There’s this myth that I think the media like to sort of present, that there’s still sort of two wings of
the Republican party. There’s the Trump wing, and there’s the kind of establishment wing, for lack
of a better word. There aren’t two wings of the Republican party, there’s just the one wing, the
Trump wing, the Trump party. There are some people . . . who criticize Trump, and say maybe this
isn’t the best direction for the party. But those people have no power. All of the power, all of the power,
is consolidated in the Trump wing of the party. Donald Trump is the king of the party.
Where to begin? First of all, Trump does not have any power, any more than Hitler did in Germany in 1930. What he does have, like Hitler, is a voting block loyal to his hatred that he can wield either against his enemies or alongside his allies. That is why no one I’ve ever heard speak about Trump and his followers has never been able to adequately explain what is going on with them. But the reason is fairly simple. In a word: hate. Trump hates who they hate. He hates immigrants, he hates blacks, he hates Hispanics, he hates women, he hates gays, lesbians, trans people and the rest of the alphabet, he hates liberals, he hates intellectuals, and because he hates the same people they do, they don’t care about the rest. Stealing classified documents, shopping them around to our enemies, weaponizing the Department of Justice, giving tax cuts to the wealthy, trying to rig a presidential election then trying to steal it afterward when he lost, inciting an insurrection? They don’t care about any of it . . . because he hates the same people they hate. Trump’s followers want only one thing from him, the very same thing the antisemitic voters in Germany wanted from Hitler: for him to punish other people, and punish them hard for perceived ills in those voters’ lives. That’s it. Deportations, imprisonment, concentration camps, extermination, they want everything he’s promised them and more.
And lest we forget, in another salient comparison to Hitler he also hates Jews. Trump’s stance on the Israeli Gaza crisis in support of Israel is only because he wants to wipe the Muslims from the face of the earth. Once that’s accomplished, he would gladly turn his hand without a second thought—like Hitler invading Poland and then neglecting to stop—to doing the very same to Jews in the Middle East. And he doesn’t try to hide it, either. Keith Olbermann, in a recent episode of Countdown, gave this completely uncontroversial description of Trump:
“He’s . . . a Nazi.
Trump plays your roundup of the great antisemitic hits. He has insisted, repeatedly, that American
Jews, “have to get their act together before it is too late.” He has repeatedly pushed the calumny
that Jews are loyal to Israel and not the United States. At the White House on Hanukah, he
referred to “your country.” He meant Israel. He had dinner with the avowedly antisemitic Nick
Fuentes and Kanye West. He praised Hitler to former chief-of-staff John Kelly . . . This is not a
complicated calculation. If Trump determined today, that he could get elected by beginning a full-
fledged attack on Jewish people, Jewish influence, he’d do it. When we speak of him as having
the soul of a mass murderer, that’s what we mean. People do not have any actual value to him.
Reenact the Holocaust in whole or in part to get reelected, to stay out of jail? Of course he’ll do
that—and to any group you could name.
When Hitler made a pact with the Soviet Union to partition Poland, he knew from the start he was never going to honor it, and intended all along to continue on into the Soviet Union and conquer the Russians as well. Trump’s implicit pact with his followers, that if they vote for him it will be the “others” who are punished, not them, means no more than Hitler’s. What Trump’s followers don’t understand—and have never understood, because Trump lies about it every chance he gets—is that he hates the people who vote for him just as much as he hates all the rest.
But the unvarnished truth is, these people who hate do not represent the majority of people in this county—just like they didn’t in pre-World War Two Germany. Trump lost in 2020 by nearly eight million votes, a landslide repudiation by any estimate. Unfortunately for all of us, however, the election was actually much closer than that because of an archaic voting system we have been saddled with, designed by wealthy elites in order to control the will of what they considered the ignorant masses. Democracy, sure, but representative democracy, a democracy that can be manipulated at the state level for the benefit of those who are really in charge, the corporate and wealthy donors who essentially employ politicians to work directly on their behalf, and only incidentally—if at all—for the voters who believe they have elected them. In the end, however, Trump was so objectively bad as a president, making the country pathetic in the eyes of the world, twiddling his thumbs while nearly a million people died of Covid-19 on his watch, and using the White House as his own personal base of criminal operations to benefit him and his children, that the majority of the people in this county had had enough. Therefore, when Biden won the election, church bells all over the world rang out with relief. So in that way, at least, Trump has no power at all. But that may not last much longer. Political machinations at the state level have ramped up considerably since 2020, in a desperate bid by Republican politicians who control state governments to rewrite election law in order to throw out votes they don’t like and install Trump as president even if he loses by another eight million votes, or more. The desperation comes from the fact that, if they don’t get Trump back in the White House in 2024, they very well might find themselves voted out of office.
