What Was the Trump Presidency Actually All About?

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell, Preface to Animal Farm (1946)

“By understanding the world, I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the philosophy of idealism propounds. Those who refuse to be bluffed by enunciations will not regard this as pessimism.”  Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

I liked President Trump.  He has many admirable qualities, perhaps most especially in his impatience for “Beltway” politics, and his private sector experience in contracts and general business orientation that he brought to bear on trade deals.  His patriotism seemed genuine, and his energy was extraordinary.  He had a generally smart, if self-serving team around him, and the majority of the electorate backed him.  His ratings were competitive, and his policies were pro-business and pro-family.  His posture on constitutional rights including free speech, was aggressive.  He made the American public more aware of government waste, and rightly attacked the bias if not active treachery of the major media in its fabrication of narratives, and its extreme ideological prejudice for what amounts to a cult of Marxist-socialist agendas across numerous public policies including education, health care provisioning, wealth redistribution, and class division.

But there is also something not quite right with his overall presidency: if the Left wanted a perfect antagonist; if you wanted someone to be the red flag that is waved in front of the Liberal bull, Donald Trump fit that role perfectly.  I want to be wrong, and maybe I am.  But something doesn’t look right after all the dust has settled.  With his tough language on immigration, his sprayed blond hair, facial make-up and signature long red tie, he was almost custom-designed to produce antagonism combined with invidious caricature, even among his traditional allies in Conservatism, Inc., while serving as a convenient poster boy of “White Supremacy”—along with the laughably contrived horned and helmeted bare-chested “Viking” who has been continuously broadcast as the symbol of “White Insurrection” at the Capital.  If the Left needed an exaggerated enemy in order to create a rallying symbol (and swing the swing voters and RINOs), then Trump was perfectly designed, almost out of a PSYOPS manual.

White terrorist at the Capital; White Supremacist at the White House: Hollywood Picture-Perfect?

More than this, however, is the constellation of special interest actions that were sponsored under his administration, or carried out directly by it.  For example, pro-Israel interests were always front and center in his bombast and priorities.  Indeed, his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner and his Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin (son of Goldman Sachs partner, Robert Mnuchin) appeared to spend more time in Israel on the re-location of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and on military aid and investments, than on strictly American domestic financial priorities.  Israeli PM Netanyahu was nearly a regular guest at the White House while the notorious Anthony Fauci somehow avoided Trump’s wrath of “you’re fired,” a fate that he surely otherwise deserved.

Trump and Sheldon Adelson

And then there’s Trump’s eager digestion of the entire Covid program, hook, line, and sinker, including his “emergency” evacuation from the White House on board Marine One with the First Lady, and his encampment at Walter Reed Hospital. This was followed by his intensified commitment to his “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine production and distribution program carried out by his pharmaceutical executive friends, surrounded by military Generals on the White House lawn in an unprecedented act of medical authoritarianism. All this points to a president completely under the influence and direction of the same actors currently running Biden in the Covid program.

Trump and Netanyahu: One and the same?

Since when do military generals run pharma programs?

Moreover, it was under Donald Trump, in the last period of his presidency, that, like all administrations before him, executed a “raid” on the U.S. Treasury: this one of a magnitude that would even make the Bush II “mortgage crisis” raid look like small potatoes and his team blush with envy: $4 Trillion dollars suddenly gone, with no financial accounting, no formal distribution records made public, and the Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin, quietly disappearing back into the life of the rich and famous.

Was Trump merely in it like another casino project, with this one at the White House, with near sure odds of a windfall?  Was the American public played by a dealer with weighted dice?  I think that conclusion may look increasingly unavoidable.

