THE 50 YEAR REICH: A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF TRUMP’S APPOINTEES

BY GARY ZABEL @AUTONOMIA75

While a great deal of press attention has been focused recently on the battle within Trump’s transition team between supporters and opponents of Mitt Romney as Secretary of State, the appointments the President-Elect has already made tell us a lot about the nature of his future administration. First, they indicate that Trump intends to intensify the repressive power of the state and extend its reach substantially, especially as directed against Blacks, Muslims, and Latino immigrants. Second, they signal a campaign to break the still-powerful teachers’ unions (the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers) by privatizing public schools as part of an even more ambitious plan to roll back the entire public sector while keeping Wall Street in control of the economy. Third, they signify the consolidation of a propaganda apparatus, a clandestine link with the violent right, and a program to expand industrial jobs to retain the support of the white working-class voters who provided Trump’s margin of electoral victory in the Rust Belt battleground states.

Intensifying Repression
The key appointments in this category are Alabama Senator Jeffrey Sessions as Attorney General, Mike Flynn as National Security Advisor, K.T. McFarland as Deputy National Security Advisor, and Mike Pompeo as Director of the CIA.

Jeffery Sessions has been a controversial figure since the US Senate blocked his nomination by Ronald Reagan to a federal judgeship in 1986. Several justice department attorneys who served with Sessions when he was Assistant US Attorney in Southern Alabama testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that they had heard him make racist remarks, including referring to an African American attorney as “boy,” saying that he liked the Ku Klux Klan until he learned that its members smoke pot, and criticizing the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as “un-American” “communist-inspired” organizations that “ram civil rights down people’s throats.” Sessions either denied the accusations or claimed that he intended his comments as jokes. He was also accused of failing to pursue some plausible accusations of civil rights violations (although he did file charges on others) and of prosecuting false charges of voter fraud against three Black community activists, who were speedily acquitted at their jury trial.

As US senator from Alabama, Sessions has taken stands in favor of deporting undocumented immigrants as well as restricting future immigration, has voted against prohibitions of torture in Guantanamo and other relevant locations, and has opposed gay marriage as well as seeking to deny funding for LGBT student organizations on college campuses.

Several attorneys in the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department have threatened to resign if Sessions is confirmed by the Senate, which appears to be a near certainty since the Senate has a Republican majority.

What can we expect from Sessions as Attorney General? The following seems likely: lax enforcement of civil rights law with respect to African Americans, LGBT people, and immigrants; hostility to Black Lives Matter and support for police who kill unarmed Black suspects; vigorous participation in Trump’s plan to expel 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants with “criminal” records, the majority of them based on traffic violations; implementation of a Muslim Registry, if Trump goes through with his threat to create one; and Justice Department harassment of activists with groups that Sessions regards as even more “communist-inspired” and “un-American” than the ACLU and NAACP. We may also see a return to the widespread use of the FBI against political opponents such as marked the reign of J. Edgar Hoover.

Sessions’ work in the Justice Department is likely to be complemented by the CIA under the directorship of Mike Pompeo. So far liberal ire has been directed principally against Sessions. But in some ways Pompeo is even more dangerous to the Bill of Rights. Pompeo is a Tea Party congressman from Kansas who has developed a special interest in releasing federal surveillance, torture, and secret incarceration programs from the limits placed upon them by the Obama administration. He supports the reestablishment of CIA secret prisons, believes that torture is an effective method of interrogation and should be used against suspected “terrorists,” opposes closing the Guantanamo prison, wants the NSA domestic surveillance programs fully unleashed so that comprehensive computerized files on the public and private behavior of American citizens can be kept, and believes that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be repatriated from Russia, given “due process,” and executed. He has had no difficulty making the transition from the supposed Tea Party emphasis on small government and individual liberty to support for the creation of a federal government wielding powers of surveillance and repression that would have made Hitler and Mussolini salivate. (As I write this, the news media are reporting that Trump tweeted this morning that American citizens who burn the flag should be stripped of citizenship or jailed. The Supreme Court has already ruled that flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment.)

