RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media.  Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level.  The deplorable vulgarian of yore has morphed into a metaphysical incarnation of evil, an “enemy of the people” par excellence.  Orwell’s “two minutes of hatred” has become a continuous, 24/7 orgy.

The roll call of attackers reads like a Who’s Who of the U.S. Deep State.  The list of their hyperbolic adjectives (including “sellout,” “traitor,” “Putin’s pussycat,” etc.) is familiar to the curious, starting with Barack Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan (“high crimes and misdemeanors”).  The outraged were particularly incited by Trump’s refusal to parrot the “Russiagate” narrative, falsely presented as the result of an “intelligence community consensus.”

Trump’s refusal was justified, on factual as well as political and moral grounds.  No evidence of any kind exists to prove Russian meddling in the presidential election, or thereafter.  It never will be found, for the simple reason that both Podesta’s and DNC emails were leaked, not hacked.  The meddling myth is just a tool the Deep State has used since late 2016 to torpedo Trump’s attempt at détente with Moscow.  Its operatives saw this attempt, with reason, as a threat to the maintenance of the duopolistic, neolib-neocon system of full-spectrum global dominance.

Just three weeks after the Helsinki summit, it is tricky to discern its implications and likely consequences, but three themes seem clear.

First and foremost, nothing of substance has been settled.  It is of course possible and desirable to make a fair and enduring deal with Russia on all contentious issues (Ukraine, Syria, cyberspace, terrorism, trade, etc.).  In operational terms, the biggest problem for Trump is not how to keep his supporters loyal; it is how to ensure that his own bureaucratic machine will obey and apply his vision, regardless of what Putin and he may yet agree to next fall.  A chronically disloyal civil-service apparatus—especially at the Department of State and the CIA, but also at Defense—overwhelmingly subscribes to the Weltanschauung of Trump’s haters and detractors.

In terms of domestic politics, it seems Trump either knows what he is doing—that there is uncanny finesse behind his bluster—or that he is guided by an almost unfailing intuition, with similar results.  The Trump-haters’ unhinged reaction has not eroded the President’s base.  Quite the contrary: According to recent polls, only 45 percent of respondents said outside influence from foreign governments is a major problem in American elections.  Two thirds of Democrats see “interference” as a problem, as opposed to only 22 percent of Republicans and 40 percent of independents.

Solidifying the base in advance of midterms has always been Trump’s focus, rather than the hopeless task of winning over self-described Democrats, and he is doing it well.  Over one half of Americans do not accept the media narrative.  They are watching the ongoing hatefest by Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, and other screamers with annoyance.  Now that the commentariat are routinely using the phrase “Trump has taken Putin’s word over that of our intelligence services” (an unsubtle attempt at suggesting that there is a collective “we” standing united here), it is to be expected that many hitherto skeptical minds will feel nauseous at the thought that Messrs. Brennan, Comey, Strzok, the latter’s concubine, and their ilk, are indeed “ours” in any shape or form.

Most self-described Republicans and Independents support Trump’s desire for constructive relations with Russia and do not buy the dominant line.  This is a winning policy, but the President has to brave the hysteria and reestablish firm dominance over the debate.

At the same time, the aftermath of Helsinki has focused the collective mind of the establishment on the old lure of regime-change.  It had been plotted by the Deep State even before Trump was inaugurated.  Important centers of power had never accepted the legitimacy of this presidency.  After Helsinki they are emboldened and relentless, with the media machine in the vanguard.  The rhetoric has gone so far that its perpetrators believe that the political point of no return has been reached.  They have established to their satisfaction that “everyone” sees Trump as delegitimized—that he is ripe for the coup de grâce, and damn the Deplorables.

This obsession cannot be reconciled with the certain refusal of a significant minority within the majority to remain docile.  This may lead to the second most acute crisis in the nation’s history, on par with the winter of 1860-61.  The similarity is that one of the warring camps is better armed.  The difference is that they are not geographically distinct: Any violent mayhem would soon descend into a Hobbesian free-for-all.

Standard left-right labels are not useful here; we are looking at the conspiracy of the Globalist Postmodernia Central against everyone else.  For now the former pin their hopes on Robert Mueller, who will soon produce new politically motivated indictments (money-laundering raps, etc., none of them having anything to do with “Russian meddling”).  If this regime-change model based on August 1974 does not work, what else are they willing to do to remove the threat of this President?

The aftermath of Helsinki has shown that our country has something very terrible awaiting it.