What’s Worse: Trump’s Campaign Agenda or Empowering Generals and CIA Operatives to Subvert it? https://t.co/cZJNSTn6CS — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 5, 2017

My second question – after Am I really going to read this thing? – was How is tRump’s campaign agenda relevant to what’s happening now? Then, because the byline wasn’t clue and warning enough, I started to read.

For those who can’t stand suspense: Greenwald is clumsily courting Breitbartians.

For those of you who wish to play it the hard way, this may be worse than standing upside down with your head in a bucket of piranha fish:

In the beginning, The Elite hated Trump. But He was Duly Elected by The People. Therefore, True Liberals should not be happy that The Deep State is opposing him in secret, sneaky deep state-y ways. Like being appointed to positions in his cabinet.

DURING HIS SUCCESSFUL 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, for better and for worse, advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus. As a result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with their sprawling network of agencies, think tanks, financial policy organs, and media outlets used to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.).

My God. He ‘s one white board and pack of erasable markers from Full Glenn Beckhood, and this is only the lede.

Whatever else there is to say about Trump,

At least it’s an ethos!

it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions,

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Hang on, I’ll start again.

Whatever else there is to say about Trump, it is simply a fact that the 2016 election saw elite circles in the U.S., with very few exceptions, lining up with remarkable fervor behind his Democratic opponent.

Also droves of ordinary people. About 3 million of them. But they don’t count to anti-elitists like Greenwald.

Top CIA officials openly declared war on Trump in the nation’s op-ed pages and one of their operatives (now an MSNBC favorite) was tasked with stopping him in Utah, while Time Magazine reported, just a week before the election, that “the banking industry has supported Clinton with buckets of cash . . . . what bankers most like about Clinton is that she is not Donald Trump.”

Intelligence officials’ dark forebodings about Putin’s Pal sure seem overblown.

As for bankers’ preferences before the election, the Time article Greenwald cites contains this sentence:

Many financiers fear her unorthodox Republican rival could disrupt global trade, damage geopolitical relationships and rattle markets, industry analysts and participants say.

Imagine that.

Greenwald later admits that the self-proclaimed multi-billionaire hasn’t been hostile to Big Money. However, anyone who thought Trump the Outsider’s campaign agenda would be his real agenda is a big dummy, because he’s a politician.

It is true that Trump, being Trump, was wildly inconsistent in virtually all of these pronouncements, often contradicting or abandoning them weeks after he made them. And, as many of us pointed out at the time, it was foolish to assume that the campaign vows of any politician, let alone an adept con man like Trump, would be a reliable barometer for what he would do once in office. And, as expected, he has betrayed many of these promises within months of being inaugurated, while the very Wall Street interests he railed against have found a very welcoming embrace in the Oval Office.

At this point the reader may assume that the campaign promises are completely irrelevant and again wonder why they are mentioned in the headline. The reader would be wrong. Wronger than the people who believed the Groper-in-Chief would stick to his campaign promises.

The CIA and Wall Street and think tanks like AEI and Think Progress and the rest of The Elite are the biggest dummies of all; they didn’t know he wouldn’t stick to his promises. Instead, they looked at the erratic loudmouth with the brains of a shrimp who is covered in a thick layer of slime and got all concerned that a president who is an erratic loudmouth with the brains of a shrimp who is covered in a thick layer of slime might upset their apple carts. The big babies.

Nonetheless, Trump, as a matter of rhetoric, repeatedly affirmed policy positions that were directly contrary to long-standing bipartisan orthodoxy, and his policy and personal instability only compounded elites’ fears that he could not be relied upon to safeguard their lucrative, power-vesting agenda. In so many ways – due to his campaign positions, his outsider status, his unstable personality, his witting and unwitting unmasking of the truth of U.S. hegemony, the embarrassment he causes in western capitals, his reckless unpredictability – Trump posed a threat to their power centers.

According to Greenwald, they’re still mad, bro.

But at the very least, Trump’s campaign assaults on their most sacred pieties was, and remains, a major factor in their seething contempt for him.

Sure, everyone’s predictions that the Gilded Goon would be a fucking disaster as president are coming true, but in the case of The Elite it’s mostly a grudge about things he said – but did not mean – before he was elected.

The latest evidence that tRump’s pretend agenda is being subverted by the CIA and the military and Tippecanoe and Tyler too, is none other than new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Kelly cunningly made his way from Department of Homeland Security to the White House and conducted a one-man purge of one man.

Then there’s H.R. McMaster. He recently fired an entire brace of people appointed by Michael Flynn. His deputy fired a third man who had published a memo about globalists and Islamists and Maoists.

That was bad because those people still believed in the Unpresident’s campaign agenda. Which is still relevant. Even though he was lying. Because it is still the agenda of unelected officials like Steve Bannon therefore it is dirty pool for unelected officials like McMaster to do anything that might undermine it.

As the Atlantic’s Rosie Gray reports, McMaster has successfully fired several national security officials aligned with Steve Bannon and the nationalistic, purportedly non-interventionist foreign policy and anti-Muslim worldview Trump advocated throughout the election.

Enacting Islamophobic policies is the one promise Trump has kept, but for some reason Greenwald skitters away from that fact. Perhaps he’d lost track of what the hell he was talking about.