Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.
– Robert F. Kennedy
President Trump admits that neither Xi nor Putin worry about being called out by the press for what they say and do but he laments he does. The Fourth Estate is always telling lies about him and sponsoring treasonous whistle blowers. This President doesn’t like to be held accountable. Or indicted 4 times and charged with 88 criminal counts.
The Fourth Estate”: This from Google Gemini:
The “Fourth Estate” refers to the news media as an independent power that holds government accountable, a term that originated in 18th-century Britain. Initially a derogatory term coined by Edmund Burke for the press, it evolved through figures like Thomas Carlyle to represent the media’s crucial role as a “watchdog” for the public interest. Historically, it has been a force for checks on power, but in recent times, it faces challenges from factors like misinformation and the decline of traditional business models.
Just based on this brief exposition I would say the threat AI presents has to do with selection of what to present and what to conceal. Concealing cyberspace’s part in flooding us with everything including crazy alternate “facts” and thus its crushing effect on the independent power of the news media is for me a big negative, a real problem. Also, not offering that “in recent times” a president has ignored the First Amendment by calling the press “the enemy of the people” conceals a threat we face with a president who mocks his oath of office.
The ”traditional business model” AI referred to is cyberspace’s takeover of classifieds and advertisements, the cash cows of print media. No connection is made between “misinformation” and the “publication at will” of digital media where Influencers, running from narcissists to crackpots in their basements, fight for Followers. In the absence of evaluative criteria of both author and article for publication we have now a mosh pit of bullshit, lies, nonsense, sheer insanity, invective and blinding ignorance. What we have are muddled minds pouring out what they “think’ they “know.” And, as Trump has said about Mexicans “some I assume are good people.” Attention in social media as in politics is won, eyeballs drawn, not with a long form by a new Burke or Carlyle but by affective reach. Passionate crushes and diatribes not slow reasoning to common understanding. Words to incite a flash mob, not words really at all. Videos. Quick flare up memes. Drawings on cave walls.
To the extortionist/grifter Trump, aka President, all this confusion cyberspace reality creates is a bonus. His own default approach to media control is extortion. And the purpose of his extortion is to get a pay off. If you give him what he wants, he won’t hurt you. He uses the leverage of the Federal Government and its enforcers whom Trump 2 now owns to frighten print and TV media into shutting up. He can hurt their bottom line.
What counter offensive to launch? The problem of clear messaging and unambiguous reception remains: The smorgasbord of choices cyberspace offers fractures and fragments the establishment of common understanding and weakens the potency of critique and attack. And at this moment, the unsubtle bludgeon of Trump’s relentless attack on any order not his own requires a counter offensive of equal or greater magnitude. The Fourth Estate is not equal to the task because 1.it’s major agents are bending to Trump and 2. A scattered, impoverished guerilla warfare is being fought in cyberspace and this gaggle serves to distract and deflect a unified counter that must be made. The Trump sphere launches more obedient droids in cyberspace than counter response can obliterate. Free to choose Americans stand behind their personal choices regardless of what science and reason, or schooled critical thinking, may counter with.
Xi, Putin and Kim Jong-un easily shut down the Fourth Estate. They don’t have to wait for the gravity of loss of profit or cyberspace’s flooding of minds to erode the Fourth Estate. Turkey’s Erdogan shuts them down when “emergencies” are declared. Trump is heading in that direction in regard to everything from tariffs to elections. I think we can be sure that he’s having so much fun and success in playing his hand as a bogus, con man good hearted, best dealmaker capitalist, he might just extort businesses flat out, bogus emergencies and insurrections not needed. He just settles for donations from the moguls he promises to keep out of jail. It was good capitalist business for Paramount to pay 16 million extortion money to Trump so he would not unleash his droids on its proposed merger with Skydance Media. Pay up and no anti-trust obstacle to the merger.
This is clear blatant Don Corleone dealing but it also points to the treacherous and traitorous relationship of our gun toting capitalist economics of choice and our, now we know, fragile Constitutional order. If one asks why or where Project 2025 and its tool, Trump, and his tools are going in all this destruction it has much to do with a view of wealth and wealth making that yearns to be free of the obstacles of our Federal Government, its bureaucracy and agencies. For the investor class, it’s the Federal government alone that can bring suits against unbridled profit making. This is the class Reagan was speaking to when he said government if the problem. Sad to say government has not slowed down the zero sum Monopoly game, either under Democrat or Republican regimes. But what Trump gangster is doing now should be a warning to them that an autocrat sticking his beak into their profit making may be more intrusive in “wealth creation” than democratic rule. Trump is making clear that you will suffer in every way because he can use his control of the Federal government to make you suffer. The wealth tech bros, the wealth Wall St bros, and the Christian Nation bros can see that Trump will hurt anyone who brooks his will.
Or maybe they can’t.
