I don't know what a successful coup in America would look like, but making enemies of the CIA, NSA and DoD beforehand isn't it. This isn't some s00per subtle evil plan, this is a bunch of people with more confidence than competence and for the most part no experience in government fucking up their every move. Which isn't to say that there's not plenty to worry about, just that we're dealing with children playing with grenades, not Lex Luthor.
I was busy. I have words. Watch this space.
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So. Furthering the conjecture and providing a little counterpoint, I believe that there are cogent issues raised but vital counterarguments left unasked. The author's analysis basically boils down to:
- The Trump administration deliberately gutted the State Department the same weekend they rolled out their Muslim ban in order to test the limits of executive power.
- They did this at the behest of Russia, which has sold of about a fifth of Rosneft without anybody really noticing.
- Trump has distanced himself from the American intelligence apparatus while also ramping up his personal security.
therefore, coup d'etat.
Did I miss anything?
All of this could be absolutely, 100% true and it does not support "therefore, coup d'etat." For example, sure: the Trump administration gutted the shit out of the State Department the same weekend they decided to write "ban all muslims" in crayon on a napkin and have Trump sign it. If you didn't want anyone from the State Department to tell you officially that it's a bad idea, unconstitutional and likely to cause unnecessary chaos for weeks/months/years, firing them all would be a great way to ensure your executive order gets rolled out how you want it.
If you wanted the State Department to lend legitimacy to what you're doing, it's exactly the wrong way to do it.
Right now, DHS is defying court orders and doing what Trump says. This is no doubt due to the fact that their lawyers looked over their charter and determined that they report to the Executive, not the Judicial, and that they're required to be goose-stepping thugs whether it's illegal or not. They are, no doubt, awaiting clarification or instruction from the chain of command their lawyers have determined they're bound by so that they can continue to do their jobs as charged.
But suppose Trump is literally Voldemort, Bannon is literally Skeletor, KellyAnn Conway is literally Cruella DeVille and RNCPRBS is literally Joseph Goebbels. DHS has a quarter million employees. You think they're all going along with this? Dunno about you, but at the airports I fly through they're mostly minorities and women. Shit, I've seen like a dozen in LA wearing hijabs. I've overheard them talking to each other in Seattle in Amharic.
I say this to celebrate it, not to denigrate it: we had two days of protests at ten different airports this weekend over 109 detained travelers.
A quote over the article:
- It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal is to create “resistance fatigue,” to get Americans to the point where they’re more likely to say “Oh, another protest? Don’t you guys ever stop?” relatively quickly.
Supposes that the protestors represent the minority opinion. They do not. We're rapidly reaching not protest fatigue, but protest normalization. I dunno about your Trump-voting Facebook friends, but mine were pretty goddamn quiet this weekend. They were the only ones. Moving on, Russia:
I mean, sure. It's entirely possible that this is all at the behest of Russia. It's entirely possible that Trump is doing it to get a fifth of Rosneft, just like in the dossier, for lifting sanctions against Russia. But sanctions haven't been lifted yet. More than that, any sanctions lifted can be reimposed by Congress with a supermajority if I'm not mistaken. Finally, throwing the nation into turmoil at the behest of an enemy power for personal enrichment is treason and/or terrorism and/or espionage. You wanna talk impeachable offenses, each one of those is a federal capital offense. So if Trump's gonna take the money and run, he better run far.
But right - he's gonna take over the country:
- Especially if combined with the DHS and the FBI, which appear to have remained loyal to the President throughout the recent transition, this creates the armature of a shadow government: intelligence and police services which are not accountable through any of the normal means, answerable only to the President.
Pretend none of those people are thinking, feeling human beings. Pretend they're orcs. There's 300,000 orcs willing to do Sauron's will. oh shit what will we do?
You might be interested to know that before you get dumb and talk army vs. fbi or any of that shit, there's about 800,000 cops in the United States, all of which have a long-standing interagency beef with everybody that isn't cops. Does the author really expect every other organization in the United States to roll over as the DHS attempts to consolidate power?
Does the author really think the Trump administation thinks that's going to happen?
- Trump was, indeed, perfectly honest during the campaign; he intends to do everything he said, and more. This should not be reassuring to you.
The regime’s main organizational goal right now is to transfer all effective power to a tight inner circle, eliminating any possible checks from either the Federal bureaucracy, Congress, or the Courts. Departments are being reorganized or purged to effect this.
The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterday’s moves should be read as the first part of that.
The aims of crushing various groups — Muslims, Latinos, the black and trans communities, academics, the press — are very much primary aims of the regime, and are likely to be acted on with much greater speed than was earlier suspected. The secondary aim of personal enrichment is also very much in play, and clever people will find ways to play these two goals off each other.
