Paul Craig Roberts: Trump Is Over

[Douglas Caddy]

 

[Douglas Caddy]

This is a great interview. I should add that its only fault is that Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was one of Trump's biggest supporters in the presidential election and only now is recognizing what those of us foresaw starting with Trump's acceptance speech of the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention last July.

We are closer to a world nuclear war that ever before because the U.S. now faces a nuclear armed Russia and a nuclear armed China. In 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis the only two powers were the U.S. and Russia. China slumbered until Nixon awoke it in 1972.

[Kirk Gallaway]

I wasn't familiar with this guy. I want to call him,  Paul Craig Robert & Ringo.

 

Doug, I know you're just providing different viewpoints of the current Trump Presidency. However, It is hard to reconcile the last 2 posts. On one we have an article stating that there is a smoking gun, a tape Intelligence has obtained where the President assures the lifting of sanctions to the Russians for Putin's help in influencing the election. I'm a bit skeptical, but if such a tape really exists, it is a death knell for the Trump Presidency. In this age I don't see any way that that tape won't eventually be released or leaked.

Then we have Roberts  saying that Trump has given in to the Neocons, and has abdicated his foreign powers and in the future he will do their deep state agenda which is to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on both Russia and China to foment"American Hegemony" across the globe!

 

When Doug posted this, I was very curious upon reading about a person who supported Trump has now felt Trump betrayed him, as I've noticed in polls that there isn't much defection from the  Trump voting minority, which I see is due to wishful thinking and an ignorance of political matters in general.Where I agree with  Roberts is 1)Trump has economically betrayed the 'forgotten" voters in the rust belt who have put him in office, and 2)now pursues a more strident, more interventionist foreign policy. and 3) I think  Assad's alleged chemical attack is very ill timed and stupid. I can't see any good reason for him to do that and take a chance of provoking  a U.S. intervention. I agree with him  that it could be a false flag operation. Of course he says with great surety that the U.S. and it's European allies are behind it, not Isis, or some other terrorist group. How can he really know that?

 

But then he hedges the central issue. While he loves Putin, and thinks he's the only world leader telling the truth. He  just mentions in passing the investigation of Trump collusion with the Russians concerning the election. And although he's claiming that neocons have usurped power from Trump, he stops short of declaring that these same neocon "deep state" forces are actually behind it and are unjustly framing Trump in the Russian Hack Scandal. But like so many others, he's seems unable to in any way consider that Trump's problems are result of his own doing. He gets in office and he calls the very same intelligence people that he will have to rely on to send our troops into battle "Nazi's"?  Does he really expect them to like him? Everyday he behaves like a bull in a China closet. I voted for Bernie in the primary. I'd like to see us go into a completely different direction also, but after 3 months of national embarrassment, why would any sane person really want to bank that change on Donald Trump? There are a lot of people outside of some dark, shadowy conspiracy who think Trump has shown to be not fit for office and dread the possibility of Trump pulling us into an international altercation to just take a chance in boosting his dismal ratings.And we're not being duped by the media. We just observe the words and actions of the guy before our eyes!

 

Curiously Roberts calls every President since Pappa Bush a "neocon". Papa Bush was a spy, for Chrissaske! Roberts was part of the Reagan administration, yet he wasn't suspect of Papa Bush in the Iran Contra Scandal? As a President, he had the most interventionist foreign policy of any President since!

 

It's curious how the phrase "neocon" is being used by other conservative groups  more than the liberals use it! But after all "neocon" really just means "new conservative" and yet  a lot of true neocon factions are using it to depict this group of war mongering international American hegemonists. I assume that's because some of them would sooner be thought of as Alt Right, and run away from any reference to traditional "conservatives,"and are very isolationist.

 

One huge contradiction is that he calls Obama another "neocon" and while he sees Trumps bombing in Syria as "illegal" and cites it as evidence that Trump has completely caved to the neocons. He completely ignores that Obama was faced with a chemical attack that was 30 times greater in his own administration, and while he did make his "red line" threat then backed down and chose to ask Congress, who didn't back him and was criticized for weakness and indecision. But the truth according to Roberts, is Obama, like Trump  was baited by the same neocons (who he says instigated the chemical attack) and looked indecisive but in the final analysis, did not take the bait! Yet he refers to Obama as another neocon! Well, if now both Trump and Obama are  neocons and could react so differently than how compelling are the neocons really on foreign policy?