It’s important to note, however, that this isn’t happening just because Trump lost. Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the electoral hijacking that is happening all across this country. Right-wing oligarchs, whether in the form of wealthy individuals like Charles Koch and his ilk, or the corporate-industrial complex that is run by those individuals, have been working to wrest complete control of the political system from the people for decades. And they’ve been playing a long game, in some ways going all the way back to 1789 and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But ever since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of a new war on the New Deal, Republicans have relied on stealth to achieve their aims. Subtle retraining of jurists to be friendly to big money, as well as not-so-subtle gerrymandering of state districts, have been accompanied by brainwashing of the electorate through a lengthy and elaborate system of propaganda designed to conflate the ideas of democracy and capitalism as if they were inseparable. Trump, however, was something they hadn’t counted on, much like Hitler. The right-wing hadn’t anticipated that his bugling ineptitude would expose for all to see the naked greed of the oligarchs controlling the entire Republican party apparatus. But while it has been exposed, that doesn’t mean that the electorate has been able to see it for what it really is.
At the same moment Trump kicked over the rock and sent the capitalist oligarchs scurrying for cover, a new system of propaganda had to be implemented by the right in order to obfuscate their takeover from within. That is when Fox New subtly shifted the message to their uneducated and mentally malleable right-wing voters from inuendo and implication to outright lies. Rather than suggesting that the truth may not be all it purports to be, instead they began simply lying, about everything, with no fear of rejection once a critical mass had been achieved. What’s interesting is that the same technique unleashed by Trump is now being used across the world by authoritarian dictatorships against their own people. Anne Applebaum, in a recent article in The Atlantic called “The New Propaganda War,” details how the trend in these countries mirrors what is going on in American right-wing propaganda.
When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when
anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s
Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly,
obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. (pg. 34-35)
Sound familiar? That’s why Trump’s followers will never hear a retraction from the propaganda networks they watch when those lies are exposed and debunked elsewhere. They just move on to the next barrage of lies. Internationally, the disinformation has a very different objective. “This tactic—” Applebaum notes, “the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many [lies], how can you know what actually happened” (pg. 35). The difference in the U.S. model is that the lies are meant to produce outrage, so along with the lies the anchors and hosts of Fox and their ilk also tell viewers how to feel about the lies. The real goal, of course, as far as the network is concerned, is simply to make money. The more viewers they can regularly deceive, the more they can charge for advertising, and their corporate clients—who don’t give a damn what this does to our country as long as they make money, too—are more than happy to have their brands associated with the propaganda if it’s going to increase their customer base.
What both flavors of deception have in common, however, is a decidedly anti-democratic agenda. For players like Putin and Xi of China, the goal is to discredit democracy in the eyes of their citizens so that they won’t get the idea that there’s something better out there. For the U.S. market, the goal is to pave the way for a right-wing authoritarian shift that will make the government manifestly beholden to corporate interests instead of barely concealed the way it has been for hundreds of years. The primary thrust of these lies has been through projection, disingenuously blaming the left for everything that the right is already doing. In that way they get on the record first, so if the propaganda networks are actually caught in their lies—as Fox was in the Dominion voting machine case—they can still make it seem as if is really the left that is attempting to shift the blame to them rather than anything the right is actually doing. Once the floodgates had opened on unfettered lying, other networks like Newsmax and OAN gleefully joined in to provide Internet-style unfiltered disinformation to their viewers on a twenty-four-seven basis. But it isn’t just the obvious right-wing lie machines that are participating in this deception, it’s also mainstream media as well.