This can be absolutely, positively 100% true and still not matter. I don't know if you've been watching this administration. They aren't speaking like the Lords of Creation addressing the mortals from their seats in Valhalla. They're speaking like David Koresh from the basement. They don't answer, they lash out. They don't respond, they attack. The only support they've gotten - from anyone - comes in the form of "not objecting."
- A source familiar with Booker’s exchange with CBP officials told The Daily Beast that officials with the agency refused to see him face to face. Instead, Booker wrote questions on a piece of paper which he handed to police officers, and those officers gave the paper—along with a copy of Brinkema’s ruling—to CBP officials. Those CBP officials then wrote out their answers to the senator’s questions, according to the source. The source described it as a half-written, half-spoken game of telephone.
Those are your goose-steppers, by the way. The shock troops at the front of the new totalitarian wave. Doing everything they can to not have their names attached to this travesty. The simple act of doing what they're told and throwing 100-odd people in secondary hold for the weekend has them hanging their heads and hiding under desks.
Do you really think they like this any better than you do?
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Look. Putin came to power by killing 300 innocent people and blaming it on terrorism. Theoretically, Trump could do the same. After all, without the Reichstag we've got no 3rd Reich, right? Except Putin was already popular. And at the Reichstag fire Hitler and Hindenberg had 80% of the vote. Neither of them were under investigation for colluding with foreign powers.
And there's something... confounding about the dualism necessary in these discussions. Either Trump is a greedy manchild bent on personal enrichment or he's a Manchurian candidate idealistically bent on sweeping the Muslims into the gutter of history. He can't be both.
- Mr. Bannon told a colleague in multiple conversations during the presidential campaign that he knew Mr. Trump was an “imperfect vessel” for the revolution he had in mind. But the upstart candidate and the media entrepreneur bonded anyway.
In August 2015, Mr. Bannon told Ms. Jones in an email that he had turned Breitbart, where employees called certain political stories “Bannon Specials,” into “Trump Central” and joked that he was the candidate’s hidden “campaign manager.” He hosted Mr. Trump for friendly radio interviews and offered tactful coaching. This August, with the Trump campaign foundering, Mr. Bannon took over as chief executive.
Somebody's being used here, and somebody's using. The author's argument is that the Trump administration is using us because the Russians are using them. But do we really believe that Putin has a tighter leash on Trump than the rest of us? That Bannon does?
Or are we looking at the thrashings of an insular, inexperienced administration attempting to ramrod through everything they can while deliberately avoiding anyone who can tell them no?
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Look. Russia has already benefitted immeasurably. This was a triple grand slam for Putin. Anything that happens from now only puts them further ahead. They have no real risks to worry about. But they're not crazy. They know that an erratic puppet on the throne will cause chaos and discord. They also know that whenever you put someone divisive in charge, you aren't going to get a lot of unity.
Don't get me wrong. This is all crazy shit, and many of us, myself included, certainly didn't predict it'd get this dumb this quick. I'd argue that's because we overestimated the acumen of the Trump team, not underestimated.
They're shifting the transmission into reverse without putting in the clutch. Gears are grinding. Sparks are flying. And Donald J. Trump, the man who doesn't exist if he isn't on television, is being pilloried by nearly everyone. Do you think he likes that?
Reading all this doesn't make me think "how long have we got?" it makes me think
how long has Steve Bannon got?
Counter argument one. All of our previous failsafes have failed and we'd never thought we'd be here. Here we are. The chances of more failsafe failing, however unlikely, are there.
Counter argument two. I'm certain other people, in other countries, with unexpected situations also said "there's no way x could happen. There are too many obstacles in the way for something like that." There they were.
1) "All of our previous failsafes", I'm assuming, refers to the notion of "faithless electors" and the idea that the Electoral College exists to keep madmen like Trump from assuming office. Except it's been in the best interests of the political system to remind us how much we have a representative democracy pretty much since the War of 1812 and you can't assume that the electorate standing up and defying the states that they represented would go all that smoothly either. You get a constitutional crisis either way. I'm not sure how well you remember 2000... that was nearly dicey. I wish it were dicier. But it, too, was a full-blown constitutional crisis and we got through it.
2) is an extremely hand-wavey argument. You're basically saying "no one could know" yet everyone with two eyes and an ACLU card pointed out that Trump, were he to become president, would be a bombastic buffoon with no interest in governance who would be deeply swayed by whatever sycophants he surrounded himself with. The disconnect is none of us thought it would get that far. Now that it is, this is pretty much what you'd expect if you thought Team Trump had zero chance of executing things smoothly. I figured things would be rough, but even I didn't think they'd suck this hard.
