RUTHFULLY YOURS

Much of the response to President Trump’s sacking of James B. Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has been patently hypocritical and partisan. This is not hard to demonstrate. More challenging, and perhaps much more important, is to understand the wider context of the latest outburst of Trump Derangement Syndrome. What might be the real reasons, the ideological circumstances, which explain the determination of the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, bureaucratic executives, CEOs, Hollywood activists, educators, the professoriate and so on – the whole Left Power Elite, in other words – to damage and defame the Trump presidency at every turn.

The charge of hypocrisy almost goes without saying. Ever since Comey informed the Senate Judiciary Committee, on October 28, that the FBI was re-opening its investigation of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information during her time as US secretary of state (2009-13), the anti-Trump forces having been baying for Comey’s blood. Their indignation, given the announcement came just 11 days before Election Day, is understandable.

Not even the fact that, on November 6, two days before the election, he once again closed the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure at the Department of State, could he assuage their outrage. On May 3 this year, in front of Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI Director claimed to feel “” at idea that he could have played any role in effecting the outcome of the election. No mainstream journalist, no Hollywood activist, no Democratic Party spokesman is on record respecting James Comey’s insistence he did right thing: “Lordy, has this been painful. I’ve gotten all kinds of rocks thrown at me and this has been hard, but I think I’ve done the right thing at every turn.”

Certainly Clinton has never forgiven Comey. As recently as two weeks ago she was still blaming Comey’s October 28, 2016, letter to Congress – along with “Russian WikiLeaks” and, of course, misogyny – for her electoral defeat. Perhaps the pretence of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), once considered something of an outlier in the Democratic Party but these days no more unbalanced or outrageous than her colleagues, encapsulates up the situation best. President Trump’s dismissal of Comely cannot be supported because it does not meet the “smell test”, and yet were Hillary Clinton the occupant of the Oval Office, Waters would now be supporting Comey’s sacking: “If she had won the White House, I believe that given what he did to her, and what he tried to do, she should have fired him.”

The partisanship of the media against President Trump is obvious to anyone who is not, well, hyper-partisan against Donald J. Trump. For the mainstream media – in not only America but also the UK and Australia – the White House dismissal of FBI Chief Comey smacks of President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up and, more specifically, the “Saturday Night Massacre” of October 20, 1973, in which special prosecutor Archibald Cox was sacked and, nine months later, Richard M. Nixon departed 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by helicopter in disgrace. This, surely, is to confuse adolescent fantasy with political commentary. The sacking of James Comey, as a number of wags wryly observed, constitutes a cover-up in search of a crime. The Democratic Party’s “tin foil hat” conspiracy that President Trump happens to be an agent of Putin’sRussiaisonlypuerile but, once and for all, allows the Republicans to clean the slate on the so-called McCarthy-era witch-hunts of the 1950s. The moral high ground occupied by American-style liberals, at any rate on the question of guilt-by-association, is over.

All of this, however, begs the larger question. Why, exactly, is it that politicians and celebrities and media outlets have forfeited any semblance of trustworthiness or impartiality in their attempt to bring down President Trump? The answer I proposed, in “The New Totalitarians”, is an ideological one. Donald Trump – in many ways to his own disappointment and regret – poses an existentialist threat to the powers-that-be in the United States. Zeke Miller’s recent interview with Trump, appearing in Time magazine, tells the tale of a man who works 10 hours or more a day in an attempt to “make America great again” and is genuinely flummoxed by the unrelenting onslaught of “the fake news”.

James Burnham’s The Managerial State, published almost sixty years ago, invites us to see the forces at play in America, and the West in general, in a fresh light. Those who hold power over us are no longer the traditional capitalists, “the individual entrepreneur, who owned the whole or the greater share of a factory or mine or shop or Steamship Company…and actively managed his own enterprise.” The new rulers of our world are “operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians” and “administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on.” The latter, with their eye on the globalist big picture, could not be expected to be patriotic, let alone circumspect about the encroachment of the state on the freedoms of the individual or the integrity of national democratic institutions, the national bourgeoisie and even national boundaries.

Through the lens of James Burnham, at least, the 2015-16 presidential campaign season takes on a very different hue. FBI Director Comey’s original probe into Hillary Clinton’s alleged malfeasance was as if one branch of today’s ruling class was investigating another. In his bizarre press conference of July 5, 2016, Comey pronounced Hillary Clinton guilty of being “extremely careless” but not of “gross negligence” – as if they were two different things. Ordinary people who break the law engage in “gross negligence” and may be prosecuted, while those in the Left Political Elite who break the law are only guilty of being “extremely careless” and remain at liberty to run for highest political office in the land and place all their allies in positions of power.

President Trump, as I have argued elsewhere, is a revolutionary. His business background and character, the quintessential “individual entrepreneur”, puts him at odds with the PC class of operating executives, superintendents, administrators, commissioners and bureau heads of which Bill and Hillary Clinton are most surely the perfect examples. It will not be easy holding the powers-that-be to account in what Burnham called the Managerial State. Bureau Head James Comey, for whatever reason, failed to address the astonishing corruption of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s transnational philanthropic-government-private moneymaking scam described in Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash. That makes him an accomplice of sorts, while the extent of the Clintons’ corruption and criminality continues to be exposed to this very day.

NBC News, like so many other mainstream media outlets, claims President Trump disrespected James Comey by tweeting that their recent conversation in the White House might have been taped and warning the former FBI Chief to be careful about mischaracterising their tête-à-tête to the “fake media”. I would see this as less a matter of disrespect to Comey than act of survival on Trump’s part in an atmosphere that increasingly has the feel of a modern-day civil war.

Daryl McCann has a blog at http://darylmccann.blogspot.com.au/