Trump—triumph or tragedy? Pt. 2

Under these circumstances, no common ground can be found, no dialogue conducted, no compromise reached between “the good People” and their candidate for “the Office of President”, on the one side, and the Establishment and its candidate, on the other—any more than common ground, dialogue, and compromise are possible between justice and injustice, “the general Welfare” and the avarice of special interests, or what the Second Amendment calls “the security of a free State” as opposed to the oppression of a police state. One side or the other must prevail. In this struggle, as General MacArthur said: “There is no substitute for victory.”

B. Mr. Trump (or any authentic political “outsider”) can depend only on “the good People”; and “the good People” can depend only on him. But to gain their confidence, Mr. Trump must take “the good People” into his confidence, with confidence that, knowing what he intends to do and why and how he intends to do it, they will rally to him through every vicissitude which awaits them.

1. He must convince “the good People” that he is committed to fighting the battle, both before and especially after his election, on their, not their enemies’, terms. At the minimum, that requires bringing into his campaign, and eventually into his Administration, a set of advisors not drawn from the ranks of the professional political courtiers who have carried water for prior Administrations. The sorry records of those Administrations provide conclusive evidence that these individuals’ misguided conceptions of “public service” have been the primary causes of, and therefore will never provide the solutions for, America’s woes.

2. Mr. Trump must emphasize that no one can “make America great again” unless and until “the good People” steel themselves to yank this country by its bootstraps out of the very deep hole into which past generations of incompetent and disloyal politicians have cast it. In line with the old adage that “a pessimist in an optimist who knows the facts”, he must warn “the good People” that a great deal of economic pain and social unrest will be unavoidable in the short term—and that stern measures must be implemented, prodigious efforts expended and costs incurred, and agonizing sacrifices endured in the near term—if the necessary reforms are to be achieved in the long run. That he is the one Presidential candidate ready and willing to take charge and shoulder responsibility is not enough. For he can succeed only if “the good People” are prepared to do their part to the utmost of their abilities. He can be no more than the obstetrician for America’s renaissance; “the good People” must give birth to it.

3. Glittering generalities, “sound bites”, and slogans will not suffice. Rather, Mr. Trump must set out with specificity the nonnegotiable reforms his Administration will implement. Here, I can touch on only a few of these, and only in a limited fashion:

(a) In furtherance of the President’s oath of office—that he “will to the best of [his] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”—Mr. Trump must promise to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”. Without that as the guiding principle and constant practice of his Administration, nothing of permanent value will be achieved.

(b) In fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence, he must assure “the good People” that he will bend his every effort to preserve this country’s national sovereignty, integrity, and identity—not only by securing its borders against invasions of illegal aliens, but also by rooting out those internal subversives who are employing “multiculturalism” as a battering-ram to break down America’s political and social cohesion, preliminary to the submergence of “the good People” in a supra-national “new world order” which will eradicate “the separate and equal station” “among the powers of the earth * * * to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”.

That “the political class” and its mouthpieces in “the mainstream media” have attacked Mr. Trump with the ferocity of mad dogs because of his rather mild pronouncements to date on the issue of illegal immigration demonstrates how critical the elimination of America’s national independence and integrity is to the Establishment’s achievement of its long-range goals—and therefore how vital the preservation of that independence and integrity is to “the good People’s” permanent interests. I characterize Mr. Trump’s pronouncements as “rather mild”, because he has yet to point out that, perforce of both general constitutional principles and specific statutes, a patriotic President is entitled to, and can, stop alien invasions in their tracks. See my NewsWithViews commentaries “How the President Can Secure the Borders” (18 August 2015) and “A Trumped-Up Controversy” (20 February 2016).

(c) Because “representative government” cannot function if Americans do not know what their ostensible “representatives” are actually doing, and why they are doing it, Mr. Trump must promise “the good People” that he will put paid to the present-day fetish of governmental secrecy and lies (which depend upon secrecy for their efficacy). His Administration must open the public records to public inspection to the fullest extent consistent with the constitutional definition of “national security”—that is, the security of the nation, not the security of “the political class” and its string-pullers in the Establishment.

For a prime example, Americans must be afforded access to all of the public (and, to the extent possible, private) records concerning the 9/11 event; and those records must be subjected to the most wide-ranging critical analyses, letting the chips fall where they may. In addition to that, novel methods for elucidation of the truth must be employed. Being something of a scientist myself, I favor actual experiments. Every theory which can be disproved through experiment must be discarded. So, as a scientific first step in testing prior Administrations’ theories of what happened on 9/11, Mr. Trump should promise that his Administration will build an exact replica of World Trade Center Building 7 as it existed on that fateful day—set it on fire—and see whether or not it collapses into its own footprint at near free-fall speed, as did the original. If it does not, certain conclusions can be drawn, on the basis of which further actions can be taken. In light of the serious consequences which this country has already suffered, and will continue to endure, because of the Establishment’s theories of 9/11, whatever such an experiment may cost will hardly be excessive.