Miller and Kushner

The 2020 election looked almost too easy a win for the DNC.  The Trump White House, with the full intelligence apparatus at its disposal, including a systematic network of influential organizations, was fully aware of, extensively briefed on, and regularly warned from numerous quarters about what the DNC was doing at the state level with election law fraud, managed by the “Political Law” department of the Perkins Coie law firm. And how many of his team were Never Trumpers at heart or of the other party? Perhaps more obvious was the immediate post-election roll-out of a very “B-Team,” ad-hoc assemblage of lawyers, such as Rudy Giuliani, surrounded by fresh-faced young lawyers, declaring on the streets of New York, in front of a makeshift banner and post-election TV set, that voting “irregularities” occurred. Where was the “A-Team” of senior, suit-and-tie, Yale, Harvard and Chicago lawyers such as Jay Sekulow who represented the President at the “impeachment” trial?  Suddenly, the Big Guns and Establishment law firms were nowhere to be found; completely silent and “missing-in-action.”

There are a number of possibilities as to why this was so.  In my estimation they range from the routine, such as possible conflicts of interest with other clients (state government, or private entities, or even the courts themselves). However, it seems more likely that it stemmed from a reluctance to advocate for voter fraud when evidence standards would have to be fully met by extensive investigation; this, combined with the risk of criminal allegations against themselves, may not have been their “cup of tea.”  Such advocacy takes a particular kind of aggressive lawyering and a willingness to accept reputational risk and even threats of sanction against their professional licensing.  Of course, lawyers are notorious for risk aversion (that is largely how they are taught in law schools, and how they are controlled under the ABA.  For example, new ABA rules under Section 8.1 that address admission and sanction, now include language that guides purported racial discrimination language.  The election voter fraud was framed not only by the covid pretext, but also as a “protection” for minorities under the 14^th Amendment—minorities were deemed less capable of participating under conventional vote rules (such as going to a voting booth). The corporate law firms otherwise representing Trump in an impeachment hearing may have perceived risk of triggering sanction under that rule.  Ultimately however I believe it was a combination of self-protection, influence, intimidation, and protecting their law firm practice in the larger Beltway. There certainly was pressure on these firms to pull out, including public protests against law firms and a campaign by the well-funded Lincoln Project (composed of anti-Trump Republicans) to pressure the law firms), but their pulling out could have been partly because they felt there wasn’t enough evidence.

Combined with what many feel was also a betrayal at the January 6^th rally in Washington, D.C. (“go home”) and the obvious pre-planned riot and Capital raid that could have easily been prevented by National Guard orders from the White House, the final weeks of the Trump administration look like a “pre-packaged” bankruptcy; that is, it had the appearance of a real estate deal where the project is put into a ready-made exit package. The Trump White House looked like it was following a pre-planned exit script, a get-out-of-town routine that was arranged far in advance, with just the right amount of feigned regret and anger.

Trump at his Casino; Secretary Mnuchin and wife at the U.S. Casino?

Either that, or his entire team was so disorganized and undisciplined that it was all due to managerial incompetence.  That I find hard to accept because he was surrounded by “street-smart” advisors and backers who knew how to play the game, and surely were aware of DNC operations to adulterate voting procedures in swing states.  He put up no real fight; he never used his extensive executive authority including his authority as Commander-in-Chief, and instead used his B- and C-team of random lawyers to throw law suits around to entertain the public with false hopes and his enemies with gloating victory. He held random TV interviews, inserted terms like “kraken” into the public consciousness, and even invited the “pillow king” Mike Lindell, to the White House for a very public meeting complete with flashing cameras and  “private notes” that were scribbled with “election theft” and other assurances signaled to the Trump base.

Giuliani at election “press conference”; Sekulow at Senate impeachment trial

But was this all real, or surreal?  Incredible stupidity, or a card trick?   A show was put on; the act played out; the audience entertained and distracted, and then the curtain closed, the actors leaving via the backstage doors to awaiting helicopters and jets, suitcases of cash in hand, the military dutifully protecting its own turf and paychecks, and the new heist team from the Left quickly and quietly sworn in, merely trading places with Trump and his crew, for their turn at the roulette wheel, fully fleecing the American public all over again. Perhaps this is overly cynical, but the patterns of behavior, means and motivations, suggest that the entire game was rigged.

