Inside Looking Out

Roman City Wall

Trump has decided that he cannot proceed without obtaining political control of the FBI. He may have left himself thin cover by pretending to have fired Comey for his election campaign antics but he has certainly complicated the second, and most crucial, phase of his strategy, installing a compliant replacement.

Had he consulted his inner Roy Cohn he might have tried a different approach and admitted that he wouldn't tolerate an independent director and his investigation. His more recent confession of his real motives shows that he knows he let Roy down but the damage is done. The political risk would have been far greater but, if he were able to withstand it, he would be in a much stronger position. Instead he is in a tangle that he will probably survive but which he will never escape. By dissembling he has shown weakness, confessed, in effect, that his political support is draining away.

Why? The slippage is no secret even if the numbers, among his base, are still small. But what has made him aware? Stay with me here as I follow a hunch. Trump is an actor. His true stage is not the White House but the rally. Over the course of the campaign he mastered a one-man performance which, unlike his previous career as a television actor, required a rapport with a live audience. In his last rally in Harrisburg Pa. he, for the first time, made a significant alteration to one of his themes. He explained that the Chinese were no longer guilty of currency manipulation to the detriment of the American worker but had, instead, rallied to our side in the containment of North Korea.

Now he presented this as evidence of his mastery of the diplomatic deal. He was trading his economic offensive against the Chinese for their acquiescence on Korea. And, inserted into his usual litany of applause lines, it did draw a favorable cheer. But I found myself asking, "really?". Is his base buying into this or are they just responding to his cues for applause? I suspect the later and, furthermore, I suspect he knows it.

In one of my "6 theses for the early days of the Trump administration" I said:

Everything points to the absence of any new information behind Trump's actions so far. Decisions are based on strategies that appear to date from before the election and, some, long before that. Events will, soon I think, sharpen the contradictions between those strategies and the real world and it seems that the White House will be very slow to adapt its response if it does at all.

I believe this is the first new information that Trump has felt compelled to bring into his rally performance. President Xi Jinping should be recognized as the first with the skill to bring new information into this White House. In his interview with Time Trump seemed to be very impressed with his recent lessons on Chinese and Korean history. But he would not be the performer he has shown himself to be if he did not sense some reluctance by his audience to follow him in this new path of enlightenment. While his stump shows moved easily between right-wing commonplaces on topics foreign and domestic his actions in office have fallen into quite separate categories.

Early in is tenure he was willing to sacrifice control of the exterior empire to the Pentagon. His interest in foreign affairs has never been deep, never exceeded the nursery rhymes of reaction and the necessities of business deals. And so he was willing to jettison Flynn and downgrade Bannon. Neither had provided a pennyworth of strategy beyond that of the generally agreed upon generals once the real imperial dispatches began to arrive.

There are, in any event, no victories to be found in the trans-alpine empire. American resources are over extended. Our military is highly efficient in destruction but incapable of political assembly. Among subject populations every dime of loyalty costs several dollars. Trump's attention span  for the far flung theaters of imperial grind likely is shorter than that of his audience. Again, Xi Jinping must have won him over with a well crafted five minute Introduction to Chinese History.

But the interior empire is another affair. Here is where he has allies and here is where he wants to build a power base. He holds the support of the Republican Party since its only other option is to collapse. He also relies on a cold alliance with the military and Wall Street. They do as they will and he lets them be. But the support he truly identifies with are the simmering forces of resentment and repression. Those on the front lines of the crackdown, like the rank and file of ICE, and those who dream of the redemption of their insignificance in action against the alien and the subversive. And right in the middle of this social formation is the FBI.

As the interview process opens for Comey's replacement there can be no doubt whose resume is being conjured during the midnight black mass in the White House residence. It is the putrid specter of J. Edgar Hoover. I suspect the spell requires DNA from the shriveled remains of Henry Kissinger which explains his silent presence in the Oval Office on Thursday.