“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” – Winston Churchill

I submit that Trump’s failure to deal effectively with the GOP establishment in Congress on healthcare reform represents his exasperation with them and the end of the beginning of his presidency.  This is also evidenced by the firing of Spicer, hiring of Scaramucci and derision of Sessions.

Last week, Thomas “Listen, Liberal” Frank admonished the media for its war on Trump:

As newspapers die off, their place in the American consciousness is taken by social networks of both the formal and informal variety. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, these days we read only that which confirms our biases. Once upon a time, perhaps, the Washington Post could single-handedly bring down a president, but those days have passed…

These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class – an exalted and privileged class. They are professionals and they believe in the things that so many other professional groups believe in: consensus, “realism”, credentialing, the wisdom of their fellow professionals and (of course) the stupidity of the laity.

This is the key to understanding many of their biases – and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.

Chris Hedges‘ Monday sermon focused on Trump and the Christofascists:

Donald Trump’s ideological vacuum, the more he is isolated and attacked, is being filled by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism, with its network of megachurches, schools, universities and law schools and its vast radio and television empire, is a potent ally for a beleaguered White House. The Christian right has been organizing and preparing to take power for decades. If the nation suffers another economic collapse, which is probably inevitable, another catastrophic domestic terrorist attack or a new war, President Trump’s ability to force the Christian right’s agenda on the public and shut down dissent will be dramatically enhanced. In the presidential election, Trump had 81 percent of white evangelicals behind him.

From Dan Glazebrook:

By ‘injecting’ money into the economy, QE was supposed to get banks lending again, boosting investment and driving up economic growth. But overall bank lending in fact fell following the introduction of QE in the UK, whilst lending to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) – responsible for 60 percent of employment – plummeted…

Put simply, markets were (and are) glutted and there is no point investing in glutted markets.

This meant that the new money created by QE and ‘injected’ into financial institutions – such as pension funds and insurance companies – was not invested into productive industry, but rather went into stock markets and real estate, driving up prices of shares and houses, but generating nothing in terms of real wealth or employment…

QE, by effectively devaluing the currency, has reduced the buying power of money, leading to an effective decrease in real wages.

Tuesday, we heard from Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:

DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying and doctoring were performed on the East coast of the U.S…

Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the original “Guccifer 2.0” material remains a mystery – as does the lack of any sign that the “hand-picked analysts” from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the “Intelligence Community Assessment” dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention to forensics.

Yesterday, From Wolfgang Streek:

Donald Trump’s promise to make America great again is an acknowledgement that the United States is a power in decline, embarrassingly unable since Vietnam to win, or even to finish, any of the wars that it started.  When Trumpers ask about NATO, they are asking why NATO should continue to exist a quarter century after the end of the Soviet Union. Calls for economic protectionism raise the question, long taboo among liberal internationalists, of whether new free trade agreements are really to everyone’s benefit, and why, in particular, the government of the United States should have let its country deindustrialize. The United States has an elaborate immigration policy, and yet there are eleven million illegal immigrants in its territory.²Trumpers say this is odd, and Trumpists agree with them.

Previously:

As a process of institutional and political regression the neoliberal revolution inaugurated a new age of post-factual politics. [5] This had become necessary because neoliberal globalization was far from actually delivering the prosperity for all that it had promised…

Instead of trickle-down there was the most vulgar sort of trickle-up: growing income inequality between individuals, families, regions and, in the Eurozone, nations…

It began with the Laffer Curve, which was used to prove scientifically that reductions in taxation lead to higher tax receipts.

The Democrats will never recover from their failures to run Henry Wallace and Bernie Sanders.

The Mooch got busted in The New Yorker, which apparently pleased his boss and failed to enrage supporters.  The wrestling ethic of kayfabe is now official White House policy to the delight of the downtrodden and apoplexy of the considerable opposition.

There’s even talk of a dynasty:

Ivanka Trump is duly apprenticed in the White House that, according to my sources, she means to occupy as America’s first female President.

King Baron Trump has a nice ring to it.

As you can see, Trump signifies the interregnum, as neoliberalism dies and something waits to be born.  So far, we’ve seen polity from an amateur, appealing to a corporatized Congress and a deep state bent on permanent war.  The results have been predictably unsuccessful, but a good faith attempt has been made.

What comes next is not polity, but a strategy to let Congress twist in the wind of leaderless vacuity, while keeping campaign promises made in the face of a hopelessly intractable and murderous government.  Deep state would love to have Pence as POTUS, so they can ply him with Christofascist deals to promote hateful cruelty based on xenophobia and tribalism.

The Imperial sins of Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Syria are inevitably being practiced on Americans and Trump is pretty much all that stands in their way.  If he needs to jettison some Never Trumpers from his staff and fire a bunch of disloyal Obama hold overs, then so be it.

Capitalism and Imperialism are dying of their own weight.  Trump was elected primarily because the greatest socialist of our time got bamboozled by the DNC.  The rise of a populist was predicted.  Everything is against us.  Like him or not, Trump’s all we’ve got.