The major media and all the sanctioned political pundits and tired elected officials filled the airwaves and newspaper columns the last few days with fruitless debates about whether or not expelling Sarah Sanders was the right thing for a small mid-Virginian restaurant owner to do.
But while preoccupied with that, monumental decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court relating to the nation’s ability to ban immigrants based on religious affiliation (the technical ruling did not pertain to that, per se, but the matter was derived from earlier claims that did), and to the ability of states to gerrymander electoral districts in unfair ways (in Virginia, it ordered the state to redraw the boundaries of all 11 of her U.S. Congressional Districts before the November election) were being announced.
Then came a couple somewhat more esoteric but meaningful reveals whose import may remain obscure for now but eventually far more important.
There was Virginia U.S. Senator Mark Warner’s off-hand comment reported by Politico over the weekend at a Democratic political event in Martha’s Vineyard. He was said to have quipped, “If you get me one more glass of wine, I’ll tell you stuff only Bob Mueller and I know. If you think you’ve seen wild stuff so far, buckle up. It’s going to be a wild couple of months.”
(Just the day before in Northern Virginia, when I asked Warner at a press conference on an unrelated matter, “What’s coming next with the Intelligence Committee?,” he just gave a giant shrug and grin and walked away. Was I to read that as the committee had run dry? Maybe his remarks the next day were inspired slightly by his felt need to set that matter straight.)
There was the startling reaction of a visibly upset Trump at a rally in Duluth last week when a person in the crowd held up a enlarged photo showing Trump with convicted child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. Trump stopped everything to tell people to remove the protester, over and over again. There persist the lawsuits by women charging the president with rape while they were underage.
Then this week there has been the release through You Tube of a music video by the same Russian rock star, Emin Agalarov, who had a hand in the famous Trump Tower pow-wow with Trump Jr. and top Russian state officials. This video has been characterized as a “definite provokatsiya,” or provocation against Trump.
It shows a Trump character being compromised in a hotel room with scantily clad women and payoff exchanges going on with members of his family. This has raised eyebrows globally. Does this signal that too much irrefutable evidence on the Russian-Trump connection has fallen into Mueller’s hands, via cooperating witnesses like Michael Cohen, that it’s time for Moscow to cut ties and kick Trump under the bus?
Now, of course, come the polls that show Trump enjoys 90 percent support from the GOP (and five percent from the Democrats). But what does “GOP” refer to these days? What kind of shrunken, shriveled up caricature of its former self does the Republican Party now represent, now that it has abandoned its former life and is staggering along like a drug-addicted vagrant toward a row of garbage cans.
Neither Trump himself nor the Russians are primarily to blame for the direction all this is heading, however. Trump fell into Russian hands through the Russian mob operating out of Brighton Beach in the 1970s, with the help of his mentor Roy Cohn. But this was the American ruling class gambit devised under Richard Nixon, through the ruse of “detente,” to permit this new social phenomenon to infect the U.S. like a slow-growing deadly virus.
Their “Manchurian candidate” finally gained the White House, and has been shredding and sapping the strategic strength, globally, of the U.S. as rapidly as possible.
Their only miscalculation was a huge one: that is, the American public is not buying it. The particularly craven nihilism of their chosen man does not resonate with the great majority of us. As nihilists themselves, they didn’t expect this. So they’re about to be swept into the dustbin of history, and hugely.
Nicholas Benton may be emailed at [email protected].
