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2/05/2018

Another Authoritarian Building-Block

Unlike the mainstream Media, this Blog has not attempted to down-play or hide the truth or the reality of the ‘deconstruction plan’ of the Trump administration, as conceived by Donald Trump and Steve Bannon (and other “special advisors”). “De-construction” is little more than a euphemism for their anti-democratic value system.  Their ideology is closer to that of fascism than to conservative Republicanism, and their tactics are often those of Nazism.  Their alleged collusion with the Russians is bad enough, but their concept of deconstruction may be worse.  I have dealt with this several times along the way (see my Blog postings of 8/6, 8/14 and 4/15 in 2017, 4/1/2016 and 11/16/2015). 

Until very recently, the mainstream Media has been shy about this, even denying that there is such a “plan.”  Those who down-play the de-construction plan fail to understand, that Trump and many of his cabinet members and staff are wedded to ideas and tactics that are found among those of the Farthest Right.   It is past time to at least recognize the Trump acceptance and practice of concepts and tactics that resemble those present in almost every Fascist government and regime.  Or, put another way:  we must focus on the fact that democratic values are not as important to this administration as authoritarian ideology and leadership. 

I know it is difficult to fathom that an overthrow of our democratic government could happen, but please consider what has already happened in relation to the 14 common characteristic actions of fascist regimes, as studied and enumerated by Professor Larry Briggs and detailed in my last Blog posting.  I encourage you to review them in that previous post. 

Trump may not have a well-thought-out Plan to make us over into a fascist country, but he is already acting upon internalized values, beliefs and experiences that drive his actions, as they have always done.   Denying the existence and danger of that poisonous strain in this potential despot is dangerous.  Just ask those hundreds of victims who have taken him to Court, or the many other countries that have been corrupted, overtaken and devastated in the wake of authoritarians who acted upon their fascist beliefs, myths and biases, while the bulk of the citizenry (and too many in their media) lived – and died -- in denial of that possibility. 

Before I identify another sign-post of authoritarian Far Right actions involved in de-construction, let me briefly point out what I consider to be major elements of ‘the Plan’ that are already either accomplished, well on their way to being accomplished, or are just being inaugurated.

1) Capture the judicial authority.  With the approval of the most recent SCOTUS Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and with the appointment of numerous justices to lower courts, this important piece of the Plan is well underway.  After all, what better strategy can you employ than to have the Supreme judicial authority that invalidates and calls for re-writes of Constitutional provisions and mandates-- be on your side in terms of both leadership philosophy and political ideology?

Watch what happens.  If the SCOTUS begins making decisions in issue areas that loosen requirements for justice, negatively affect the rights of minority citizens, or impose religious beliefs of one group upon others;  back immigration restrictions, uphold elimination of subsidies or coverage in terms of healthcare; allow corporations and other business entities to deny certain employee benefits if they conflict with religious beliefs of the employer; or lessens the right to vote in any way, you will be witnessing our constitutional democratic value system “de-constructed’ before your eyes. And that result can only improve the chances that the capture of the Judiciary will mean that it is no longer independent of partisan politics and philosophy; no longer on the side of justice for all citizens and those seeking that status, but is a willing participant in the building of an authoritarian government. 

2)  Capture the Legislative Branch
The release of the Devin Nunes memo has focused a laser beam on the Congress; mainly on the Republicans in that bi-cameral body.  Without getting side-tracked into the controversy surrounding this summary ‘report’ written by Senate Intelligence (?) Committee staffers, this “fake news” indicates exactly what is happening…Mr. Trump seized on the memo to assert that it renders the Russia investigation moot. “This memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe,” he wrote on Twitter. “After one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead. This is an American disgrace!”

This is not the first time that Nunes has carried “intelligence” given him by the White House.  He is a lackey – a Trump servant – who is now working to protect this President so that Trump can reign for another 4 years.  Instead of acting as a member of an independent branch of government and refusing to have his Committee used (and tarnished) by this President, Nunes has given up the unique check on presidential power.  In working as a political operative with this President, he has signaled his capture.  Others around him, like Speaker Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are no less responsible for the capture of the legislative branch as they lead the defense of this “collusion” between Trump and Nunes and lack of the same between Trump and Russia.

Apparently, an oath of office to “protect and defend the Constitution” has little meaning to Nunes, some other Republican members of his Committee, and those Senators and Representatives who speak out only to protect and defend their President, but do not speak out when obstruction of justice is in the making.

3)  Prelude to a Coup
 In my estimation, another sign-post of Far-Right regimes is the de-construction of independent policing and intelligence-gathering authorities, and the construction of a federal policing authority responsible to, contained within, and dependent upon, the Office of the Fuhrer (oops, I meant ‘President’).

Without going into all the details of the back-and-forth between Trump and Congress and the compelling investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, there are important questions to be asked that go beyond separate events and behaviors and cannot, and must not, be ignored.
For instance, why is Trump so vehemently attacking the integrity of independent law enforcement and investigative agencies like the FBI and the CIA, the SNA, and his own Department of Justice?  Is it simply to denigrate the investigators to such an extent that they will not be trusted when indictments or criminal or impeachment charges are brought? 

Is this merely an effort to diminish the Mueller team, or is it a far deeper and more sinister effort to denigrate federal policing agencies to extreme lengths so that the populace (or Trump’s base plus some of the general public) will acquiesce in favor of a national police authority responsible to, and under the orders of, this authoritarian Executive?

Trump’s legal team appeared to come down on the affirmative side of this question by asserting that the President has the ability to fire the head of the FBI, and the Special Counsel.  Indeed, according to the latest breaking news, the President did order the firing of Robert Mueller last June, and ironically, what stopped him was his own White House Counsel threatening to resign if he persisted. 
 