Sessions and Pompeo will anchor the Trump Administration’s plans to weaken and in some cases eliminate civil liberties. But they will have assistance in this regard from the new National Security Advisor, retired Army Lt. General Mike Flynn. In 2014, Flynn was forced out of his post as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency by his superiors for erratic management and abusive behavior toward his staff, although Flynn claims that he was dismissed for criticizing Obama’s assertion that ISIS was near collapse. Flynn is perhaps best known for his rabid anti-Muslim beliefs. He has called Islam (not merely Islamist radicalism) “a cancer,” claiming that “fear of Muslims is rational” and that Islam “wants to enslave 80% of the world’s population.” Although as national security advisor, Flynn’s principal responsibilities will consist in advising the president on matters of national security, vetting policy options from different branches of the military, and chairing meetings involving the Secretaries of State and Defense, he will have an office in the West Wing of the White House that will permit daily contact with the president. Trump has already taken Flynn’s advice to shift from a ban on all Muslim immigration as unworkable to a policy of “extreme vetting,” and prohibition of immigration from countries supposedly posing terrorist threats. He is sure to involve Flynn in questions involving domestic surveillance and further changes in policy on Muslim immigration.

K.T. McFarland is a former national security analyst and current Fox News analyst who has taken public positions in favor of water-boarding (“Even if it is torture it’s probably worth doing”); awarding Vladimir Putin the Nobel Peace Prize; abrogating the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, saying that the military option must be kept open; and eventually taking “our troops out of Europe and putting them on the Mexican border.” She accused Hillary Clinton of having blood on her hands in Benghazi, and of ordering that helicopters be flown over McFarland’s home in order to intimidate her. She shares Flynn’s delusional paranoia and ought to work well with him in her new job as Deputy National Security Advisor.

Under the Trump administration there is likely to be a significant blurring of the line between domestic and foreign repression, along with close cooperation between agencies on the two sides of the line. This is because Trump regards the external enemy — namely Islamic jihadism — as having a sizable presence within the United States, and indeed sometimes identifies the jihadist threat with the entire US Muslim population.

Destruction of Teachers’ Unions, Privatization of Public Schools, End of Affordable Care Act, Giving It All to Wall Street
There are three key figures in this category: Betsy DeVoss, Tom Price, and Steven Mnuchin.

Betsy DeVoss, Trump’s appointee for Secretary of Education, will have the primary responsibility for dismantling public education and breaking the teachers’ unions. DeVoss is a billionaire with no professional experience as an educator who has bought her way in to “school reform” by making strategic financial donations. She has taken it upon herself to advocate for charter schools, and voucher programs that enable parents to send their children to private schools with public money. There is a great deal of research that shows that neither policy works. Children who attend charter schools score lower on objective tests than those attending public schools, and in Detroit, where DeVoss was able to get the city to adopt a voucher program, children now have the lowest reading scores in the nation. But of course, the purpose of charter schools and voucher programs is not to improve education. It is to break the teachers' unions — with one or two exceptions neither charter schools nor private schools are unionized — and to make the wealthy who invest in either of the two options richer.

Tom Price, a six-term Republican congressman, is Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Price has spent the last six years in Congress trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act. With Trump as president and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, he should now be able to do that. The precise way in which he proceeds is another matter. Trump has indicated that he wants to allow children to be covered by their parents’ policies to age 26, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, as well as continuing to prohibit insurance companies from turning down clients with pre-existing conditions. It is anyone’s guess how Price is supposed to mandate either policy in a private insurance system without the “socialist” modifications of Obamacare or something like it. He will also face the problem of how to throw the 20 million people currently insured by Medicaid under Obama’s program off the rolls without provoking a massive health crisis.

Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s choice for Secretary of the Treasury, is a graduate of Yale University, a billionaire Wall Street investor, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, and creator of his own hedge fund. He is a perfect representative of the global financial elite that Trump raked over the populist coals in his campaign, saying that it had “robbed our working class.” If he is confirmed by the Senate — a sure bet — he will be the third Goldman Sachs alumnus to head the Treasury Department. Mnuchin made much of his fortune when he bought a failed mortgage company at a fraction of its worth, renamed it OneWest, and proceeded to foreclose on thousands of mortgages, with many of the foreclosures violating financial regulations. One of Mnuchin’s chief tasks will be to accelerate the process of emptying the pockets of working-class people by abolishing the estate tax, and crafting the tax cuts that will shift a massive amount of wealth from the bottom and middle to the top of the income ladder. On a theory that was already discredited during the Reagan years, this transfer of wealth to the wealthy is supposed to encourage investment and thereby create jobs. What it does instead is give more money to people like Mnuchin who manipulate financial instruments such as hedge funds and mortgages without adding any value at all to the productive economy. Mnuchin may also have a role in Trump’s plans to freeze federal hiring, substitute 401ks for defined benefit pensions, and make it easier to fire federal employees.

Making Propaganda, Connecting with the Extreme Right, Implementing the Jobs Program of the “Fascist Left”
There are two unlikely bedfellows under this rubric: Elaine Chao and Stephen Bannon.

Elaine Chao is Trump’s choice as Secretary of Transportation. A former Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush, Chao is the wife of Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell. She is a fixture of the very Republican establishment that Trump excoriated during his campaign. Her connections in the Senate will help her shepherd Trump’s one trillion dollar infrastructure program through Congress. Since the program is supposed to be “revenue neutral,” it will proceed by enticing private companies to undertake the work of infrastructure repair through a combination of tax breaks and the partial privatization of roads and bridges, with companies recuperating their investments and taking their profits by charging tolls.

Stephen Bannon is the former director of Breitbart, the “Alt Right internet platform” (his own words). He became CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign at its low point, receiving much credit for turning the candidate’s fortunes around. He has now been appointed Counselor to the President and Chief Strategic Advisor. Like Flynn, this gives him an office in the West Wing and daily access to Trump. Bannon shares Trump’s and Flynn’s fantasies about an enormous Muslim Trojan Horse in the US. Like Sessions, he is militantly opposed to undocumented immigrants and believes that legal immigration should be restricted. But he does not seem to have chosen opposition to Islam or immigration as a specialty as a Trump appointee. Rather, he appears slated to play three roles: 1) Informal conduit between Trump and Breitbart, which is now expanding into European markets. Under Bannon’s directorship, Breitbart gave up all pretense of independent journalism and became an outright advocate for Trump, a role it has continued to play after the election. It does not need much in the way of prodding to support the new administration, other than, perhaps, advance notice of White House news releases. But since Bannon’s experience with Alt Right online media is what primed him to play a key part in the Trump campaign, he is probably going to act as something like Secretary of Propaganda in the new administration. 2) He will serve as Trump’s liaison with hard core and potentially violent fascists — both the KKK and the American Nazi Party praised his appointment — although he will be careful to appear unconnected with them. 3) His primary interest, though, seems to be ensuring that, in his words, Republicans “govern for the next fifty years” by creating industrial jobs with nationalist economic policies; tariffs on Chinese goods, cancellation or re-negotiation of trade deals, and the trillion-dollar infrastructure project. He is a critic of globalism every bit as much as the original Nazis were critics of international (Jewish) finance. Bannon will play multiple roles then; Trump’s Joseph Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda), his Ernst Röhm (leader of the SA commando squads), and his Georg Strasser (advocate of a National Socialist “second revolution” that would represent the interests of Aryan workers rather then the financial and corporate elite). All three figures were members of the so-called “left wing” of the National Socialist German Workers Party. But Bannon needs to be careful. Röhm and Strasser were murdered by the German army on Hitler’s orders in the Night of the Long Knives, and Goebbels committed suicide in the Führerbunker along with the great man himself. None of them lived to see even a 50 Year Reich, such as the one Bannon imagines.

Gary Zabel is a senior lecturer in philosophy at UMass Boston, and longtime labor activist.