David Brooks Relishes Soft Coup Underway

Part of an op-ed page that was strewn with demands for an independent counsel to investigate the Trump administration for treason, David Brooks' column yesterday, "What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like," explicitly acknowledges what is commonly accepted on the various websites branded as Fake News portals by the ludicrous PropOrNot, that the permanent government, the deep state, is engaged in a campaign of across-the-board sabotage of Donald Trump's presidency. If anyone should know it is David Brooks. He is a paragon of the governing elite.

As Brooks notes,

The Civil Service has a thousand ways to ignore or sit on any presidential order. The court system has given itself carte blanche to overturn any Trump initiative, even on the flimsiest legal grounds. The intelligence community has only just begun to undermine this president. 

President Trump can push all the pretty buttons on the command deck of the Starship Enterprise, but don’t expect anything to actually happen, because they are not attached.

But as Brooks points out:

Everything about Trump that appalls 65 percent of America strengthens him with the other 35 percent, and he can ride that group for a while. Even after these horrible four weeks, Republicans on Capitol Hill are not close to abandoning their man. 

The likelihood is this: We’re going to have an administration that has morally and politically collapsed, without actually going away.

In many ways this is exactly what is called for. The United States is a brigand that destroys states; that is all it can do at this point. It answers to the oil-rich despotic Arab sheikhdoms, the Likudniks in apartheid Israel, and the insulated, brittle governing neoliberal elites ensconced in Western capitals. It is morally bankrupt and survives by purveying lies, like "Russian aggression in the Crimea." The United States needs a reboot, a thorough overhaul, a revolution. Barring that, it needs to collapse -- for the greater health of the planet.