It’s important for the American people to finally realize, once and for all, that the media is NOT objective. And it never has been. The media are corporate entities. They are businesses. And in a capitalist society their only function is to make money for their owners, executives, and stockholders. Their function is NOT to keep the public informed by telling the truth. In fact, it has been this fealty to the financial bottom line that finally broke CNN. Their misguided goal of appealing to both sides of the political electorate has backfired spectacularly. Viewers on the right, hardened into false beliefs by an amoral leader who lies every time he opens his mouth, are not going to sit still when presented with viewpoints that oppose the disinformation that has atrophied their already weak intellect. At the same time, intelligent viewers on the left are not going to abide a news network that regularly gives equal time to “opposing viewpoints” that are inherently and demonstrably false. Not when, at the very least, they can watch MSNBC or PBS and see Trump’s lies actually called lies—rather than legitimizing the lies by not calling them out, or worse yet, showing them in the first place. Yet even the most left-leaning news network, MSNBC, is still woefully inadequate in terms of the information they convey to viewers. And that is because MSNBC is a business, just like CNN, just like Fox, and just like the networks. What that means is that they are limited in what they can really say about politics in this country, because they are only allowed to talk about the politics itself, instead of who really controls that political process.
All of which brings us back to Nikki Haley and Chris Cillizza. The one statement Cillizza makes that contains an element of truth, is when he says about right-wing politicians, “The only path that exists for you to maintain some credibility with the Republican base is to be for Donald Trump.” That is true for the vast majority of Republican politicians, but it in no way explains Haley’s complete reversal of nearly everything she said in her campaign—or to a lesser extent the other Republican presidential candidates now kissing the former idiot-in-chief’s ass as if they are contestants in some kind of perverse, vice-presidential version of The Apprentice. He then goes on to emphasize that Haley has never been a politician who placed principles over pragmatism. But once again, that is not what’s going on here, and the fact that absolutely no one in the media is addressing the real reason why—though not surprising at all—is maddening. Haley is no different than any other politician in this country. They work for the people who pay them, and their employers are not the voters. Politicians work for the rich, corporate elites who pay them in all sorts of ways, from under the table bribes, to above board gifts from lobbyists, job offers and golden parachutes if they have done well for their employers. Their salary for working in government is the least of their reward and therefore gets the least of their effort. But the oligarchs made a serious miscalculation when it came to Trump, because they hadn’t accounted for his ability to tap into right-wing hatred. They believed that, like themselves, people can be controlled best through their desire for money—or in this case the illusory promise of money.
Then there is the fact that Trump is, objectively, the stupidest man to ever hold public office—perhaps in all of world history. While the oligarchs were willing to hold their noses during his first term, especially after he gave them trillions of dollars in tax cuts, the disastrous elections every two years since have convinced them that they need someone more traditional in the role, someone more in the mold of George W. Bush—a tool who could be controlled just like senators and representatives. They couldn’t really put anyone up against him in 2020 when he ran as an incumbent, but once he had lost they began to back alternatives like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley to forestall an inevitable rematch against Biden. That is the role that Nikki Haley played in the 2024 Republican primary race. She was a test balloon, a trial case. She was told to let Christie do all the heavy lifting—pun intended—at the beginning of the race, and after he dropped out to assume his role as the anti-Trump candidate in order to see what kind of numbers she could split off from his coalition of hate. She did well, probably better than expected and may have continued to do so. But while the rich are willing to spend liberally on things that will benefit them down the line, they don’t like to throw their money away. In this case they did not have the stomach for an entire drive to the convention if it was only going to come up short, and so they pulled Haley out of the race before her numbers could continue to build momentum. Demonstrating that it is the oligarchs who are actually the “political realists.”
