A Fifth Column Inside the Trump Administration: A Contrarian View
Here's a contrarian view of the "Anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times by a disgruntled "senior official" in the Trump administration denouncing him as "petty," "impetuous" and "amoral" while claiming to be part of a "resistance" to thwart an unhinged president. Actually, I offer two contrarian takes. But let's start with the most dangerous one.
First Step in a Carefully Planned Purge
There is no "Anonymous." He or she is merely a fictitious character invented by some of Trump's more evil, less stupid acolytes - say, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone - to lay the groundwork for a major purge of the "Deep State." Frustrated at his orders to Sessions and others to carry out Idi Amin-style inquisitions, wholesale jailings sans due process, barring brown people from immigrating here and a crackdown on the MSM being ignored or overruled by the courts, a cornered Trump is in the process of engineering a made-up crisis centering on traitors in the ranks out to destroy his presidency. Naturally, the only way to deal with this impending mutiny is to hit back hard, launch "investigations" replete with lie detector tests and signed oaths of personal allegiance. These measures, of course, won't suffice. Purges will follow. We will see emergency decrees suspending habeas corpus, first amendment rights and mass protests. The GOP Vichyites in Congress will continue in their collective coma, tut-tutting, "Well, these are extraordinary times requiring extraordinary measures" while voting down all the fluffy efforts by a geriatric Democratic leadership to "vigorously protest these authoritarian measures." And the Kavanaugh-infused Supreme Court will knock down all challenges to the crackdown, citing "a unitary executive," blah-blah...
Then, bye-bye Rosenstein, Sessions, Mueller and the other crypto-Democrat Trump-haters. Hello sweeping libel actions against the Fake News Establishment. A massive McCarthyite scourge of the career ranks in government agencies. And time to finally conclude that forward-looking Peace and Friendship Treaty with Vladimir Putin as we dissolve NATO and wage all-out trade war against a disintegrating E.U.
Can't happen, you say? Why not? Trump has amply proven he has the political instincts of Mussolini, the social graces of Kim Jong-un and the humanitarianism of Vlad Putin. Constitution, rule of law, free and fair elections - all that frivolous crap our effeminate Founding Fathers slapped together in perfumed parlors as they profited from slave labor and buggered the household staff is s-o-o-o passé and irrelevant these days. Nope, what America needs is a genius, ersatz-billionaire strongman to lead her to a bright and grand future. A septuagenarian, serial adulterer, junk food gorger unfazed by the silly confections of liberal democracy and restrictions on anything-goes wealth accumulation. All backed and egged on by a third of the population constituting dead-ender MAGA zombies.
Here's the thing. It's happened before. And successfully. Ever heard of Sergei Kirov? Jang Song-thaek? Marinus van der Lubbe?
Sergei Kirov was a fast-rising star in the Soviet state under another no-holds-barred paranoid narcissist - Joseph Stalin. A Vozhd toady with blood up to his armpits, Kirov's growing popularity within the communist party was giving Stalin a case of conniptions. So, in 1934, Stalin had him whacked with a bullet in the neck. This served two purposes: it eliminated a potential rival, and provided a pretext to launch a wave of violence within the party to assert his own dictatorial power, a four-year long blood bath known as the Great Terror. To cover his tracks, Stalin not only had Kirov's hitman also whacked, but the man's wife, 85-year-old mother, brother, sisters, cousin and close friends as well. His infant son was spared, being placed in an orphanage. Stalin's successful, though a tad excessive, purges solidified his hold on power until his own death nineteen years later.
Jang Song-thaek was uncle and mentor to new North Korean leader (and new Trump goombah) Kim Jong-un. Fearing his uncle's growing power, the nephew had him offed, reportedly by anti-aircraft gun. This, in turn, triggered the executions of two ambassadors and four ministers. One of the latter was a Kim cousin. He was dispatched by flame thrower. In case you didn't know, the Kims play for keeps. Kim the Younger consolidated his base through the purge - a lesson our own Dear Leader likely has taken to heart during his touching courtship with the diminutive Korean tyrant.
Marinus van der Lubbe was more pretext than historical figure. Mentally disabled and nominally a Dutch communist, poor Marinus was made the scapegoat by the Nazis for the mysterious 1933 burning of the German Reichstag. His arrest, "trial," and expeditious beheading provided the lie enabling Hitler to quickly exert "emergency" dictatorial powers over the nation. Thousands of "enemies of the state" were rounded up and summarily executed or sent to concentration camps. The rest, as they say, is history.
So, taking his cue from history - not that he's ever read any - Trump is unleashing a diabolical plot to finally dispatch the American Experiment to the dustbin of history and ensure his place as our nation's new Duce. Don't lecture me that this is nutso-talk in Crazytown. Just spend some time reading Breitbart, InfoWars, The Daily Stormer, and listen to Rush, Laura, Tucker and everybody else on Fox News (myself excluded - I only appeared once and still haven't gotten over it). IT...CAN...HAPPEN...HERE!
Now to my less apocalyptic contrarian view on "Anonymous" --
Keep Up the Good Work and Shut the F--- Up!
I have to confess, I'm perplexed by all this blather from the left about Anonymous needing to out him/herself, how "abnormal" and "undemocratic" it is to have a cabal of anti-Trump conspirators working behind the scenes to keep the madhatter in the Oval Office from blowing up the world. President Obama said, “That’s not how our democracy’s supposed to work. These people are not doing us a service by actively promoting 90 percent of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this White House, and then saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’re preventing the other 10 percent.'”
Of course it's not normal, not how our democracy is supposed to work. But these are far from normal times, and many are not sure our democracy is working fully since the 2016 miscarriage of an election, likely midwifed by Russia. Congress has demonstrated in spades that it has abdicated its role as a constitutional check on this president. The Vichy GOP is packing the courts (including the Supreme Court) with mendacious, sometimes ill-qualified hanging judges. His Orangeness is selling our national security down the drain. Clearly an intel asset of Putin, Trump is scrupulously following the GRU's script to deliver our head on a platter to Moscow.
So, then what's normal?
We should welcome anti-Trump conspirators inside the administration, egg them on, provide our moral support. Only they stand in the way of cataclysmic disaster. They are our Maquis, our White Rose, our Culper Spy Ring.
But splashing their secret machinations to the world is stupid. "Anonymous" should have kept quiet. I fully appreciate these people's frustration at being demonized by two-thirds of Americans as they go on record publicly defending Trump while saving the Homeland by clandestinely sabotaging him. It's only human to want recognition for doing the right thing. But by declaring their actions to the world, they invite a purge upon themselves, one that, as history has shown, can lead to dire consequences for all of us. While I'm nowhere near predicting a Trump crackdown on our liberties and institutions, that notion is less preposterous than before.