Reservoir Dogs in the White House

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. - Ernest Hemingway

A guest post by Gwynne Dyer, an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

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Anthony Zurcher, the BBC’s North America correspondent, nailed it in a report on 27 July. “Where Abraham Lincoln had his famous ‘team of rivals’ in his administration, this is something different,” Zurcher wrote. “Trump White House seems more akin to the final scene in Reservoir Dogs, where everyone is yelling and pointing a gun at someone else, and there's a good chance no one is going to come out unscathed.”

Several walking wounded have limped out of the White House since then, including ex-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, but nobody would call them unscathed. And in has come Anthony Scaramucci, the new communications director, who appears to have escaped from the same Quentin Tarantino movie. Maybe Steve Buscemi as Mr. Pink.

Fun fact: Scaramuccia (literally "little skirmisher"), also known as Scaramouche, is a stock character of the Italian commedia dell'arte. He combines the roles of a clownish servant and a masked assassin carrying out his master’s will. He often ends up decapitated.

Things are falling apart in the White House much faster than even the keenest observers of Donald Trump’s behaviour would have predicted, and the important part is not the dysfunction. The United States would work just fine – in fact, rather better – if Trump never managed to turn his tweets into reality. What matters is that he is cutting his links with the Republican Party.

Trump was never a real Republican. As a genuine populist, he is ideology-free. If Barack Obama had fallen under a bus and Trump had chosen to run for the presidency in 2008, he could just as easily have sought the Democratic nomination.

Senior Republicans knew this, and they tried quite hard to stop him from winning the Republican nomination last year. After that they were stuck with him, and he did win the White House for them, so they have been in an uncomfortable partnership ever since. That is now coming to an end.

Part of the unwritten deal was that establishment Republicans get senior roles in the Trump White House. Reince Priebus, dismissed last Friday, was the most important of those people. He followed deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, communications director Mike Dubke, press secretary Sean Spicer and press aide Michael Short, all of whom had already been pushed out.

What’s left are alt-right white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, New Yorkers with Democratic leanings like Anthony Scaramucci, Jared Kushner, Dina Powell and Gary Cohn, Trump family members (Donald Jr and Ivanka), ex-businessmen like foreign secretary Rex Tillerson (who may be about to quit), and a triumvirate of generals in high civilian office.

This is a recipe for paralysis, but who cares? Did you really want a White House team that enabled Donald Trump to impose his will (or rather, his whims) on the United States and, to some extent, on the world? Well, no, and neither do senior Republicans – but they do care very much about controlling the White House.

Republicans who think long-term are well aware that the changing demography of the US population is eating away at their core vote. This may be their last chance, with control of both Houses of Congress and (at least in theory) of the presidency, to reshape their image and their policies in ways that will appeal to at least some of the emerging minorities.

They can’t do that if they don’t control the White House, and the only way they could regain control there is for Trump to go and Vice-President Mike Pence (a real Republican) to take over. A successful impeachment could accomplish that.

It would be very hard to engineer such a thing without splitting the Republican Party, even if the current FBI investigation comes up with damning evidence of Trump’s ties with Russia. Nevertheless, the likelihood of an impeachment is rising from almost zero to something quite a bit higher.

It would be a big gamble. The Republicans in Congress couldn’t really get Trump out before November 2018, and the turbulence of an impeachment might cost them their control of Congress in the mid-term elections. In an ideal outcome, however, it would give the Republicans time to go into the the 2020 election with President Pence in charge at the White House and some solid legislative achievements under their belts.

What would Trump do if he faced impeachment? Maybe he would do a kind of plea bargain and resign, but that would be quite out of character. His instinct would be to fight, and he fights mainly by creating diversions. The best diversion is a war, but against whom?

Even Trump would have trouble selling a war against Iran to the American public. Despite all the propaganda, they don’t really feel threatened by Iran. Whereas North Korea says and does things provocative enough to let Trump make a (flimsy) case for attacking it.

If he thought his presidency was at stake, he certainly would.

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A guest post by Gwynne Dyer, an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.  Reproduced with permission from the author.

We Need More Selfishness

In the midst of fulfilling client requests, answering phone calls, filling out an inordinate number of forms and the like, I had a blog rattling around in my head today that was prompted by British PM Cameron’s warning yesterday that North Korean nukes were about to start raining down on the UK.

The fact that North Korea may not even have a functional, deliverable nuclear device and definitely doesn’t have a means of delivering it that far doesn’t seem to matter to politicians who use fear to either control / coerce people or to encourage them to randomly consume more (both of which serve the needs of politicians who aren’t “getting it done” when it comes to solving the problems they’ve been elected to figure out). 

While I recognize that the nutbar in power in North Korea is taking the world to the edge of disaster if we are not careful, such words from the PM bring to mind the notion of “surely not the old WMD thing again”.

And in fairness, I believe that many problems in the world are now too large to solve (at least by humans) and have passed a critical point of no-return but alas, I digress.

Yup …. I was all set to write about this subject when I reconnected with a friend and colleague whom I haven’t seen in 14 years.

This person was a voice of sanity at the client site where she and I met back in the 1990’s.  Whenever the ignorant, the mundane, the greedy, the nasty and the dangerous would rear their ugly head, she was always there to raise people who needed to be lifted or to calm down people who needed to hear a voice of reason.  She was a source of sanity in a world of madness.