Don Corleone did not extend his operation beyond national borders. But Trump does. Economic and military power are like this army you have to enforce your will anywhere you want. Why not show up where the money is – such as wealthy oil rich countries in the middle east — and make it known that it’s in their interest to shell out whatever Trump wants. He wants to be cut in. He’s like Julius Caesar who can show up in Rome and tell the Senate he’s taking over. Take a look at my army that just crossed the Rubicon he tells them. From a Republic to a dictatorship just like that. Note that Caesar pushed his own droids into the Senate as Trump 2 has done. He weakened the structure of the Roman Senate from the inside. The White House Press now is salted in the same way with droids. He has extorted universities to pay up AND make his lunatic anti-humanism their educational mission. Instead of putting together their own rival mob, universities are being isolated, threatened and extorted one by one. Trump goes after universities because they nurture a critical thinking he fears. This is where the reporters and journalists he hates and fears come from.
The present Federal government shut down doesn’t bother Trump as for him it’s another version of Musk with a chain saw getting the Feds out of the way of his Mars dreams, or Vought with his 2025 plan to make a Christian Nation out of the rubble that once was a secular Western liberal democracy. Democrats hope that the dire effects of this shut down will bring the House to them in 2026. Trump is confident that he can put all the blame on Democrats, from the price of eggs to the cost of health care. He wouldn’t be hosting a Great Gatsby party on the eve of millions losing health and food benefits, fiddling while Rome burned, if he didn’t think he could once again turn reality his way.
It’s fascinating the way in which Trump has openly acted like a Mafia don and at the same time woven a spell of soft power of the cult variety. An election winning number of voters wanted him a second time because he played into where they were at. The desire to re-boot/re-set whatever power structure, aka a Constitutionally based democratic Republic, exists like a passion not abated among those who see Donald J. Trump as the man for the job of insurrection and destruction. The angry nihilism of the re-set everything faction are played to by Trump as steadily as he plays to those, like him, who hate. His followers don’t see extortion and grifting; they don’t fear his vindictiveness will reach them And yet he makes the lives of wage earners miserable while stroking the invested class as well as that percentage of voters who brought the 2024 election to him who hurt and will hurt the most.
Trump relies on his power to entrance a steady 30% to 40% of the population but he has a back up plan for the 2026 elections, a plan he has been rehearsing since he sent Federal troops into LA for bullshit reasons. He has 50 ways to invalidate election results, beginning on election day. He’s probably wondering why no past president who needs to win or get impeached or worst didn’t think of these ways. He’s studied in his first administration and in his interim Mar a Lago retreat how to criminalize the Federal government, how a fox can show up in a sleepy chicken house pretending to be just another chicken. With Homan’s goons stationed at polling booths there will be some excitement, quickly declared insurrection by Trump and …
Will the military do what he wants? The U.S Uniform Code of Military Justice clearly states Constitutional allegiance above presidential. Whether Trump 1 knew of this or not Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, reportedly made plans to resign en masse rather than follow orders they believed were illegal. Trump 2 has been busy kicking out the Milley brand of military leaders.
We shall see. The greater odds are that Trump will try to shut down the 2026 elections any way he can.
Nothing beneficial to this country or anyone in it, or any of the internationals that have done “deals” with him, can result from Trump’s presidencies. He’s bolder, crazier and more dangerous each passing day. Hand over our tech advantages to Xi? Start nuclear testing to see if they still work? However, I believe his style of threats, extortion and vindictiveness are dark warnings to those who believe autocracy will make them richer than our democratic order of things. Putin’s gangster style squeezes both blood and money out of his moguls. Xi has bent and neutralized the Communist Party and remade it to serve his own personal ambitions. Trump is neither the KGB trained gangster Putin is nor has he the savvy experience and military control of Xi in remaking our Constitutional order. Both Xi and Putin are steady, well-informed strategists not liable to shoot themselves in the foot while Trump is mania erratic, a brazen criminal daring the Democratic order of things to stop him, daring the whole of American history and its people to stop him. Such pathologies in the past self-destruct.
What Trump has is not a nation of people shaped by a 1917 Bolshevik revolution or a homogeneous Chinese peasant class but rather 50 states zealously independent in spirit, masterless really in every way including politics, and proud of the fiery rebelliousness, the still resident frontier spirit of the country’s origins. Those who see Project 2025 as a workable plan for a nation subject to religion are not serious in this insanity but clearly intending to form an illiberal order in this hypocritical manner.
Often cited are two congenital defects haunting the American order: the extermination of a native indigenous population, and the nuclear indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To this we must now add, not a congenital defect but one newly earned, this country’s election to the presidency twice of a man who ruled by extortion, ripped the greatest holes in the moral fabric of a country than any American politician before him, and corrupted in a brand new way the international reputation of the US. This man will go down in history but not in the way he would choose for himself.
