Flowers For Socrates

By ann summers

The anonymous op-ed in the NY Times has shown that Trump may have (only) one dissenter in his WH. It’s still a game of Secret Hitler, and the unhingery continues. John Miller/Baron’s cabinet has bad hinges. But the op-ed does have a tactical feel, considering the Woodward book and the Kavanaugh hearings are coming.

Play can get undermined in Secret Hitler, by policy traitors and like the Trump regime, has shown that trust among players becomes a precious commodity. We now see it’s a White House of back-stabbers or as the Mooch says, “front-stabbers”.

The op-ed’s made more tantalizing because a #KreminAnnex protestor claims to have seen a WH staffer leaving the building with a copy of the game in the hands. Bill Shine is not smart enough to play such a game but this whole anonymous op-ed affair is the thing of trust falls in Caesar’s forum and PR party games.

More interesting is the op-ed’s turn to neoconservative talking points, trying to whitewash the capitalist crimes committed by the WH in favor of as yet unidentified speculators and numerous oligarchs so far.

Whoever wrote it is worried that Trump will tank the economy or even start a war, hence devaluing wealth, and does want to rationalize the grab-bag RW takeover of the US executive branch by now betraying the clown prince of kleptocracy.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

 

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Trump is not smart enough to undertake an internal purge and cannot trust his chief of staff to execute such a move because … “idiot” so this whole op-ed might be contrived by folks with other agendas. The current betting line has authorship by someone associated with Mike Pence.

In a rambling speech that took place shortly after the New York Times published a bombshell editorial written by an anonymous senior official in the Trump administration, the president himself took shots at both the op-ed and the newspaper that published it.

“When you tell me about some anonymous source within the administration probably who’s failing and probably here for all the wrong reasons, now, The New York Times is failing,” Trump said. “If I weren’t here, I believe The New York Times probably wouldn’t even exist.”

“The failing New York Times has an anonymous editorial, can you believe it, anonymous, meaning gutless, a gutless editorial,” he continued.

www.rawstory.com/…

This is a finely crafted piece of propaganda – in content, placement, and timing.

Be VERY wary of taking any of this at face value.

>THREAD<https://t.co/lyc2EgJvDw

— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) September 5, 2018