Trump's quadruple-decker sandwich

I can't believe he ate the whole thing

Trump’s “unrelenting agenda,” as he dubbed it last night, is no exaggeration. You can say it’s all achievable because it’s mostly about subtraction and pulling out and walking away and gutting and terminating and so on, but none of these things happen in a vacuum and none of these things are self-perpetuating. Counterparties (and not just a docile Congress) are needed for all of it, and basically none of those counterparties (think US courts, Putin, Xi, EU, drug cartels … the list is endless) are on the same urgency wavelength as Trump — that being his great weakness right now: when you want it bad, you get it bad. When you take on both the world and your domestic opponents, pretty much everybody is against you — outside of your base.

And sure, you can say, as Trump did, that the Far Right is on the march across much of the world right now, but, guess what, the Far Right, by definition, doesn’t play well with others — that’s their whole raison d’etre! As a rule, they only cooperate in destruction — not construction. So don’t expect any great help when things go sour here or around the world, because none of those parties will feel any more responsibility than world’s-all-time-greatest-victim Trump does.

That’s the danger we face now: Trump’s attempt at four simultaneous revolutions — two domestic and two global — with, frankly, zero-sequencing. In World War II terms, it’s FDR deciding to do Normandy, North Africa, Iwo Jima, and drop the Bomb on the same day. Brilliant stuff if you can pull it off, but, unless you’re a true nihilist End Timer eager for the hereafter, this ends up being one of those plots where you, as the film viewer, shut down your brain trying to comprehend the from-here-to-there logic and begin to wonder if this isn’t a dream sequence that will be whisked away in a jump cut.

Whew! That was fucked up!

That’s what I’m sensing here: crazy mad plot holes that, when portrayed on the great white board of that man’s brain, are covered up time and again by the written instruction, Insert miracle here!

The four revolutions:

1. Trump seeks to detach America from virtually all of its security obligations across the Eastern Hemisphere and focus on a truly aggressive drug cartel war in our hemisphere.

2. Trump seeks to re-negotiate America’s trade relations with the entire world through trade wars.

3. Trump seeks to trigger a Cultural Revolution inside America that simply defines all sorts of “undesirables” out of existence (e.g., Two sexes only! No DEI because zero racism! No foreigners because we only speak American here!).

4. Trump is dismantling the USG with no hint of what is going to replace all the discarded functions and roles and responsibilities.

In each instance, the list of what could go wrong? is … intimidating, to say the least, in large part because they — in combination — offer untold seeds of destruction.

Examples:

• 1+4: You hamstring our military and intelligence community in your destruction of the USG and HOPE Putin doesn’t take advantage as you seek to dump Ukraine. Putin keeps his word, right? He’s famous for it, plus he and Trump were similarly traumatized by Russia-gate!

• 1+2: You want allies to step up and pick up the slack created by America’s withdrawal from the world and you’re attacking their economies at the same time!

• 1+3: You shut down your cyber-defenses vis-a-vis Russia when the guy already has a frightening strong ideological hold on your base and can now simply pile on like that guy in the mayhem commercials.

• 2+3: You declare a cultural war on roughly half your population while introducing inflation and likely stock market damage on basically everybody — sort of the opposite of triangulation (strangulation?).

• 2+4: You’re whacking your foreign policy structures (e.g., USAID, State) right as you create difficult bilateral relations with just about every nation in the world.

• 3+4: You’re signaling to your base that now is the time to pick on every possible weakling in society right as you inflame all those groups by whacking their government lifelines. This one is going to blow.

Point being, all these things feed viciously on one another, meaning there’s simply no way they all work out.

Mao pursued this sort of crazy-ass ambition with his Great Leap Forward (Let’s industrialize the entire country on a wing and a prayer!) that segued into a Cultural Revolution targeting all those losers who failed the state in the preceding effort. Trump is trying to do both at the same time.

Nixon, going to China, sought to rejigger superpower relations right as domestic opposition to the Vietnam War was peaking and, guess what? Neither Moscow nor Beijing felt any need to pull his fat out of the fire. Trump now tries a reverse Nixon-goes-to-China by going to Moscow instead (literally).

When both TR and FDR sought to remake government, they were exceedingly careful on the international front, with the former winning a Nobel Peace Prize as he “spoke softly” and the latter placating the isolationists for as absolutely long as he could.

Stalin decided to purge just about everybody he could find on the eve of war with Nazi Germany, blindly hoping that Hitler — of all people — would stick to his word and remained focused on hold-out Britain. It earned him and his people the greatest ass-kicking in human history in terms of casualties (27M, with China coming in second because Mao sought to fight both Japan and the Kuomintang at the same time!).

Hitler, fixated on those communist Jews ruling those “subhuman” Slavs, decided he needed to achieve his lebensraum (living space for the German people), so the disastrous second front was attempted just months before the US entered the war, at which point, Hitler did the world a favor by unnecessarily declaring war on the US.

All of these examples and so many more I could cite reflect the hubris of doubling-down, which is a concept so celebrated in our society today, when, it truth, it simply speaks to stubbornness, an inability to adapt, a refusal to accurately view the correlation of forces surrounding you, a willfulness in blowing off all negative feedback as proving your success and their weakness.

These aren’t simply games where going for it on 4th down and one yard to go is just plain fun. This is attempting a Hail Mary when your quarterback is scrambling deep in his own territory in OT.

Meanwhile, the evidence of the growing “resistance” is out there — like some inconvenient truth.