Fear of The Angry Red Planet

The anonymous op-ed in the Times as well as Woodward's book (which I have not read but am proceeding from his summaries on talk shows) emphasize the peril to the actual American empire of Trump's ignorance. As any thoughtful imperialist will tell you an empire is a complicated matter and not child's play. A president is not required to come into office with a comprehensive mastery of the subject but he or she must have a verifiable grasp of the state of their knowledge and their ignorance.

In this White House the imperialists whose asides from the stage have provided a relentless commentary, from the beginning, to the soliloquies of their commander-in-chief have, none of them, anything like the credentials normally required for their roles in the management of the actual empire. But they all can take an inflated measure of their own worth by comparison to the president. And it appears that they have.

The disastrous record of the previous Republican administration has left that party's reserve of certified strategists depleted. Had another candidate won its nomination they would have needed to promote most of the roster from the farm leagues.  But Trump, running against everything since MacArthur, was left to pick among the misfits and the reckless climbers.

So the emperor knows nothing and the palace is both disloyal and out of their depth. How have we arrived here?

We should start by acknowledging that the empire as it actually exists is in crisis. America's colonial strategy has never moved beyond the one it used to destroy the population and occupy the lands of North America. What success it had in the 20th century was by outspending all rivals and the economic history of the 21st century demonstrates the radically diminishing returns on that.

Politically, at home, the actual empire has required a fantasy empire to rally enough of the working class to give it broad support and to staff its legions. While the Obama administration pursued an assortment of wars and the patching of financial markets the Republicans were free to sell fantasy to their mass audience. And no one excelled at salesmanship like Trump. Through a strategy no more complex than protecting his right flank he swept the remains of the GOP from the field. He knows that the actual empire that his staff is so intent on bringing him around on is a much harder sell than the one in the imagination of his rally audiences. And he knows that the Republican party is an empty husk without it.

The impersonality of financial abstraction escapes any attempt at conscious political transformation, so that people who have lost control of their life hang on dearly to a sense of illusory belonging. The nation, religious faith, and ethnicity provide protection from insecurity and loneliness, and serve as tools to attack competitors. ... Aggressive belonging is their only form of cohesion.  Franco “Bifo” Beradi – And

This “aggressive belonging”, which Bifo diagnoses in our digital era is, in the American homeland, much older than the internet and fundamental to Trump's performance. However deranged the particular impulses which his advisers feel compelled to protect us from it is this underlying drive which is his bond with his audience and the very substance of their ideology.