Patrick Lawrence: Donald Trump’s Middle Finger
Donald J. Trump’s second four years in the White House are shaping up to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, as the old saying goes. I have it from several sources, who cannot be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, as the old saying at The New York Times goes, that Trump’s cabinet nominees already resemble a barrel of monkeys. And my sources have been “verified by The New York Times,” I will have you know.
Let’s leave all those liberal authoritarians, still smarting from their failure to sell Americans a bottle of snake oil labeled “Joy and Good Vibes,” to their predictable freakout as Team Trump runs onto the field. It is fun to watch, but you don’t want to partake of it. Remember, empire was not on the ballot Nov. 5: There was no voting against it and there never will be so long as America runs one. Trump and his people are simply going to run the imperium differently—more crudely, more in-your-face, in some cases with more immediate brutality—but an imperium it will remain, just as it has long been.
We must remember our Wilde at this moment. “In matters of great importance,” the estimable Oscar wrote, “style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” It is the same with the empire managers, and leave all thought of sincerity out of it. Bush II ran a nasty one, Obama a nice one, Trump I a nasty one, the addled Biden got all mixed up and ran a nice and nasty one, and Trump II… you can finish the thought.
The only kind of upset worth nursing at this point is an upset with a 70–year story behind it.
I was impressed by how quickly, as in instantly, Trump started naming his names. It suggested pretty plainly he was determined to resume his war against the Deep State, a war he started during his campaign in 2016 and then lost by technical knockout, his first term resembling a 15–round prizefight. To my astonishment, Peter Baker, The Times’s treacly White House correspondent, gets this exactly right—well, mostly right—in a piece published in The Times’s Friday editions under the headline, “Trump Takes on the Pillars of the ‘Deep State.’”
Naming three of Trump’s announced appointments, Baker writes, “If confirmed, Mr. Gaetz, Mr. Hegseth and Ms. Gabbard would constitute the lead shock troops in Mr. Trump’s self-declared war on the deep state.” This is just what we witness as it unfolds and just how what we witness should be named. You have to appreciate the honesty.
I knew Peter Baker had it in him. Somewhere.
Trump announced his first appointment, Susie Summerall Wiles as chief of staff, but two days after he trounced Kamala Harris. Wiles has interesting bloodlines. She is the daughter of Pat Summerall, a football great many readers will be too young ever to have heard of, and, at 22, went to work as an assistant to Jack Kemp, another football star, after Kemp got elected a conservative congressman from New York. Then it was on to the Reagan campaign in 1980 and then into the Trump orbit.
An inside-the-tent Republican operative, then. Not too much going on upstairs so far as one can make out, but this hardly distinguishes Susie Wiles. She knows how to get things done. She co-chaired Trump’s just-victorious campaign. Nothing remarkable here.
But the rambunctious stuff soon started. Four days after the Wiles announcement Trump named Elise Stefanik his choice for ambassador to the United Nations. Holy St. Gamoli, I says to myself I says. Maybe Tim Walz, back in St. Paul and safely distant from anywhere he could make a mess of things, was onto something: This could get very weird.
Stefanik, a New York congresswoman, elbowed her way in front of the cameras last spring, when she savagely attacked students and faculty protesting terrorist Israel’s genocide in Gaza on campuses across the country. Her hatred of the U.N. and everything it stands for ranks her with John Bolton, Bush II’s bomb thrower in the post back in 2005–06. Now Stefanik is in slip-and-slide mode in the manner of Kamala Harris. She was all for Ukraine joining NATO when Russia began its intervention two years ago. Since her appointment she’s kind of hard to find when this question comes up, leaving it to her people to say she’ll follow Trump’s orders.
Whatever they turn out to be.
In quick succession this past week, Trump went to the heart of the matter. On Tuesday, Nov. 12, he named Pete Hegseth his defense secretary; a day later he announced Matt Gaetz as his attorney general, Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence (DNI). The military, Justice, State, intel: In 48 hours Trump invaded the Deep State’s sanctum sanctorum. These are the bastions from which it mounted its incessant and finally successful raids on the Trump I administration.
■
Good enough Trump has pounced. Good enough he gives the Deep State his middle finger. The national-security apparatus, with the appendages of an octopus, corrupted the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the cause of what would have amounted to a nonviolent coup had it succeeded. The intelligence agencies were instrumental in the extravagantly destructive subterfuge operation known as Russiagate. The State Department habitually usurped the president’s authority, notably but not only in Ukraine. For its part, the military threatened mutiny and in repeated cases—Syria, Iraq—indeed refused or subverted its commander-in-chief’s orders.
Hear me when I say (my new favorite transition phrase): The damage the Deep State did to America’s most fundamental institutions—and we should not omit the collapse of mainstream media’s ethics and credibility—has devastated the strength and resilience of our already ailing republic. Peter Baker writes that those who deployed these institutions in what was almost certainly the most coordinated effort to depose a president in American history “proved too independent for Mr. Trump.” What a disgraceful gloss. This is just what I mean when I say mainstream media abandoned their duty more or less completely as they enlisted in the Deep State’s cause.
I do not blame Trump for his pugilism as he arrives back in Washington. The Deep State is a grotesque tumor on our body politic and the sooner this goes into radical surgery the better. But my God, mon Dieu, mein Gott, we now have a Fox News presenter nominated to run the Pentagon, a wayward congressman at the Justice Department and a mad-dog warmonger—a through-and-through neocon, indeed—at State. America and its people, not to mention the world beyond their shores, are not equipped at this point to withstand either prolonged chaos or a prolonged farce.
