I listened to the bizarre ritual performance of the GOP at the White House yesterday, praising Trump to their heavens. Bizarre, weird, strange — and utterly misplaced since they were offering cries of praise to someone who had virtually nothing to do with that tax scam.
Over the past year — and during his campaign — Trump has spewed his usual incoherent and contradictory ideas about taxes, all produced by the people who have been running him and delivered to their mouthpiece, who has shown no capacity for understanding anything that comes out of his own mouth.
The tax scam has been the wet dream of the GOP — especially Paul Ryan and other Ayn Rand-influenced sorts — for decades. And, according to reports, they were threatened by their dark money owners, a/k/a “libertarians,” to get this plan done or else.
Meanwhile, my extensive reading about these dark money owners, the Koch Bros and their wholly created “libertarianism,” has informed me this tax ripoff has been patiently, deviously, carefully and secretly in the works since the mid-1950s.
They have been clever, these Kochs. They have quietly purchased politicians at all levels of governance, state and federal. They have used the GOP as a tool to advance their goal of diminishing democracy in favor of an oligarchy. I don’t think they did much to support Trump but saw his win, his presidency as moderately useful. To the Kochs, one tool is almost as good as another.
After the attack on the ACA collapsed, the only remaining use the Kochs had for Trump is his signature on this tax bill.
Trump has been a puppet, as Hillary said, but an awkward, hard-to-manage puppet, with too many ferociously competitive puppetmasters. Spoil the broth? Spoil everything. I’m not going to bother listing the erstwhile and current puppetmasters. You know them all. Some of them you’ve probably forgotten about and I forgive you. There have been so, so many.
I doubt even Putin is comfortable about Trump. He, Trump, is so incalculably, unmanageably erratic and unintelligent, the whole GOP upper echelon establishment — who never wanted him as president — must have been sitting on shpilkes this whole year.
Still, they got what they wanted: serious damage to invaluable government agencies, gifts to polluters and poisoners, the dumbing-down and/or elimination of any coherent policy, unfettered capitalism in ascendance, and the theft of our treasury.
So they don’t need Trump anymore.
I listened to the — I’m trying to think of a sleazier word than “encomium” — worship lavished on Trump by all those guys at the White House. After a while, I began thinking they all sounded like orators at a religious funeral, tossing out hopeless clichés in memoriam.
Am I crazy to be wondering whether behind the scenes the GOP establishment is plotting to ease Trump out of the White House?
Cajoling him, bowing to him, praising him to the skies. Then, going to him privately, bowing and repeating the praise and saying, “Hey, we know you’ve been brave and terrific and have put up with so much crap. And we know you’ve made your brand the biggest, best brand in the whole universe, and we know you’d really like to get back to being the best, richest, most important executive in the whole universe so…”
Or they could wait until the Mueller investigation captures a few more indictments before going to Trump.
Because, if you’ve noticed, the major GOP players are not saying much about the Mueller investigation. The ones who are yammering their crap on Fox TV are the GOP twits, minor yellers none of us has ever heard of before.
And a minute ago, I heard on Ari Melber’s The Beat that those loud twits have been developing a close relationship with the White House. So there’s a realistic suspicion the White House has been controlling the attempts to demean Mueller. Which, as was pointed out, would be a further obstruction of justice charge.
Desperation and advanced insanity.
Am I crazy to think this is what’s going on?