Remember: we're in a full-blown holy fuck what happens next moment over an executive order that prohibits immigration from seven countries. We've done that sort of thing all the time. The difference is, it usually happens based on consensus.
Want a glimpse into the mind of Steve Bannon? Here's his hero:
(psych! had to poke a little fun)
No actually it's this guy:
Prolly well before your time, but back in '81, the Air Traffic Controllers went on strike in the middle of the summer. Reagan told them to get back to work in 48 hours or he'd fire 'em. Pandemonium was predicted. Chaos in the streets! Who will land the planes! So they stood firm, and Reagan fired 15,000 of them.
Everything went better than expected.
Air traffic was back up to 80% within a few days, thanks to 2,000 scabs, 3,000 supervisors and about 800 military. The system was effectively all better in a couple years and 15,000 sour-ass union pricks were out of a career. Yay Reagan! Yay strike-breaking! Yay free enterprise!
Thing is, though, Congress passed a law that air traffic controllers couldn't strike back in '55. They upheld that ruling in '71. It was damn dramatic, no doubt, but it was also the legislative, judicial and executive branches acting in concert. Reagan's big power move was literally doing his job (despite the truly scary consequences). His renegade, maverick action was preventing a constitutional crisis.
But Bannon doesn't think that deeply.
So here we are.
Failsafes refer to people making rational decisions in a rational process and preventing irrationality through majority vote and the friction of beuracracy keeping the train from derailing.
Whoever is making the decisions right now is trying to carve glass with a sledgehammer. If they succeed, it'll be an amazing feat. If they fail, that glass sculpture is still fucked up and now someone's gotta clean up the mess.
My second argument is also in reference to previous heads of other states that I don't want to bring up or name but there's a super scary, super long list of people who have fucked the world up in real bad ways. I'm trying real hard to toe the line here and not be super critical of our government and I'm failing spectacularly at it. Other people keep dropping the f-bomb, I'm pretty certain I haven't yet, but seriously. Damn.
Bannon et. al. are not acting irrationally. They're acting rashly. They're acting impetuously. They're acting amateurishly. but they ain't being irrational.
Whoever is making the decisions right now is trying to open a can of beans with a scalpel. If they succeed, it'll be an amazing feat. If they fail, the scalpel won't cut much ever again.
Your second argument is not an argument, it's an expression of unthinking fear. Your government is busily tearing itself apart over the civil rights of people that aren't citizens. If you aren't proud, you aren't paying attention.
I'm proud of the people at the women's march. I'm proud of the people rushing to the airports to offer legal aid, emotional support, and solidarity. I'm proud of the people determined to be vigilant day and night for the sake of their neighbors, their country, and the international community.
I'm fucking terrified that any of this is happening and how much worse things could possibly get. This isn't sane and this isn't healthy and this isn't the direction I want the world to go.
Yeah but come on, of all the agencies to go rogue you just knew the Forest Service would be somewhere near the top of that list. At least given my encounters with Forest Rangers and the like.
Yeah but come on, of all the agencies that could possibly go political you cannot tell me that the Forest Service was on the short list.
My great aunt Marge was a staunch Republican who, for 30 years, ran the FDR memorial in upstate New York. Generally they're above this sort of thing.
Dang. I booped this link hoping to come back and find someone explaining why this is unrealistic hyperbole. Your post isn't the comforting response I was looking for.
Interesting. A bit sensationalist. And I think it gives Trump - essentially a bumbler with money - far too much credit for orchestrating a large-scale disruption of a complex set of systems he has little to no real understanding of how they work, or what they do.
It's the other snakes in the pit that scare me.
Like Dubya, some seriously bad people with bad intentions for the state and the American people, now have a puppet that can control, who has completely self-isolated himself from all reasonable and measured inputs.
There is no longer anyone with a reasonable mind speaking into Trump's ear. (And by "reasonable" I'm including the incredibly horrid Paul Ryan, who - in the last 3 months - has begun looking like a fucking Boy Scout, after being an epic shit for his entire life.)
Either they are dumb enough to think they can turn the ship of government in a couple of weeks, or they are intentionally driving it on the rocks, just like they promised when campaigning.
Either the Republican Senate and the DHS (and other branches) grow a pair and say NO, or the entire power structure comes tumbling down.
Because the whole secret to the entire US Government is that it is run on the base assumption that nobody is really going to do anything bad. Everyone trusts that people are in their positions because they are good at what they do, and have good intentions.
We now have actively bad actors, with bad intentions, holding the levers of power, and there really is no recourse.
Individuals within agencies can hide documents, dodge phone calls, "forget" to do things they have been asked to do - in other words, make dumb ideas get mired in bureaucracy - and block the bad actors.
Or someone can go to court. And fight for what's right. And take YEARS to get to a ruling. Which cannot actually be enforced by anyone.
