On Absolute Power, Nixonian Machinations & Trump’s Fascist Fulminations

NinaIllingworth April 16, 2020November 5, 2022 Andrew Cuomo, Anthony Fauci, austerity, authoritarian, bailout, big business, big business will kill you for profit, CA4, class, class war, coronavirus, coronavirus relief package, corporate takeover, coverage, Covid 19, Donald Trump, Dr Fauci, Essays, essential workers, FA1, fall guy, fascism, grift, health policy, Joe Biden, John Dean, killing grandma for Wall Street, Media, mob boss, neoliberalism, News, Nina Illingworth, Nixon, Politics, Pork Reich, re opening America, Simon Says, Trump Administration, Trump war with Governors, Watergate

Editor’s note: as those of you who listen to the No Fugazi Podcast or read a newspaper are probably already aware, this hasn’t exactly been a great week to be a leftist. Despite my best efforts to spill out all the conflicting emotions I have about Bernie Sanders suspending his campaign and joining the soft left Soc Dems in our movement as they try to purge the class war focused, anti-Biden rebels from serious political life, I am nowhere near finished talking and writing about this subject. I am however, like many of you, a little bit too sad, hurt and angry to properly articulate all my thoughts on the matter, so I’ve decided to pack it away for a couple of days and turn my attention towards the ongoing corporate looting clusterfuck that is the Trump administration’s coronavirus response; we’ll get back to the disintegration of the American left when the subject doesn’t make me want to punch my monitor until my hands bleed.

Subliminal Slip-ups With The Swine Emperor

I think the recent row between the liberal establishment and Downmarket Mussolini over Herr Donald’s choice of language when he informed a (rightfully) hostile media he had “total power” over when American Governors chose to re-open their individual states from coronavirus lockdown is both frustrating and a little bit overblown.

On one hand, I have long warned that Donald Trump and his administration are explicitly fascist; even if they aren’t particularly successful fascists because the boss can’t keep his hands out of the cookie jar long enough to get down to the business of reinforcing American white supremacy and plotting the country towards the ideal fascist future of a white ethnostate. On the other hand it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the liberal media took Trump out of context in this instance and the glib nature in which the existing liberal establishment cooperates with the Klepto Kaiser on the regular puts a constant lie to their claims that they actually *believe* Trump is a fascist. Furthermore, Trump immediately tried to walk it back the next day in his typical narcissistic, image preserving manner by saying he meant he had the absolute power to authorize the Governors to “re-open” their states. In other words, Trump, the guy who keeps saying we should shove grandma in the furnace to get the economy back on line, is now exercising his right as President to keep states from ending coronavirus prevention measures… too early.

Please understand that none of this is meant to absolve Trump for his horrific, incompetent and exclusively pro-capital response to the coronavirus; this fascist f*ckwit is absolutely responsible for perhaps thousands of unnecessary deaths already, with perhaps thousands more on the immediate horizon. Indeed, it is precisely the seriousness and selfish savagery of Trump’s crimes against the American people that make the bizarre game of Simon Says the corporate “liberal” media are playing here so frustrating and counter-productive; New York City hospitals look like a censored episode of M.A.S.H. right now and Trump is definitely responsible – nobody gives a shit about Trump’s blatant posturing at this exact moment, read the f*cking room and maybe focus on all the people he’s killing.

With that having been noted however I would like to point out one bit of bizarre Trump-speak that was probably a little bit more revealing about Downmarket Mussolini as a leader than anyone in the Pork Reich should be comfortable with. Unfortunately explaining why Trump’s verbal slip is so indicative of his true character requires a little knowledge about the current power struggle going on inside America in regards to precisely how many people it’s okay to murder in order to get the spice flowing again – let’s talk background for a minute:

As many of you may have gleaned from reading the news, the Trump administration is actively working on manufacturing consent to “re-open” the economy as soon as possible, no matter how many people it kills.

Standing in the way (mostly by accident) of that goal is a one Doctor Anthony Fauci, who at this point is pretty much the only actual doctor or scientist of note still exerting much of an influence on Trump administration policy. While I could certainly write a whole article about the bizarre liberal pathology behind the current lionization of Fauci despite the fact that throughout January and all of February he was telling people they had nothing to worry about (even though his administration knew otherwise), what’s important to understand here is that Fauci doesn’t want to be blamed for perhaps hundreds of thousands of dead people and as such, his commentary to the media has largely run counter to Trump’s plans to “re-open” as soon as possible. This in turn has caused Trump allies in the right wing and financial media, from the explicitly fascist blogs all the way up to Fox News itself, to begin a low-grade but increasingly vociferous campaign to oust Fauci and set him up to be the ultimate coronavirus fall guy – much in the same way Nixon sought to do with John Dean in the Watergate scandal.

Unfortunately for Trump, simply firing Fauci and replacing him with another yes-man has proven to be more difficult than the frothing reactionaries in the right wing media have expected. This is in part because Fauci has purposely re-branded himself as “the voice of reason” in the crisis, in part because it’ll be hard to blame coronavirus deaths on Fauci if you fire him too soon, and in part because no medical administrator of any worth whatsoever is going to want to sign on to Trump’s “Deathship America” strategy at this late a date. No matter how much Herr Donald might want to axe Fauci, if he does so right now, the swine emperor himself becomes the only possible target for outrage against the government’s wholly inadequate coronavirus response and the ensuing corporate takeover it is enabling.

Powerless and impatient, Trump has taken to quietly trying to threaten Fauci into publicly supporting his plan to re-open America for business, seemingly as soon as early May. It is in this context of a threat that Trump retweeted some random reactionary on Twitter’s call to fire Fauci, which in turn lead to a press scrum question about what exactly that retweet meant. Trump, who is utterly abysmal at playing coy on his best day, blithely responded to the effect that he personally thought Fauci was doing an excellent job and had no intention of replacing him. Then, inexplicably and almost certainly by accident, the swine emperor said something that explicitly underlines the number one reason why Trump is a terrible president even if you still, at this late a date, refuse to acknowledge that he’s an actual fascist. He said:

“Not everyone’s happy with Anthony. Not everybody is happy with…” and then, after an awkwardly long trail-off, Trump added “everybody.”

Of course, anyone listening in real time knew immediately that the swine emperor was initially going to say “not everybody is happy with me” during the coronavirus crisis, which would have been not only the truth but a far more effective formulation for the halfhearted defense Trump was offering Fauci. Alas, because Trump is in fact a raging narcissist and as such has only been able to see the entire coronavirus crisis through the lens of himself, his presidency and his re-election campaign, it is utterly impossible for Herr Donald to admit for even a single moment that not everyone in American loves the swine emperor enough to forgive him for murdering their loved ones on behalf of Wall Street.

Whether it’s insisting the Treasury department stamp his name on relief checks or trying to buy the patent to possible vaccines, it’s extremely clear that Trump sees the coronavirus as merely another aspect of his efforts to transform America Inc, into Trump Inc, whether America likes it or not. In the grand scheme of things, Trump’s attempt to turn this emergency response into just another part of his ongoing mob racket turned government grift is the kind of thing that might topple a president regardless of ideological positioning. One would think that perhaps this might be a more important topic of discussion for a liberal establishment supposedly devoted to removing Trump at all costs than his war of words with the (typically Democratic Party) Governors, but I guess that story doesn’t help manufacture consent to replace Joe Biden with Andrew Cuomo at the Democratic Party Convention, so it barely made it off the cutting room floor and has seemingly already left the news cycle.