NEO – Trump Trials and Tribulations

by  Jim W. Dean, VT Editor   … with New Eastern Outlook, Moscow

[ Note: Any chance of the Trump news slacking off via a breathing spell while his nominations finish their Congressional approval process has been quickly dashed during his first week.

His Whitehouse team was ready with a flurry of executive orders, which were presented as evidence of a completed campaign pledge when they are still nothing more than a “continued” promise.

His policy deep bench turns out to not be very deep; no detailed plans as to how to do things have been presented, because it appears they do not know how to yet.

And for the departments with no confirmed leadership in place, Trump just ordered everything to stop until his people were in place. Even long time State Department people, who have served Republican and Democratic presidents and with many valuable years of experience, have been told to pack up and get out. It’s a bit like Genghis Khan has come to town.

But, we must not overly focus on Trump, which I see too many doing. It is bigger than that. There is the not too tiny item of a Republican House and Senate that will be solidly behind funding most everything he wants to do. Paul Ryan as the Jack-in-the-Box on the billions needed to fund a Mexico security wall would just be a formality.

We are looking at a steamroller here, where no compromises will be made because the votes are there for the Republicans to do whatever they want. Part of this is due to Obama refusing to compromise on a lot of his major legislation to give the Republicans part ownership on it.

He had several key narrow margin victories, and now that twisted rubber band has snapped and will be hitting the Democrats in the eye, over and over. The Republicans are going to ram legislation down their throats and cheer while doing it.

Trump has momentum. Wall Street is up, and that has had a ripple effect on world markets, for now; much of that due to his talk of cutting corporate taxes and having a repatriation tax holiday for US corporate offshore profits. But no mechanics on how that would work have been presented.

For example, will these companies be able to effectively launder their profits by bringing them back, but then just doing a little shuffling around and taking them back out again, leaving paper ownership here in the US? That would be my bet. We will see lots of sizzle on the roll out, and then smoke and mirrors as to the details.

The Democratic Congress will need to be hiring every detective agency in the country to keep up with the flurry of “changes” taking place in 2017. As I have said before, hang onto your hats folks, as it is going to be one hell of a ride, one you will remember forever… JD ]

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– First published … January 27, 2017 –

Donald Trump is triumphant and enjoying the spoils of our latest American political war, the ability to sign executive orders where each of the last several presidents has done more of than his predecessors. I will bet that Trump breaks Obama’s record if he gets eight years in office.

What else can a President do but sign executive orders when his CIA chief, Secretary of State and others have yet to be confirmed? The US ambassador to Kazakhstan had to step in to monitor the Astana – Syrian peace talks, where he did not even speak to the media.

If the attendees successfully continue on to the UN Geneva meeting in February, it will not be due to any positive acts of the US, but in spite of them.

Both Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will need time to prepare for the heavy lifting work needed for the Syrian political negotiations, which will be a war of its own.

We should see at least a phone call between Putin and Trump before Geneva to test the waters. Both want to get off on the right foot, Trump to show he is a “can do” guy, especially after Obama having led us down a dead end regime change road in Syria with hundreds of thousands dead.

If Trump is looking for partners to fight extremist Muslim terrorism, he will have found them in Russia, Syria, Iran, and to some degree, in Turkey. But Israel and the Sunni-Wahhabi Gulf States would be very unhappy to see that, and are not without the means to trip him up.

But first “The Donald” has to transition from reality TV host and election candidate, to acting presidential. That will require the ability to execute the pie in the sky promises of his surprising inauguration speech that left many veteran media pundit stunned.

Trump has bet his administration’s reputation by pledging to undo what the banksters, gangsters and crooked politicians have done. But there is a big problem with that. He is talking about taking down the “Deep State”, the powers that really run the show, where heads of state are often merely lieutenants of those behind the scenes. No one has ever “removed” these Deep State people before, or pried their fingers from the throat of public institutions. In fact, they remove presidents.

Our new president should not be over criticized for over promising. Even Obama had to fudge the numbers to hide some of his failure. During rolling coverage I did with Press TV on his final speech in Chicago, he took credit for having produced significant growth in household income.

I had to point out he did not explain that the average figures he had used were “fake news” because the majority of that “extra income” earned was in the pockets of the rich, not those he had led us to believe.

So if Obama can take such license to misrepresent his accomplishments at the end of his eight years, then we can hardly be too strict with Mr. Trump on the front end of his realm.

