Kevin Barrett
When I was in high school (1972–1976) my political heroes included JFK assassination researcher Mark Lane, antiwar provocateur Abbie Hoffman, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — the Washington Post journalists who brought down President Richard Nixon. Today, I still admire three of the four. But I’m not so sure about Woodward.
Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets, a shocking and well-documented exposé of the Bush crime family, presents strong evidence that the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency was a coup d’état by deep-state actors — including a certain Naval Intelligence officer named Bob Woodward. Today, when I read Woodward’s work, I no longer embrace the illusions that led me to choose journalism as my undergraduate major. The USA does not have a free and independent press. What we have is “American Pravda,” as Ron Unz puts it in his masterful series of articles collected here.
Since Woodward is an intelligence officer whose cover job is “journalist,” should we believe anything he tells us about Trump’s White House? His new book Fear: Trump in the White House is almost entirely based on “Deep Throats” — that is, people who supposedly participated in and witnessed the events described, but whose names are withheld. So we are basically being asked to take the anonymous sources’ accounts on faith.
That said, I suspect that like most good disinformation, Woodward’s book is 95% true, at least to the extent of representing a reasonably accurate presentation of what the author heard from people who worked in and around the Oval Office. But the way the material has been selected and arranged betrays an agenda. Just as Woodward’s Watergate-era journalism was not disinterested truth-seeking, but part of an intelligence operation by oligarchs and their military intelligence friends aimed at ending Nixon’s presidency, Fear is part of a similar operation today whose purpose is to hobble and/or terminate the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
Like Nixon (and before him JFK), Trump poses a threat to the permanent national security state.* Each of these three presidential “threats” to the deep state was quite different: JFK had become a pacifist and an enemy of Israel’s nuclear program; Nixon and his sidekick Henry Kissinger were freelancers who transformed America’s China policy without deep-state permission (and of course Nixon was an “anti-Semite” who dreamed of ending Jewish-Zionist control over American media); while Trump is dangerous due to his “isolationism” and ineptitude.
If we remove the punctuation Woodward’s title becomes “Fear Trump in the White House” — which is of course its barely-subliminal message. So why should we fear Trump’s presidency? Woodward’s series of artfully-arranged vignettes shows us a White House in complete chaos. Trump seemingly has no idea what he is doing from one moment to the next. He watches six to eight hours of television a day, gobbling junk food, raging against CNN and MSNBC commentators, and nodding sagely at the wisdom of Fox News talking heads. His agenda is neither written down nor remembered, so aides can derail his projects by stealing presidential edicts from his desk before he signs them, confident that Trump will forget them: out of sight, out of mind.
Like the Watergate tapes, Woodward’s quotes reveal a White House in which practically every other sentence is laced with profanity. In 1974 America, this posed a political problem with a public not yet inured to foul-mouthed leadership. Today, the USA’s manners and morals have sunk so low that even Trump’s evangelical base is happy to support their p-ssy-grabber-in-chief, even if he and his whole entourage cuss like sailors.
If profanity was once considered sinful, so was lying. Today’s Washington, DC is a swamp of prevarication, but recognizes a distinction between good and bad liars: good liars skillfully recite officially-sanctioned bromides and stick to their stories with confidence and consistency; whereas bad liars blurt out whatever comes into their heads, rattle easily, and get caught contradicting themselves. Trump, Woodward informs us, is the quintessential bad liar. This comes on the authority of Trump’s ex-lawyer, John Dowd, who explained to Robert Mueller that when Trump was put through a mock interview “he just made something up. That’s his nature.” Dowd told Mueller that if Trump ever testified the President of the United States would be exposed not only as a pathological liar but as “an idiot… a goddamn dumbbell,” which would pose a threat to the national security of the United States.
Woodward’s book confirms Michael Wolff’s earlier claim in Fire and Fury that practically everyone who has worked with Trump considers the President a mental midget. Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis is quoted as saying Trump acts like, and has the understanding of, “a fifth or sixth grader.” Woodward confirms earlier accounts that ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron.” Many other Trump advisors express similar sentiments. There is only one denizen of the White House who thinks Trump is a “very stable genius,” and we all know who that is.
But is Trump really that stupid? The harshest attacks on Trump’s IQ are all coming from true believers in American imperial ideology. These people are frustrated that Trump doesn’t “get it” when they try to explain to him how self-evident it is that the USA must continue to serve as global policeman. Woodward notes that both Tillerson’s “moron” remark, and Mattis’s “sixth-grader” assessment, were responses to Trump’s rejection of American imperialist exceptionalism at a January 19, 2008 National Security Council meeting in the Situation Room. That meeting had been arranged by deep-state denizens John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, Tillerson, and Mattis for the specific purpose of brainwashing Trump into accepting their “we must police the world” outlook. Trump belligerently refused. His final remark was, “We [have] spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. We can’t even muster $1 trillion for domestic infrastructure.” Over and over, throughout Woodward’s book, we see Trump trying to pull US forces out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Korea… and his deep state aides panicking and sabotaging his efforts.
Is the “sixth grader” who notices that the emperor has no clothes a “moron”? If the self-styled smart guys and adults in the room all think the US should bankrupt itself destroying the Middle East for Israel, and needs a globe-straddling empire with more than 1,000 military bases in more than 60 countries, maybe we need to find an as-yet-unindoctrinated sixth grader to apply some common sense. Trump is right in asserting that the US could be far more prosperous, at least for its ordinary honest citizens, if it became, once again, a normal nation: a republic, not an empire.
So if Trump wants to pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Korea, why hasn’t he? Isn’t the president supposed to be the commander-in-chief? Woodward explains that Trump’s aides have pulled off “nothing less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the President of the United States and his constitutional authority.” In other words, they have committed treason. But that shouldn’t surprise us, since they are all complicit, actively or passively, in the greatest act of treason in American and perhaps world history: the September 11th, 2001 Zionist coup d’état.
Unfortunately, despite his isolationist instincts, Trump has fallen for neocon-Zionist brainwashing with respect to Iran policy. Though Iran hawk James Mattis, cited by Woodward as hating “the idiot raghead mullahs” of the Islamic Republic, may be on his way out, the even more obsessive Iran-haters Mike Pompeo and John Bolton are now firmly in charge. The good news is that Trump doesn’t want war, he wants leverage. The bad news is that he won’t get any leverage, or any deal, by waving Pompeo, Bolton, and their MEK terrorist friends at Iran’s principled and disciplined leadership. The resulting standoff could encourage Israel to gin up another 9/11-style false flag, or perhaps a Gulf of Tonkin style attack on a US ship in the Persian Gulf, to try to draw the US into attacking Tehran. Such a plot wouldn’t have succeeded against the Netanyahu-loathing Obama Administration. But it might work on Trump, who fell for the April 4, 2017 Syrian sarin gas false flag, screaming “kill them all” and firing a volley of missiles, to the delight of his deep-state advisors and the cheers of the mainstream media.
So what are we to make of this chaotic administration? It seems that America’s top leadership, according to Woodward and other semi-reliable sources, consists of an idiot (some would say idiot-savant) commander-in-chief surrounded by traitors bent on endless mass murder in service to a dying empire.
* On the permanent national security state or “deep state” see Michael J. Glennon, National Security and the Double Government; Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State; Eric Wilson (editor), The Dual State; Kouzmin, Witt and Kakabadse, State Crimes Against Democracy; and Lance DeHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America. On Zionist influence on the American deep state see Laurent Guyénot, JFK-9/11 and From Yahweh to Zion.
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