The reason for this drastic change is in order for him to be able to win the support of the U.S. aristocracy, who had overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton during the Presidential contest, and who (and whose ‘news’media) have been trying to portray Trump as “Putin’s fool” or even as “Putin’s Manchurian candidate” and thus as an illegitimate President or even traitor who is beholden to ‘America’s enemy’ (which to them is Russia) for Trump’s having won the U.S. Presidency — which they had tried to block from happening. (And, actually, even Republican billionaires generally preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump — and almost all of them hate Putin, who insists upon Russia’s independence, which the U.S. aristocracy call by all sorts of bad names, so that any American who even so much as merely questions the characterization of Russia as being an ‘enemy’ nation, is considered to be ‘unAmerican’, like in the days of communism and Joseph R. McCarthy, as if communism and the U.S.S.R. and its Warsaw Pact that mirrored America’s NATO military alliance, even existed today, which they obviously don’t. So: the U.S. Establishment’s portrayal of current international reality is so bizarre, it can be believed only by fools, but enough such fools exist so as to enable that Establishment to do horrific things, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the 2011 invasion of Libya, just to name two examples, which got rid of two national leaders who were friendly toward Russia.)
After Trump ditched his National Security Advisor Mike Flynn (whom Obama had fired for not being sufficiently anti-Russian, but Trump then hired) and replaced him with the rabidly anti-Russian H.R. McMaster (whom the aristocracy’s people were recommending to Trump), Trump was expecting to be relieved from the aristocracy’s intensifying campaign to impeach him or otherwise replace him and make the President his clearly pro-aristocratic Vice President Mike Pence, but the overthrow-Trump campaign continued even after McMaster became installed replacing Flynn. Then, perhaps because the replacement of Flynn by McMaster failed to satisfy the aristocracy, Trump additionally ousted Stephen Bannon and simultaneously bombed Syrian government forces, and now the campaign to overthrow Trump seems finally to have subsided, at least a bit, at least for now.
They thrive on war, because war is the ultimate government-expense. (Aristocrats have, over the centuries, benefited from government expenses, because those expenses are extracted from the public, and become income to the aristocracy.) And, then, after a war is over, the entity who own the debt that the taxpayers will need to pay back, for all of those government-purchases, from all of those government contractors (basically the manufacturers of the machines for mass-killing) is whom? The megabanks had been lending to those weapons-makers, of course, so as to enable these manufacturers to ramp-up production. The money that was lent to make those weapons, comes back to these megabanks, with interest, charged to those weapons-makers, who profited from these weapons-sales. Thus, it’s not just those weapons-manufacturing firms but also the megabanks, that grow from wars. In addition, the government has issued bonds to pay to the weapons-makers to purchase those weapons. Those enormous debts, which had been paid to the weapons-makers, are now owed by taxpayers to the government to pay to the owners of those government bonds, which often are investment-firms, either the megabanks themselves, or clients of the megabanks. Ultimately, these debts often become assets on the mega-banks’ balance-sheets — and the same aristocratic families can (and often do) own or control both government contractors and megabanks, and sometimes also the investment-firms. This is the safe way, the low-risk way, for billionaires to become multi-billionaires. Virtually all of the risks of wars are borne by the general public, but all of the profits from wars go to the aristocrats. It’s a certain type of game, in which the billionaires are the players, and the public are the toys, which are played with; and, from which, multiple extractions are made, as the game is played. It’s like raising “game” (in the animal-sense) in order to shoot, and eat it.
So: Trump has decided to do what he thinks he must do, in order to be able to stay in power. In order to stay in power, he must be a type of President that, in some crucial respects, is more like what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were, than what he had promised his voters he would be. And the reason that this is so, is that this is what America’s aristocracy demands, in today’s American ‘democracy’.
Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
COVER IMAGE: BILL CLINTON, A NOTORIOUS SERVANT OF THE PLUTOCRACY, HAS BECOME RICH WITH HIS WIFE BY SELLING THE PEOPLE DOWN THE RIVER.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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