There is more to this than meets the eye, in my opinion.  There has been a pattern developing in the past year that adds weight to the suggestion that there is in this President’s authoritarian tool box the possibility of a national police authority responsible to him and under his oversight.  Let us review some of what has happened (and been declared) in an admittedly incomplete and partial time line.

1/23/2017 – Trump signs Executive Order to put freeze on federal hiring.    The order directs that no vacant positions can be filled, or new positions created, unless an agency head deems the position "necessary to meet national security or public safety responsibilities." The freeze would allegedly end once the Office of Management and Budget created a "long-term plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government's workforce through attrition." (The Hill).  It did end in 90 days, but the long-term effects on government are yet to be determined.

March 2017 -- Jeff Sessions recused himself from Russian collusion investigation—"three weeks after his swearing-in and fifteen weeks after his nomination. In Trump’s view: ‘Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.’

He twice describes Sessions’ decision as ‘unfair to the president,’ seemingly unaware that his recusal was almost surely compelled by Justice Department recusal rules. That is, the President is openly expressing bitterness toward his attorney general for following the rules—because the rules don’t favor Trump’s interests. He wants an attorney general who will actively supervise the Justice Department, and the Russia investigation, in a fashion congenial to his interests, and he has no compunction about saying so explicitly. He made perfectly clear that he regrets appointing Sessions.
He made equally clear that Sessions’ job is, in his mind, a personal service contract to him and that if Sessions couldn’t deliver on service to Trump, he shouldn’t have taken the position.” ( Benjamin Wittes, July 20, 2017)

June 2017 – Trump on Twitter: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!” While Trump has previously admitted that Rosenstein’s memo criticizing Comey was pretextual and that the president would have dismissed the FBI director regardless… saying, “Now, perhaps I would have fired Comey anyway, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have the letter, O.K.”

In a separate interview with the New York Times, Trump “issued a stunning vote of no-confidence in basically everyone currently in a leadership position in the Justice Department, the FBI, or the special counsel’s office—in other words, not just some federal law enforcement, but all of it. The President’s rebuke reaches everyone from the attorney general to staff attorneys hired by Robert Mueller—whose investigation he pointedly did not promise not to terminate. His complaint? They’re all, in different ways, not serving him. And serving him, he makes clear, is “their real job.”

If, on reading this, it sounds like the President believes that law enforcement should be at his personal beck and call, that’s because that is, in fact, exactly what he believes. We know this because he made this belief perfectly clear in the interview as well. At one point, he offered an extraordinary account of the history of the FBI and its relationship to the Justice Department. He indicated that around the time of the Nixon administration, “out of courtesy, the F.B.I. started reporting to the Department of Justice.” He continued: “But there was nothing official, there was nothing from Congress. There was nothing — anything. But the FBI person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting. You know, which is interesting.”

Trump’s logic isn’t easy to follow here, but his core claim is unmistakable—and “interesting” is a generous word for it: the FBI director serves the president. As a matter of constitutional hierarchy, this is of course true. But in investigative matters, the FBI director does not, or should not, serve the president by reporting to him. He serves the president by leading law enforcement in an independent and apolitical fashion. And it is fundamentally corrupt for any president to be asking him to do otherwise."

The astonishing implication of Trump’s view is that he believes the president may shut down an FBI investigation that displeases him. Indeed, Trump went so far as to say that too: when explaining why it would not be a problem even if he had told Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, he stated, “other people go a step further. I could have ended that whole thing just by saying—they say it can’t be obstruction because you can say: ‘It’s ended. It’s over. Period'."

In a single interview in which the President of the United States expresses no-confidence in the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the special counsel, the acting FBI director, and the special counsel’s staff, and in which he makes clear that the FBI should be his personal force and that all of law enforcement should be about serving him, the result is an environment in which the President can say these things without obvious consequence, at least for now.

We are in a dangerous moment—one in which the President, with his infinite sense of grievance, feels entitled publicly, without obvious consequences, to attack the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, and that apparatus, in turn, lacks a single person with the stature, the institutional position, and the fortitude to stand up to him.  Since deputy F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, was pushed out recently, possibly Chris Wray, Trump’s appointee heading the FBI is the only one left to make such a stand.

WE the PEOPLE must become warier and resist the efforts of this President to create a damaged FBI that is responsible to him and him alone.  WE the PEOPLE must recognize and resist the possibility of any kind of nationalized police or intelligence authority under the office of the President and responsible only to him in a secretive pact of some kind.  

If Trump is indeed the fascist authoritarian leader that many suspect he is, there will soon enough be an attempt to inaugurate such a “President’s Guard” or “Secret Militia” or “Presidential Youth Corps” that will protect, defend and carry out missions for, the Presidente.  It is the SS, the Storm Troopers, the Palace Guard, the Hitler Youth all over again.  If anything of the kind appears in the near future (as I expect it might if Trump is not impeached), given this President’s rhetoric and actions, you will know for sure that this democracy is dead, and that resistance in the form of political demonstrations will also be totally ineffective.

BREAKING NEWS:

WASHINGTON — “The attacks are having an impact. A new SurveyMonkey poll for Axios, a news website, showed that only 38 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of the F.B.I., compared to 64 percent of Democrats. In interviews, more than a dozen officials who work at or recently left the Justice Department and the F.B.I. said they feared that the president was mortgaging the credibility of those agencies for his own short-term political gain as he seeks to undercut the Russia inquiry.  (NY Times, 2/3/2018)

"This should be a matter of grave concern for every American. This is a test whether in this country we can have an independent investigation of the powerful when the powerful are not happy about it," (Naftali said on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront.")