“The Trump Meteorite Fall”, Volume 1: A Misidentified Populist Object
I’ve written in French a two-volume book on the fall of the Trump meteorite. The first volume was issued in October last year. Here is the introduction of the soon to be published second volume.
The Trump Meteorite Fall. Volume 2: “High treason! ”
Introduction
In the first volume of The Fall of the Trump Meteorite, we saw, as its title indicated, a misidentified populist object appear, which not only would easily find its way into the Republican Party primaries, quickly moving into the lead, but, even more astoundingly, would win the presidential election. Of course, he would have benefited from the complex system of the “Electoral College”, which, in attempting to strike a delicate balance between population and territory in the United States, favors rural areas and disadvantages ethnic minorities residing primarily in urban areas.
In terms of votes, Trump lost the presidential election to the detriment of Hillary Clinton, and as usual, he would still deny it fiercely- but it didn’t matter because he had won under the terms of the election rules.
At the time the action begins here, Trump has already been president for 16 months, and the United States is gradually discovering that the institutions of its country did not anticipate the irruption like a bull in the china shop of its federal republic of a lout for whom the border between truth and lies does not exist, who considers his personal interest as the sole criterion for his actions, to whom the notion of a collegial process is completely foreign and who, as a result, quickly creates a vacuum around him in terms of advisers whose advice should be taken, with the exception no doubt of Steve Bannon, white supremacist and head of his election campaign before being Trump’s White House adviser for six months.
The Americans also discovered during the Charlottesville disturbances of August 2017 that, put in the position of having to take sides between white supremacists and counter-demonstrators, the President had chosen his camp without hesitation, to the great displeasure of the Generals of his country. This led me to describe Trump as “the last general of the routed Southern Army of de Civil War”. This scandal motivated Bannon’s departure, although he would remain an advisor in the shadows.
As this second volume opens, the United States worries increasingly about the disproportionate influence that Russian President Putin’s wishes seem to have taken on Trump’s actions for the nation.
In a recent twist, Trump’s corporate lawyer Michael Cohen was arrested and a considerable number of his documents seized. Some of these certainly shed light on the questions to be resolved by the Commission of Inquiry, chaired by the Special Council Robert Mueller (former director of the FBI) into the possible collusion between Trump’s entourage and Russia.
Faced with the danger to the nation, the No. 2 in the Department of Justice, Rod Rosenstein, created this Mueller Commission, established in response to Trump’s dismissal of FBI Director James Comey, and Mueller made no attempt to hide his interest in Trump’s ties to Russia. The Attorney General himself, Jeff Sessions, had recused himself from the case, having himself been compromised by conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador, conversations which he had initially tried to conceal. Rosenstein, to whom American commentators have attached little importance, is for me, on the contrary, a central figure. He is the complete opposite of Roger Stone, the man of all twists and turns, who is also one of the essential protagonists here, the third being Christopher Steele, a former British spy and editor of a famous dossier bearing his name.
Active or passive collusion with the Russia of Trump and his entourage ? In any case, with his election, it is a fringe of American society with intimate, commercial, Mafia and political ties with Russia, that is now in power.
The State apparatus, the institutions, and the civil servants, took the shock badly: they only clumsily and weakly resisted Trump’s assertions that they, all together, constituted a Deep State, scorning people like him who are the real United States, the Deep America. At least that is what appears on the surface: that is all that the public can see. That said, it would not be surprising if, one day, we learned that the underwater part of the iceberg looked nothing like the tip.
Doubtless the most extraordinary aspect of this affair, when sooner or later it comes to an end, will have been the inability of the American democratic system to prevent someone as unqualified as Donald Trump to exercise power, and then wreak havoc almost unopposed. The countervailing powers will have been astonishingly ineffective. The supporters of the President will not have ceased to denounce the Deep State even though their accusations remain unproven…, even those against the Mueller Commission, since some members of what would become Trump’s entourage in power had already been in the sights of the Federal police for many years. On the other hand, enthusiastic supporters of the President will have found a boulevard open before them to orchestrate a mafia-like drift in the state apparatus, facilitated by Donald Trump’s use of an arsenal of presidential prerogatives that have become quasi-legal in hands as perverse and seditious as his own.