ERIC ZUESSE—The people in actual power had originally evaluated Trump’s Presidential candidacy only on the basis of what he said on the campaign trial, because he had never actually served in any public office. And, so, they feared him, solely on account of his words, and Hillary Clinton received vastly more big-dollar donations than he did. Though some of her campaign promises were moderately opposed to what billionaires want, she had had a long and consistent record of ‘public’ service, including as a U.S. Senator and as Secretary of State, serving actually billionaires, at the expense of the public, and so they didn’t really care what she said in her campaigns, because they knew, from actual experience with her, that she would be loyal to them. But not so with Trump.
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GARY LEUPP—Trump is an ignorant man, uninterested in the world intellectually, unable to invest time in reading, clueless about the historical context of current crises. Part of his candidate persona was opposition to recent U.S. wars (not so much because they’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people, but because they have been expensive and not resulted in the U.S. taking the oil). But he loves men in uniform, surrounds himself with them, relies on them.
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ALEX MERCOURIS—With Pompeo and Bolton Donald Trump has what looks like the foreign policy team that he wants.
It is indeed an “America First’ team, committed to preserving and extending the paramount position of the US, and indifferent to the methods used to achieve it. It is fair to say however that this is not the conception of ‘America First’ which many people expected when Donald Trump was elected. Most people then assumed that ‘America First’ meant retrenchment: the US abandoning in its neo-imperial adventures so that it could refocus on its own needs. Instead we look more likely to get a repeat of the administration of George W. Bush on steroids. -
PAUL STREET—The deplorable, dollar-drenched Democrats (the 4D party) seated moronic mogul Donald Trump in the Oval Office in at least ten key ways: 1. By governing in accord with the wishes of the wealthy Few under the neoliberal, fake-progressive Goldman Sachs-and Citibank-captive Barack Obama. The demoralized and demobilized the majority-progressive working-class base on which the Democrats depended to win the 2016 election…
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ERIC ZUESSE—So: The federal-debt issue is killing Trump politically. His voters don’t much care whether he starts World War III by his respecting and appointing such people as the super-neoconservative John Bolton. Bolton’s being loathed by “The libbys” (liberals) convinces Trump’s followers that Bolton is “the right man for the job.” By stark contrast, they’re rabid against Trump’s signing the Government’s budget bill. And, to them, that’s a much bigger issue than whether there will soon be a WW III.
