“The formal mechanisms of power don’t work. We’ve undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion and it’s over. They won…. Our only hope left is to build mass movements of dissent that can wrest power back from this rapacious corporate elite that quite literally will kill us.”
The Commoner Call (7/6/17)
“How do you make the power elite frightened of you?” Chris Hedges poses – and answers – the question at the 21-minute mark in part two of the video. We had better learn the lesson and learn it soon.
- Link to the Reality Asserts Itself web site for other important interviews, HERE.
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Trump’s Antics: Carefully Choreographed Chaos
BY James Zogby
The HuffPost (7/29/17)
We are only a little more than six months into the Trump presidency and I’m already becoming emotionally exhausted by the antics of the president and his underlings. What I’m beginning to suspect is that this may be the reaction Trump is seeking to elicit from his opponents. He is using chaos and outrage to wear us down.
Like millions of other Americans, I wake up each morning and turn on TV and check Twitter to see what new and outlandish things have been said by the occupant of the White House: Who has he demeaned? What new whoppers has he told? What bizarre charges has he levied at his favorite targets?
Analysts and commentators have posited several theories in an effort to make sense of the president’s behavior. I think, to a degree, all of them may be valid.
Like other charismatic authoritarians before him, Trump thrives on chaos. From the beginning, his staff had competing power centers. This was by design.
One theory suggests that the president makes particularly outrageous comments when he is under attack or failing. Understanding media, he knows that if he can create a “feeding frenzy” with a crazy tweet, he can steer attention away from his inability to pass legislation or damaging aspects of the continuing probe into Russian collusion.
It’s all about me
Others see in the language Trump uses in his tweets and speeches an effort to play to the worst instincts of his supporters while cultivating his own brand of authoritarian leadership. In his messaging, he promotes the notion that he and he alone speaks for true American values and, therefore, those who question or oppose him are not patriotic. He uses his tweets to target his (and, therefore, America’s) enemies—the media, judges, the intelligence agencies, those law enforcement officials who are investigating him, minorities of all stripes, etc. Because, as he has claimed, “no one knows the system better than me, [and therefore] I alone can fix it”—it is particularly disturbing that those who are susceptible to his messaging are being led to see our nation’s most fundamental institutions as a threat to their leader and his ability to restore some vague promise of “greatness”.
Then there are those who simply see in Trump’s tweets an unhinged narcissist who out of his own sense of inferiority needs to prove himself to be better, stronger, smarter, and more virile than everyone else. This need drives the president to make outrageous and clearly dishonest claims about the size of his crowds (or his hands), his legislative successes, or his ability to accomplish things that no other president has been able to accomplish. This same pathology leads the president to demean opponents or those whom he feels are standing in his way.
Finally, there is what I mentioned in the beginning—the chaos and the exhaustion. Whether by design or unintended consequence, Trump’s tweets are taking a toll on the psyche of many Americans who are simply finding the daily outrages and the circus-like antics in the White House to be too much to bear. …