I do use the word realm on purpose, as I can already see him grooming his handsome son-in-law and polished daughter as a modern version of John and Jackie Kennedy. Dad is a showman before being a businessman, first and last.

The election hacking media coverage has finally died down. It’s kiss-and-make-up time. Trump visited the CIA, with John Brenan having left on Friday at noon, with no replacement confirmed.

Trump told the staff he loved the CIA and blamed his anti-CIA hoopla on media manipulation. This is the same man that used the Nazi term on them a week ago, and seemed to forget that most peoples’ memory lasts that long. His audience considered his visit to be more of a campaign stop than a bridge builder outreach to them.

Some pundits are saying that his ego is so big that being the greatest American president in history is a sincere ambition from which we could all profit. But that all depends on how one would define success. Trump’s will be simple. Everything he does he will claim was great…end of story. He will be a one term president if he does that.

But he has a bigger problem from his past shadowing him from the wings, as there are allegations that he was bailed out by Russian oligarchs out of his bankruptcies. He and his son’s historical statements are opposed to each other in this regard, with dad claiming to have had no dealings with Russians whatsoever.

That is a bomb waiting to blow his presidency into a low space orbit, creating a constitutional crisis, such that the next Supreme Court Justice added to the Court could be the swing vote. All bets are that Trump will want to get that vacancy filled with a very friendly and dependable pick.

The ship of state turns slowly, in terms of producing results from actions on systemic problems like trade, infrastructure, and bringing jobs back. It takes a long time to build modern plants, and the new ones today are maximizing robotics to reduce high-tech payrolls. The payroll component for industrial production is trending down from that alone.

We find ourselves in the middle stage of an international trade war. Advantages of shipping energy by pipeline versus ship can quickly change which seller can deliver a price advantage, and one that will last. The Silk Road is a long term game changer, as it gives all of Asia secure shipping routes, versus the current ones that the US Navy can close when given orders to do so.

The vast area of Eurasia holds god only knows how much in undiscovered energy resources which, if eventually found and developed and tied into Silk Road pipeline distribution, could change the world for many producers, meaning losing their market share.

Russia is leading the way on new nuclear power generation with plants that reprocess their own fuel, eliminating the huge cost of storing dangerous long term waste.

VT’s nuclear expert Clinton Bastin, before he died in 2014, had briefed us on how, in the good old days when chemical engineers ran the Atomic Energy Commission and later Dept. of Energy, they had pushed hard to finish the development of reprocessing fuel rods, but were fought tooth and nail by the lobbyists of the uranium companies and by the contractors who wanted their contracts for hazardous waste storage to go on forever.

The battle came to a head when the pushy engineers were forever removed from running the Department, and replaced by politically friendly academics who played ball with the entrenched lobbies, including the oil and coal people who did not want to see safe and lower cost nuclear plants popping up all over.

And lastly, the price curves on renewable energy technologies could be a game changer in terms of lowering demand for oil and gas. Does any of this figure into Deep State America’s push for a unipolar world? Many think so.

More Americans, including veterans and their families, are beginning to realize how our military has been used and abused in what were purely commercial war competitions that utilized a whole cast of false threats to hide that our service men and women where becoming corporate mercenaries. Most of the proxy Jihadi terrorists are mercenaries themselves, strange bedfellows indeed.

Can Mr. Trump ride herd over all of this when his only demonstrable skills are real estate hustling in big cities with corrupt union and political structures? He will have to subcontract government departments out to people hopefully with the skills to run them.

But both Trump and these hopefully professional administrators will know that a gangster like Shelly Adelson has never sat near a president like he did on inauguration day. This act alone showed what a fraud Trump’s “drain the swamp” hype was.

Only Mitt Romney exceeded this embarrassment when he held a fundraiser for international gangsters in Israel, where the suitcases of cash flowed in, their corporate jets all tracked by the various Intel agencies that follow large gatherings of mobsters. Mitt set a new standard when he loaded a bunch of them onto his leased campaign plane to fly with him to his London fundraiser, where he bragged they would soon be flying on Air Force One.

We hope the best for Mr. Trump, as his failure will have a big ripple effect, as did the Bush and Cheney administration, whose gang brought us the fairy tale of Osama bin Laden and 9-11.

Jim W. Dean, managing editor for VT, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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