(d) Mr. Trump should explain to “the good People” that, by setting aside all constitutionally unwarranted governmental secrecy, his Administration will be able to enforce the Bill of Rights and other constitutional and statutory guarantees of Americans’ freedoms in a rigorous fashion against rogue public officials and their co-conspirators in the private sector. The Constitution’s goal to “establish Justice” can never be fulfilled except perforce of the principle that no one is “too big to jail”. For far too long “the political class” has been able to sweep its serial malfeasances under the rug, either through the wrongdoers’ suppression of the evidence of their wrongdoing, or by grants of “immunity” to one set of wrongdoers by another set of wrongdoers when wrongdoing slips into the light of day. The time has come to employ a firmer broom in more trustworthy hands. For, as the old saying has it, “a new broom sweeps clean”—and an iron broom sweeps cleaner yet. Such a thoroughgoing housecleaning is especially needed with respect to those rogue officials whose “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” has “evince[d] a design to reduce [Americans] under absolute Despotism”. As the apt slogan of the Navy’s “Silent Service” had it in World War II, “find them, chase them, sink them”.

(e) Of all possible wrongdoing by rogue public officials, nothing could be worse than fomenting international warfare. Not only because modern warfare is hideously homicidal and egregiously expensive, but especially because the prosecution of wars abroad inevitably encourages the imposition of despotism at home. “[T]he common defence” is the constitutional standard. Therefore, Mr. Trump must assure Americans that he will end America’s involvement in aggressive military adventures overseas. Moreover, he must guarantee that he will see all of those rogue public officials who and the private special interests which have fomented or otherwise been responsible for or otherwise complicitous in such adventures brought to justice, through execution of those “Laws of the Union” which enforce the principles of the Nuremberg tribunal. See Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), Volume I, arts. 6(a), 7, 8, and 9, at 5-6. See also my NewsWithViews commentary “A New Nuremberg Moment” (6 September 2013). After all, these crimes—steeped in conspiracy and aggression—have resulted in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of needless deaths and injuries; destruction of the political integrity, social stability, and economic viability of whole countries; and huge wastage of resources by “military-industrial complexes” in both the United States and the other nations which have foolishly participated in these operations. And they continue even today, unabated in their savagery. See, e.g., Felicity Arbuthnot, “US Apocalypse in Mosul in the Guise of Bombing ISIS”. For such wrongdoing there can be neither excuse, nor exoneration, nor expunction from the pages of history.

Mr. Trump recently announced his “foreign policy” with a rousing speech. Yet it lacked the clarity and wisdom of George Washington’s Farewell Address with respect to foreign affairs, alliances, and the like. (Indeed, Mr. Trump could not go wrong by adopting as his guiding principles all of the tenets of that document.) Much of his speech was, as the wag once said, “déjà vue all over again”. To be sure, Mr. Trump’s reliance on the principle of, shall we say, “strength at home, businesslike diplomacy abroad” is a workmanlike approach, along the lines of Theodore Roosevelt’s precept, “speak softly and carry a big stick”. Nonetheless, I wonder how anyone can imagine, on the one hand, that this country cannot control its own borders to the extent of repelling an invasion of illegal aliens from a nation as militarily impotent as Mexico, but, on the other hand, that it can deploy to the very frontiers of Russia and China sufficient forces to awe those powerful nations into sheepish compliance with policies dictated from the District of Columbia at odds with their own compelling national interests. Indeed, one need look only to the débâcles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya to understand the limits the real world imposes on the hubris and fantasies of American military interventionists. (The only saving grace here is that Mr. Trump evidently desires to avoid a major war, whereas Hillary Clinton would likely prove a worse warmonger, and more feckless a war-fighter, than even George W. Bush.)

Finally, Mr. Trump’s promise to crush ISIS militarily rests on the naïve premiss that ISIS is some truly “foreign” force. He would do better first to investigate whether ISIS is in large measure the product of the devious intentions or simple-minded incompetence of the CIA and the Pentagon—and that therefore the initial step in the process of eradicating ISIS must be a thoroughgoing housecleaning of those agencies. (A parallel investigation should be conducted to determine the extent to which certain of America’s ostensible “allies” are at fault in this matter, too.) Mr. Trump might also want to inquire, for example, why the NSA, the DIA, the CIA, the FBI, FINCEN, the IRS-CID, and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies at home and abroad have not been able (or willing) to employ their extensive networks of surveillance to ferret out the sources of and routes for ISIS’s funding. After all, although logistics is not everything, everything depends on logistics. How does ISIS raise its revenue and pay its bills? Who are ISIS’s bankers, money-launderers, and so on? And why have they not been exposed, and steps taken to eradicate their operations? Inquiring minds surely want to know.

(f) As far as “domestic policy” is concerned , it will be essential for a Trump Administration to restore the two great powers of government—the Power of the Sword and the Power of the Purse—to “the good People’s” own hands. For no one else is sufficiently trustworthy to exercise them.

