or that they already had planned to
hire them anyway prior to the press conference.

From cancelling the TTP free trade deal (already killed in
Congress), to declaring a reopening of the TTIP free trade
deal with Europe.

And what about the silent deal Trump struck with Japan’s prime
minister, Shinzo Abe, when he was here?

It’s been leaked that Japan will pick up the lead on the TPP
renegotiations and the U.S. will join it later.

Or Mexico’s recent offer to the U.S. to just apply the TPP terms
to a new ‘reform’ of NAFTA by Mexico and the U..S?

Watch both these back door free trade resurrections,
they’re coming too.

And what about Trump’s organizational about face, with right wing
ideologue Steve Bannon banished from the National Security Council
and pro-Russia general Flynn banished from the government?

What I also find interesting is the intense media attack on
Trump— focusing on his Russia connection, his tax returns,
nepotism in the White House, his companies’ benefiting (a
violation of the emoluments clause of the US constitution)
and calls for impeachment in Congress—all of sudden all the
above have disappeared from view in the media front page.

They’ve been put on the back burner in Congress and the press.

And there’s no more damaging leaks coming weekly from the
intelligence spooks either.

Instead, what we hear is talk about ‘now he’s coming around’
beginning to appear presidential.

Is all that just coincidental? Hmmm.

Is this a presidency where the Donald gets to sit on the second
floor of the White House and do his late night tweets, and the
bureaucrats scurry the next day to clean up?

Where Donald is brought downstairs to the oval office for Executive
Order signings or occasional reporter interviews and then trotted
back upstairs?

Is it a presidency where he makes his late night calls to his
moneybag friends, like the billionaire Mercers and others,
to find out ‘how am I doing guys’?

While the rest of the representatives of the economic and political
elite run the show?

Is this a Trump presidency, or a government by Generals-Goldman
Sachs-Pence, with son in law Kushner functioning as intermediary
between them and the Donald?

A government of second floor tweets and first floor executive order
signing events?

The quality of the American presidency has been in steady decline
for decades.

From the crook Nixon to the inept peanut farmer, Carter; from
the movie-actor, camera friendly Reagan to the morally sleezy
opportunist Bill Clinton; from know-nothing George Bush to the
super-cautious false progressive Obama; and now to the fake right
populist, blowhard, tweety-bird called Donald Trump.

We’re going to need a lot of luck to get through the next three and
a half years folks!

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46992.htm