Tulsi Gabbard as DNI is to be singled out, as others have, as a very compelling choice on Trump’s part. With a military record conferring credibility that has served Gabbard well, she has long opposed the wars of adventure, knew all about intel’s Russiagate subversions and, having worn a uniform for 20 years, may comport effectively in command of an institutional sprawl that at present operates beyond the rule of law and all civilian control.
Gabbard’s nomination seems to have sent the Deep State’s denizens into something close to paroxysms. This is just as it should be, as William Astore points out in “Bracing Views,” a Substack publication, brought out Friday. Controlling the daily flow of intelligence into the White House — and the integrity of the intelligence, what is more — stands to make Gabbard the most consequential appointment Trump makes. In the best outcome, she could begin the surgical procedure noted above. In the worst outcome, we need to remind ourselves, the last person who tried to bring the intel apparatus under control was murdered 61 years ago next week.
Mainstream media will have us believe—and, as always, they all say the same thing in the same words—that all Trump’s appointments come down to an insecure president’s pitiable need for loyalty and allegiance. This is mere obfuscation. I am not at all sure Trump’s other nominees will be as effective as Gabbard stands to prove—they are amateurs who could get eaten alive in no time—but, like Gabbard, they are distinguished for where they stand. LBJ, in that refreshing vulgarity of his, once said of J. Edgar Hoover, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” With the exception of Rubio — and what he is doing among these appointments I cannot figure — Trump has chosen people perfectly prepared to piss in.
One question looms larger than all others as America and the world brace for Trump II. All of the appointments Trump has so far announced, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for Health and Human Services, are to a one either committed Zionists or Zionist fellow travelers. Again, I do not see that this much distinguishes Team Trump from its predecessors. Did Biden or his neoconservative policy people pull the embassy back from Jerusalem, where Trump moved it, to Tel Aviv, where it belongs? Did Biden rescind recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, as Trump had extended it? No and no.
How different is the current administration’s full participation in Israel’s genocide and its aggressions elsewhere in West Asia from what Trump’s is likely to be?
Trump has named Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a card-carrying Zionist, ambassador to Israel. Already there is talk of letting Israel annex the West Bank and recognizing it when it does. It is egregious. My partner is now in the West Bank, doing the most honorable work there is right now, and tells me Palestinians are in a quiet state of quake. There is no not understanding this.
Gideon Levy, the admirably principled columnist at Ha`aretz, the Jerusalem daily, published a column Thursday, Nov. 14, under the headline, “Trump’s ‘pro–Israel’ Appointees Are the Worst of Our Enemies.” Here is the gist of Levy’s reasoning:
If the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser and the U.S. ambassador to Israel stick to their words, the coming years spell disaster for Israel. The next period will determine its fate as a perennial apartheid state thanks to its ostensible friends, who are no more than blood merchants, dealers who will deepen Israel’s addiction to occupation, bloodshed and power, irrevocably.
They should not be labeled “friends of Israel,” they are the obverse. They are the worst of its enemies. The new people in charge of the U.S.’s foreign policy are friends of apartheid, occupation, the settlements and war. Trump is the most moderate and restrained of this lot. He may restrain them somewhat. Itamar Ben–Gvir [Israel’s radical-right minister of security] may also take part in restraining this group of wackos in Washington, if only he overcomes the language barrier.
I take Levy’s point and my respect for him as a courageous voice in Zionist Israel remains undiminished. But there is an illusion at the core of this thinking. Trump’s people could well assist in making a mess of Israel and, worst outcome, the rest of West Asia. But where does he think previous American administrations, all without exception, have long been headed? Where does he think some alternative to Trump II would take things? “The new people … are friends of apartheid, occupation, the settlements and war”? And “the old people” were something other? Nothing in this distinguishes Trump’s crew other than their bold-faced exuberance for the project, and so the pace with which they propose to proceed.
To put his point another way, Israel is well on its way to disaster, just as Levy foresees. It is one of its own making. The time between now and the end will be brutal however things proceed. Quickly and bloodily, or gradually and bloodily: It is a question only of how long it takes for Israel to get there. And however swiftly the Zionist state meets its destiny, the pace of America’s decline will match it.
■
Back in 2016 a few of us thought, and said so in print, that Trump was a strange tribune as the bearer of good ideas on the foreign side, but he had a few and these should be recognized. A new détente with Russia, an end to the wars of adventure, a broad reduction in the U.S. military presence in West Asia and elsewhere, easing the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance into the reliquary: We were right not to dismiss out of hand everything Trump said or proposed, as mainstream Democrats did.
But that is not the important thing here. We were wrong to interpret Trump’s foreign policy plans as any kind of constructive move to dismantle the imperium. This is the important thing.
I dislike others who toot their horns and dislike tooting mine, but here goes.
A decade ago I published a book called Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. In it, I posited that those purporting to lead our nation had 25 years, counting from the events of Sept. 11, 2001, to make up their minds as the imperium collided with the 21st century. They could accept the eclipse of American primacy thoughtfully, imaginatively, courageously, and remake it all—America’s consciousness of itself, its place in the world, and so on—or they could get it done messily and violently.
Little did I know the extent of it: This is what messily and violently looks like.