Competition or Continuity?

Was Trump too trusting, or just following instructions?

In January, 1776, Thomas Paine wrote the first direct “insurrection” pamphlet in America, “Common Sense,” calling on the public itself, and bypassing the political elites who tried to have it both ways with change and tradition, to instead rally and organize for their liberties and independence against England, and the King: to finally call England’s bluff and show the King with no clothes.   In many ways we face the same juncture in 2021, with a presumptuous if sociopathic political elite that fancies themselves capable of directing and controlling the entire U.S. economy from Washington, as if by Monarchical decree (what are “Executive Orders,” really?).  The new domestic war on terror has been declared: how much more of an obvious assault will be tolerated before the King is overthrown (who the actual King is, is a topic for further discussion)?

All on the same plantation?  The Washington Two-Step

All in the family

On the anniversary of 9-11, it is also noteworthy that, despite numerous threats to declassify government intelligence, not one word of doubt or one official investigative probe was ever directed at what remains one of America’s greatest “unsolved mysteries.”

Larry Silverstein received nearly $5 Billion from the WTC insurance claim: still no official answers

The U.S. presidency is an office that has long been captured by special interests: the prize is too big, the power too unlimited, the wealth too alluring, and the ability to steer American assets, including its prized military, too irresistible.  In his often-overlooked publication, Considerations on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill outlined a theory of government that at its most fundamental and effective level consists of two primary factors: participation and competence—and stemming from this, how the successful, functional combination of these two pillars of a democratic republic, represent its constitutional ideal.  Mill argued that a theory of government requires constant observation, assessment, and evaluation of successive attempts toward this goal.  How would one evaluate recent U.S. political history in this regard?  On one hand, Trump would seem to embody at least some form of both; on the other hand, many signs indicate a larger implosion of the U.S. government that is perhaps beyond any one man to correct or resist.  In 2021 the government appears to be what the Founders clearly feared, and were at best cautiously optimistic about avoiding: a central, unified, authoritarian federal government that subsumes all genuine individuality, and with it, the disappearance of Jefferson’s vision of state, local, and especially, individual sovereignty.   Part of a solution may reside in a “corporate break-up” of Washington, D.C. into more regional, and more homogenous groupings of interests, culture and capabilities, tied to a much smaller federal government.  This is not a new idea, but it may be one that has become more urgent, as the ability to maintain a divided government with functional checks and balances is corrupted by the same factors that felled Rome: internal disarray and external invasion.

In closing, it is important to point out that what I am advancing in this essay is a scenario.  But it is also a scenario that in my judgment, represents still, only a portion of the totality of the Trump presidency.  It should be apparent that Trump’s team, many of whom were not especially qualified or were “holdovers” from the prior administration, created a difficult environment for the President to function in. And there were the GOP swamp creatures of Conservatism Inc. who were reportedly using certain individuals, including Pence, to “keep an eye” on Trump’s behavior and actions, and were quite possibly acting against his authority.  Indeed, the GOP as an institution appeared to be at best neutral toward Trump’s case of voter fraud; some members even appeared to side directly with the other party (e.g., Lindsey Graham).  Some of that may be blamed on a “deep state” ideological consolidation that works against outsiders who challenge the status quo: Washington is inherently defined by consensus, hierarchy, careerism, and institutional loyalty.

The fight has taken on a new, unprecedented dimension, however, as the DNC and its allies (including “RINOs”) have reversed many if not all Trump policies (except “vaccines”): the open border is not merely a “reversal” of Trump immigration policy, but a direct act of aggression against the security of the United States, and one that clearly is motivated in large part by racial ideology and fanaticism, especially if not exclusively, against White Americans, and to such a degree that their personal safety, security and liberties are being directly threatened under a systematic political strategy.

V.S. Solovyev previously worked in the aerospace and defense sector in McLean, Virginia