Trump Swears Fealty to Deep State During Pink "CoRev"

Saturday was supposed to be a day for Mr. Trump to mend fences with the intelligence community, with an appearance at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va. While he was lavish in his praise, the president focused in his 15-minute speech on his complaints about news coverage of his criticism of the nation’s spy agencies, and meandered to other topics, including the crowd size at his inauguration, his level of political support, his mental age and his intellectual heft.

“I just want to let you know, I am so behind you,” Mr. Trump told more than 300 employees assembled in the lobby for his remarks.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has questioned the intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia meddled in the United States election on his behalf. After the disclosure of a dossier with unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Trump, he accused the intelligence community of allowing the leak and wrote on Twitter, “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

On Saturday, he said journalists were responsible for any suggestion that he was not fully supportive of intelligence agencies’ work.

“I have a running war with the media,” Mr. Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”

“The reason you’re the No. 1 stop [CIA HQ in Langley] is, it is exactly the opposite,” Mr. Trump added. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.”

That's from "With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift," by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Matthew Rosenberg. Much of the story is taken up with competing claims about the size of Trump's inaugural crowd versus Obama's (both 2009 and 2013). It is also being reported that "The women’s march in Washington was roughly three times the size of the audience at President Trump’s inauguration, crowd counting experts said Saturday." (See
"Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March in Washington Had 3 Times More People Than Trump’s Inauguration," by Tim Wallace and Alice Parlapiano.)

I count no less than six stories in Sunday's New York Times devoted to yesterday's women's march. Turnout is estimated to have been approximately half a million in Washington D.C. and 400,000 in New York City. Not bad.

The women's march had its colorful symbol (a pink hat), and it had it's own Shepherd Fairey poster of a woman wearing Old Glory as a hijab:

In other words, the women's march had all the makings for a domestic color revolution: robust numbers of regular citizens, fetching symbols, a supple propaganda apparatus, all in opposition to a bloated billionaire megalomaniac. What was missing was a provocative act of violence, like the Maidan snipers or the pepper-spray storm that kicked off the Umbrella Revolution.

I don't think the intention here was to send Trump and Melania fleeing from the nation's capital. I think the goal was to put Trump on notice that if he doesn't kneel to the Deep State the color revolution machinery can be fired up again easily; and the next time, protesters likely will have plans for civil disobedience. That was the great failing of the huge protests in the run up to the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- leadership did not or could not ratchet up marches to mass civil disobedience. With Moral Mondays an established part of the bourgeois protest repertoire, I think it will be much easier now to mobilize mass civil disobedience if and when it is needed.