So great. The Supreme Court decides that Trump is a terrorist, and he is convicted. Who, EXACTLY, walks up to the White House, armed, gets past Trump's personal security detail that are on HIS payroll, and puts the cuffs on the motherfucker and takes him to jail?
See? The government is designed to work as long as everyone pretty much acts like reasonable people.
But the unreasonable are now in power.
IMO the government is designed to make sure that unreasonable people don't hold power. The fact that it takes a while is part of the reason that reasonable people can and usually do. We are a nation of laws, not rulers.
Trump is currently a US president. If he wants to be a ruler, it is going to be an arduous process on his part. I am not saying that it isn't possible, but the question is whether he can defeat the legal system before it defeats him. The fact that it is difficult to remove a bad president is what creates stability for the good ones.
He's also playing a game as a Level 1 newb while surrounded by career Level 80 arch-mages. They've opted not to frag him so far but they can change their mind whenever they want.
Oh, look at that. The Attorney General has ordered the Justice Department not to defend Trump's muslim ban in court.
- Because the whole secret to the entire US Government is that it is run on the base assumption that nobody is really going to do anything bad. Everyone trusts that people are in their positions because they are good at what they do, and have good intentions.
The advantage of a bureaucracy is that it has more inertia than a glacier. They are not particularly prone to shock. This is literally the way the process works. Someone does something crazy, someone else issues an injunction, someone else calls an emergency session to debate it, meetings are had and laws are passed. Perhaps you're forgetting that Congress passed a fucking act over Terri Schiavo.
It'd be one thing if the whole apparatus were suddenly Trump-crazy. But Team Trump is pulling inward, not reaching outward. They've basically said "you're with us or you're with the terrorists" and then not waited for an answer.
- Who, EXACTLY, walks up to the White House, armed, gets past Trump's personal security detail that are on HIS payroll, and puts the cuffs on the motherfucker and takes him to jail?
Is that a rhetorical question? Because it doesn't really matter. The discussion at hand right now is whether the DHS is bound by law to answer to the Executive, even in the face of district court rulings. We see defiance. I reckon they see "clarification." When it happens, Trump has either more power or less. If he ends up with "more", it becomes a congressional problem. If "less", it sets a precedent for future grabs.
Suppose Trump is impeached and refuses to go. Wouldn't be the first time a despot refuses to step down. That's very different from the point where the despot is no longer in charge.
My concern is more Bannon at the head of the Military.
The military is a bunch of serious motherfuckers who have vowed an oath to defend the constitution above all.
They also strictly follow the command structure.
Which now has them reporting to Bannon, and him to Trump.
So they issue a blatantly unconstitutional order to block all immigrants at the border, and the DHS (aka: TSA) holds legal Green Card holders at the airport. THIS is the practical aspect that worries me. Trump says something dipshit loony, and the guys with the guns and no training jump to fulfill his orders without the honor, respect, training, or skills of the military.
Nobody at the DHS said, "Ignore that order, because it is stupid and unconstitutional, and has no practical methodology for implementation."
THIS is our concern, dude.
'member back when McNamara decided we needed "launch codes" in order to start a nuclear war and Curtis LeMay had them set to all zeroes because no pencil-neck actuarial geek was going to tell him who he got to bomb? It's not that he didn't take the job seriously. It's that he took the job more seriously than Robert McNamara.
Bannon had the Joint Chiefs removed from the National Security Council. The military reports to the Joint Chiefs, not to Bannon. The Executive has JSOC - which is probably why we ran a dunderheaded SEAL Team Six raid into Yemen that involved 30 dead civilians, two injured pilots, a scuttled V-22 and a dead SEAL. The guys that popped bin Laden without so much as a scratch and we're pantomiming Carter's hostage rescue. Clearly, they're playing whatever GI Joe games they can. But the conventional military structure? I mean, we didn't even go play saber-rattling games in the Gulf or anything.
We're talking about hair-on-fire constitutional crisis over one religion, seven countries. We're talking about guys at the DHS saying "follow that order, because stupid and unconstitutional as it is, it was given to us via a constitutionally sound process and until this shit gets sorted out, we gotta do the thing." I can see the argument that it is of a kind with the New World Order marching on California but in much the same way that budgies and velociraptors are of a kind.
I'm glad someone is paying attention. The fact that DHS willfully ignored a court order should be extremely worrying: it's a very large crack in the dyke, followed closely by the purges of the National Security Council. The former is getting far too little press.
I'm not really sure where we go from here. It's clear Trump is going to keep pushing, and the only question is who starts to push back. If it's Congress, we'll probably be okay. If they fail and it's us, well, as David Simon once said, sometimes it's the brick.