She’s still like that but she has endured much in the last couple of years and despite my repeated questions about “what can we do for you”, she indicated that having someone who listened was good enough.

Funny thing. 

She was the one who always listened to us and I wondered at the time how many, when dumping on her, actually stopped and asked if there was anything she needed.

Such heroes are not as uncommon as we think

I met a colleague yesterday who, in the midst of single-handedly raising children with challenges, is committed to making the world a better place for kids with similar challenges.

And while she obviously has needs and aspirations of her own, she places them aside for the sake of her children and for other children and families in similar circumstances.

As I closed the conversation with each of these women, I commended them on everything they had done for others and implored them to do one thing this weekend.

I asked them to do something selfish for themselves.

If we give constantly, eventually we will have given it all away and then we can’t help anybody.

In this beautiful but chaotic world, we are often bombarded with calls to help others more, serve others more and the like.

I believe this request rings true for the majority who are contributing nowhere near what they should commensurate with what they have received from the world.

But there is a certain segment who live to serve every day, constantly carrying people, lifting them up and providing a ray of sunshine where others see stormy skies.

And for those people, I think we need to help them be a little selfish for themselves once in a while.

It goes against their grain and they will fight it because it is not who they are.

But it is something that they have earned.

So do me a favor and look for those people who have made a lifetime out of lifting others and encourage them to be a little more selfish. Maybe you won’t have to look far.  After all, the person you need to encourage to be a little more selfish may be yourself .

Don’t worry – it’s just for a little bit.

They or you can return to a life of incessant giving and service soon enough – the world is never short of people who need or who take.

But a little selfishness isn’t always bad when for the right reason and for the right person.

In fact, I think it’s not only not bad but I think such selfishness is well-deserved and necessary.

What do you think?

In service and servanthood, I dedicate this today to four selfless women, V, K, F and M.  You know who you are.  Be a little selfish this weekend – something really decadent and / or self-indulgent should fit the bill.  You’ve earned it.

Harry

Preventing A Disaster–Or Preparing To Survive One

* A fictional musing somewhat continued from "Divide and Conquer" originally posted in August of 2012, and “Financial Crisis”, originally posted in March of 2008 and inspired after conversations with former senior advisors to multiple Presidents of the United States and senior officers in the US Military. *

In a darkened room lit only by the glare of a collection of large monitors on one wall, two men sat in silence as the flickering images provided an update regarding the state of the planet known as Terra.

And what a tale the monitors told.

Global warming continuing unabated while people argued over whether it was manmade or a natural part of the planet’s cyclical nature.  They argued over prevention when survival would be a better subject for discussion.  Others found a way to profit from promoting panic and fear without providing any solutions.

Wars percolating amongst a species that prided itself on being at its pinnacle in the areas of knowledge, understanding and peace.

Structured religions that didn’t see how they hypocritically violated every precept outlined in their own holy texts as they implored the devout to follow them.

New diseases constantly cropping up with the solution being to create products that solved that problem while creating three new problems instead of eliminating the root cause of the disease in the first place.

Poverty and hunger in a world that discards as trash, more than the destitute need to lift them out of their condition.

Government agencies around the planet whose laws are so self-contradictory to the principles that the respective countries were founded upon and whose spending habits would be decried as unsustainable and suicidal if any business or individual adopted similar practices.

And a planet hell-bent on shouting and screaming at each other instead of recognizing that respectful collaboration and dialogue provided the solution to every problem that Terra faced.

It was all good, proceeding exactly as planned.

Almost.

The first of the two men spoke softly, not taking his eyes off the monitors.

“How long do you think this charade can continue before the Terrans figure out what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”, replied his colleague.

The first man continued. “How long do you think it will be before the Terrans realize that their governments around the planet have no ability to solve the problems in the world and then discover that their governments are not only not trying to solve the problems but in fact are intentionally allowing them to happen?”

His colleague nodded silently but said nothing, motioning for the first man to continue his line-of-thought.

“After all”, said the first man, “Our plans will not be brought to fruition if Terrans discover that their governments exist to placate them, keep them calm and keep them so off-balance that they don’t have time to think.  In fact, the sole role their governments fill is the role of positive public relations – “eat, drink and be happy while we solve all your problems”.  In addition, our strategy to use consumption as a means of keeping them placated has run its course as they exhaust their financial and planetary resources.  When they are no longer able to consume at the levels we need them to, their governments will lose the ability to control them and in turn, our influence over these governments will diminish.”

“What are you suggesting?”, asked his colleague.

“I’m not sure”, replied the first man, frowning. “If they discover that the momentum of what is developing on Terra cannot and will not be stopped but that hope for them lies in preparing for and surviving the aftermath, they may discover a solution that we had not anticipated”.

“In that case”, replied his colleague, “we will need to accelerate our efforts.  Surely it shouldn’t be that difficult to escalate a few wars, introduce a few more contradictory opinions to confuse them and instigate a few more causes to further weaken their so-called morals and values”.

The first man laughed and then, chuckling, said “You are right, as always.  I had forgotten that Terrans are in fact their own worst enemy.  Once again I give them too much credit to be able to solve their own problems.”

His colleague paused and then replied, “This is true for the most part.  However, there are still some holdouts who can make a difference and who can adversely impact our intentions.  But even they won’t matter soon enough”.

The first man smiled silently …. and they both turned their attention back to the monitors.

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© 2012 – Harry Tucker – All Rights Reserved