06-20-2020, 11:00 AM
(06-19-2020, 09:28 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I was doing my usual Rachel news dump, and it seems Trump is not holding back.
The head of the US broadcast agencies such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, etc... has just seen to the retirement of the two permanent heads of the agencies and fired the boards of all the various channels. These had been traditionally non partisan positions, kept well balanced between the two party's people, but far more into chasing America's perspective rather than any party. If in the impeachment we caught a glimpse of the non partisan deep state's loyalty to America first and party a distant second, the tradition in the broadcast circle of the US Government has been if anything deeper.
We will have to watch, but it looks like Trump is pulling the pros and replacing them with partisans. If Fox occasionally bucks up against Trump, he is looking for a media force he can truly control and is displacing the existing bi partisan tradition in the process.
In another move, he seems to be going after the prosecutors chasing down international business irregularities in New York. Again, he is ignoring a tradition that only people who grew up in the office step up to take over, and has appointed a partisan to take over, including some particular investigations into a dictator he likes.
Summary? If Trump is starting to recognize that the polls have him as the underdog in the upcoming election, he is pulling the stops and being more Trump like than Trump. If there are reasons he is becoming unpopular, he is not learning from them, but exaggerating them. He is converting parts of the government that served America and trying to arrange for them to serve Trump.
It seems counterproductive to me, but it looks like he is going all in with being himself.
This is a purge. Donald Trump may not be doing the "dictator" thing right (he certainly failed to outlaw or otherwise castrate the Democratic Party), but he has done much in an effort to make the non-partisan sectors of government toe his line.
This will be reversed.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.