(i) Restoration of the Power of the Sword will require revitalization of the Militia, about which I have written extensively elsewhere. Only by “call[ing] forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union” will “the good People” finally be able to deal with those combinations too powerful to be suppressed by ordinary means, the continued toleration of which threatens to destroy this country within the lifetimes of most of the readers of this commentary. In particular, see my NewsWithViews commentary “Donald Trump and the Militia” (20 February 2016).

Revitalization of the Militia will also be necessary to enable “the good People” to deal in a constitutional fashion with the social unrest which will arise out of the economic dislocations and hard times this country will have to endure as part of the price of rebuilding the national economy. See, e.g., my book By Tyranny Out of Necessity: The Bastardy of “Martial Law”.

(ii) Restoration of the Power of the Purse will require bridling the banks—first and foremost, by compelling them to provide Americans with a constitutional and economically sound monetary unit to compete with, and eventually supplant, the Federal Reserve Note as this nation’s primary currency. See, e.g., my NewsWithViews commentaries “A Cross of Gold” (10 May 2011) and “Presidential Questions” (9 May 2015). It will also necessitate coming to grips with the problem of the unpayable national debt—not by imposing “austerity” on “the good People”, but by recognizing that much of this debt has been incurred unconstitutionally (in terms of international law, is so-called “odious debt”), and is therefore unenforceable. See, e.g., my NewsWithViews commentary “A Cross of Debt” (10 February 2012). As a successful entrepreneur, Mr. Trump surely understands that long-term business-relations, whether of a corporation or an entire country, cannot be conducted on the basis of the uncertain value of an unstable “rubber” currency, and that sometimes a declaration of bankruptcy and concomitant cancellation of some and restructuring of other debts is unavoidable.

(g) In even the short run, little will be accomplished unless and until a Trump Administration breaks the electoral stranglehold of the “two” major political parties and the string-pullers behind them. This will require radically diminishing, if not eliminating altogether, the ability of organized wealth to maintain the oligopoly of those parties, to suppress or capture legitimate political movements, and thereby perpetually to misdirect the course of elections. That a handful of multi-billionaires, primarily through the mega-corporations they own and the myriad special-interest groups they spawn and finance, are suffered to dominate political affairs in this country, setting “the good People” at defiance in election after election, directly contradicts any rational conception of “representative government” and “the general Welfare”. Not only is that state of affairs unsound in principle, but also it has turned out disastrously in practice. For all too long, these individuals and institutions have controlled the composition of Congress, the Presidency, and the Judiciary, as well as much of State and Local government—the consequence being the mess in which this country now finds itself at every level of the federal system. The simplistic theory that “corporate money” can be equated with “free speech” in the political realm has been tested by experiment, and found woefully wanting. (To be sure, it might be argued that the corruption and degeneration of American politics have been the products, not of the injection of wealth per se into politics, but only of the faulty ideas that such injection has promoted, and that if the wealthy were to marshal their resources on behalf of good ideas this country would benefit. Yet there is no denying that, only as a consequence of the massive amounts of irresponsible wealth behind them could the bad ideas prevalent today have become dominant in the political arena. And in politics one must be extremely risk-averse, because the risks of error are too great to be accepted.)

The exclusion of “corporate money” from politics may appear to be a problematic goal, because of the false notion promulgated by the Supreme Court that corporations are “persons” with constitutional rights equivalent to those of real flesh-and-blood individuals. The “personhood” of corporations, however, is merely a sorry legal fiction. Actually, it is a piece of pseudo-legalistic balderdash, coming as it does from a Court with the effrontery to claim that actual human beings who happen to be unborn are not constitutional “persons”. In any event, no need exists for a constitutional amendment to recognize the self-evident truth that corporations have no inherent rights, but rather are merely the creatures of statutes, with only such legal relations (rights, powers, privileges, immunities, and so on) as those statutes grant, and which other statutes can deny, to them. Whatever it may have opined on this subject in the past, the Supreme Court has a long history of changing its mind on constitutional questions. See, e.g., Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 828-830 & note 1 (1991). So it is not too much to expect that the Court can be persuaded to reverse itself on this issue, too. And if the Justices refuse to come to their constitutional senses, they can be shown the door; for their tenure is solely “during good Behaviour”, which subversion of the political process in favor of faux “persons” can never be.

Admittedly, the foregoing may constitute no more than a “wish list” for a true Presidential “outsider” who has yet to appear. For only the future will tell whether Mr. Trump is such a man. Yet one must always live in hope. If an obscure commentator such as this author, living in the remote “Canoe Capital of Virginia”, can figure out some of what needs to be done, then so can an eminent real-estate shark from the Big Apple.

Ultimately, though, the critical question is not “Can Trump do it?” or even “Will Trump do it?”, but instead “If Trump tries to do it, will ‘the good People’ do their part?” Will they demand his nomination, secure his election, and then stand behind his Administration?

As it always does, time will tell. Some Americans may yet imagine that this country can still play for time. But, as the old saying has it, time brings all things, bad as well as good. And anyone who can tell time knows that “the good People” are running out of time. It really may be “now or never”. If “the good People” do not triumph by electing a true “outsider” to “the Office of President” this November, America’s fate may be sealed, once and for all, in the worst tragedy of modern times.