They not only calculated that Haley would probably not be able to win the nomination, but also realized there was a point at which her candidacy might actually hurt Trump in the general election. Pragmatists to the core, they took her out of the game and forced her to eventually endorse the man-child she had been railing against for months. And she did it, not because she has any principles one way or the other, but because her employers told her to. Her role now, like that of all her other rivals in the primary, is to help get Trump elected, because while he is loathed by the very oligarchs who support him, they also stand to make more money with him in office than they will with Biden. Trump’s only real advantage in dealing with the oligarchs is their own greed. They could get rid of him if they wanted. It would be relatively easy, but it also might take a few election cycles to do it, if they had the will, which they don’t. Corporate elites are motivated by their greed and the lust for money and control, so being out of power for too long is an anathema to them. To be clear, they will continue to make obscene profits under a second Biden administration, just as they have during his first. After all, it was the oligarchs who infused the Biden campaign in 2020 with enough cash to overtake Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. That was because Bernie is a socialist. Biden, on the other hand, has been a friend to Big Credit his entire political career, and Delaware has become the headquarters for nearly every major credit card company in the U.S. But since the oligarchy can make more money under Trump, who plans to dismantle as much of the regulatory structure in government as humanly possible, the choice is really no choice at all.
The real reason that Republican politicians continue to support Trump, despite anything and everything derogatory he has ever said about them, is because they want to keep their jobs—their jobs working for the oligarchy, that is, not the people. You see, the oligarchy doesn’t really care who is in office. One Republican senator or representative is pretty much as good as the next. But if individual politicians don’t stay on Trump’s good side, then they risk losing their place at the trough. And if this sounds if it sort of reinforces Cillizza’s point, it doesn’t, because my point is a much larger one. The news media has been going on and on about Haley’s hypocrisy—just as Cillizza does—but never get to the real point, about who is really controlling her, and by extension every other politician in Washington. And that’s because those same oligarchs also control the media. The way they limit discourse isn’t by telling reporters what they can and can’t say, but by limiting the range of the discussion. Their anchors and pundits can talk all they want about the politicians themselves, and make any ideological point they wish. Right-wing or left, it doesn’t really matter . . . as long as the discussion doesn’t extend beyond politics to the oligarchs themselves. And they do this, not by direct coercion, but by making ideas like the “Deep State” synonymous with conspiracy theories like microchips in vaccines or Democratic pederast pizza rings. The only thing deep about the Deep State, however, is the deep pockets they have.
I realize all of this makes me look like a socialist crackpot with my own pet conspiracy theory. But how else can one explain the complete and utter lack of policy in today’s Republican party? There is no other explanation. The only thing they are committed to is dismantling democracy in order to facilitate their complete control over the citizens of this country. So the next logical question has to be why? Why are they doing that? Who benefits? The individual politicians benefit, of course, but exactly how? They certainly aren’t getting rich from their government salaries. So how else to account for all of the multi-millionaires in Congress? There’s nothing else that makes sense. But it’s not as if any of this is a secret. I continue to promote Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains, because it lays out the entire blueprint for what we are seeing acted out in Republican politics today . . . and in the oligarch’s own words. Big money capitalism is very close to owning this country. And if Trump gets reelected—for what promises to be the rest of his life—they will have gone a long way toward achieving their goal of a completely unregulated and untaxable haven for large-scale capitalism . . . the corporate state. But if anyone expects American news media to expose this scandal, and shine a light on the dystopian chasm we are on the precipice of being herded into, they are naïve at best, and deluded at worst.
The news media is the propaganda arm of capitalism. Thus, from their point of view everything political ends with politics. Politicians are simply out for themselves, or kowtowing to Trump in order to keep their jobs. Trump has taken over the Republican party and he controls everything because he’s a criminal, or crazy, or both. And right-wing politicians who support him have simply lost their minds. It doesn’t matter what the narrative is. In the news media everything ends with politics, because for them there is nothing beyond politics but a fictional Deep State that would be the height of journalistic irresponsibility to even suggest. And yet, even this is not new, as prescient voices from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to the Frankfurt School to Noam Chomsky have been warning us about this for nearly two-hundred and fifty years. But the news media has also successfully marginalized those voices of truth by characterizing their ideas as no different than the belief in Bigfoot or Atlantis. Sports and entertainment keep us distracted, smart phones and the Internet keep us addicted, culture wars keep us fighting with each other rather than the true enemy. And all the while the news media keeps reporting on politics like it’s the equivalent of a sports contest. Trump must be defeated in November, and I’m fairly hopeful that the American electorate will do its part to ensure that outcome. Just don’t expect the media to assist by providing voters with the truth, because the truth is, they have a very different agenda.
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