President Donald Trump is playing his old trick of saying something outrageous, such as blaming the Washington DC air disaster on diversity policy, in a bid to dominate the news agenda and shift attention to an issue that plays to his political advantage.
In reality, Trump is referring to limited and not very successful anti-discrimination measures which have seen the proportion of white air traffic controllers fall from 79 per cent in 2020 to 73 per cent in 2022.
Air industry experts say that the main force driving more wide-ranging recruitment is a shortage of staff, something that may explain why there was reportedly only one air traffic controller on duty at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport when the crash occurred.
As in the past, it is the pettiness, meanness and mendacity of Trump that is shocking. But the grotesque nature of the man raises more important questions about how far his open liking for authoritarian government will slide into an American version of fascism. How far will his purging of opponents from government agencies degrade or cripple them?
Lethal instability
As wars boil in Ukraine and the Middle East, will Trump’s mercurial approach inject a further dose of lethal instability into these savage conflicts?
The extent to which Trump and his Maga Republicans are fascists is much debated, and there are certainly parallels to be drawn with fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet European fascism a century ago was primarily the product of the First World War, the threat of Communism and the Great Depression.
Conditions are very different today, but fascism past and present is not confined to Europe. For all Trump’s bombastic contempt for Latin America, he more closely resembles populist nationalist rulers in Brazil, Argentina and Peru, to name but three, than he does Hitler or Mussolini.
In his first term, Trump’s anti-democratic onslaught was blunted by his incompetence and inability to get a controlling grip on the levers of state power. He does not intend to let this happen again: witness his vindictive assault on General Mark Milley, previously chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Trump, who said at his retirement ceremony in 2023 that US soldiers took their oath to the constitution and not to “a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take our oath to a wannabe dictator”.
No plans for retribution
Earlier, Milley had enraged the White House by publicly apologising for accompanying Trump to a photo op near the White House where the authorities had used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters. Milley had also contacted his Chinese counterparts to reassure them that the US was not bent on war with China.
In retaliation for Milley’s opposition, Trump’s newly appointed defence secretary Pete Hegseth has removed his security detail, revoked his security clearance, and instructed an inspector general to inquire into his record. At the time of Milley’s retirement, Trump said he had committed treason and should be put to death.
Dr Anthony Fauci, who led the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but was criticised by many Republicans, lost his government security detail just as FBI director designate, Kash Patel, was telling the Senate confirmation hearings that he had no plans for retribution against agents seen as unsupportive of the new regime in the White House.
Comparisons with the Nazis are often exaggerated or misleading, but there are instructive parallels between Hitler becoming German Chancellor on 30 January 1933 and purging his opponents inside and outside his party in “the Night of the Long Knives”, 18 months later on 30 June 1934.
‘Rogues gallery’
Trump’s procedure for securing full power may be less sanguinary than in Berlin 90 years ago, but the objective is the same. Rulers determined to demolish opposition to their authority seldom stop halfway and, once the outright opponents are eliminated, they turn on those showing less than total obedience.
This may already be happening as people like former super-hawk Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, are targeted. For Trump, only fawning loyalty is acceptable. The line-up at the top of the US government – “rogues gallery” might be a better phrase – brings together an extraordinary collection of careerists and crackpots.
I have a personal interest in the confirmation hearings of Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK) as Secretary of Health and Human Services, an agency with a budget of $1.7trn (£1.36trn) which oversees Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.
This is because RFK is best known for his scepticism about vaccination. I caught polio in Cork, Ireland, in 1956, because I just missed out on receiving the newly-discovered vaccine that was beginning to be rolled out in the US.
There was a great campaign to get everybody vaccinated in the country. Elvis Presley got vaccinated live on television. Stopping polio was perhaps the greatest achievement of the US in the 20th century.
Angry senators
A couple of years later my father, Claud Cockburn, was diagnosed with tuberculosis, against which he had also not been vaccinated, but which used to ravage Ireland even more than the UK.
Once the tuberculosis vaccine was in full use, the illness became a rarity. In response to aggressive questions from Senators, not all of them Democrats, RFK backtracked on his past opposition to all vaccinations, saying that he simply wanted scientific proof of their safety and effectiveness.
Angry Senators quoted his past statements opposing vaccines and asked if he was lying then or now. He admitted that “I probably did say, Lyme disease is ‘highly likely a militarily engineered bioweapon’”. Senator Bernie Sanders showed a picture of baby clothes with the words “No Vax, No Problem” printed in large letters which are sold by the Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit that RFK founded.
RFK may not end up confirmed, in part because of his anti-vaccination stance, but also because he is pro-abortion and hostile to the big pharmaceutical companies.
Wishful thinking and make-believe
The Senate has already confirmed an even more ludicrous nominee, Pete Hegseth, as Secretary for Defence, overseeing a budget of $850bn (£682bn) and an organisation of 3.4 million people.
This was despite a devastating 33-page letter from Senator Elizabeth Warren, listing his failings, which include “mismanagement of two non-profit organisations you ran, accusations of sexual assault and drinking problems”.
Hegseth’s unsuitability to run anything, not to mention the US armed forces, jumps off every page.
I used to comfort myself by believing that the incompetence of Trump’s administration might hamper its capacity to do evil. Now I am not so sure. People who lie all the time live in a world of wishful thinking and make-believe. When Trump had to handle a real crisis, as opposed to one he has concocted, like the Covid-19 pandemic, he was a disaster.
Suppose he has to handle another crisis involving nuclear weapons –would he and his deranged appointees do any better than they did then?
Further Thoughts
I wrote a column last week saying that Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves ominously resemble former President Joe Biden in their inability to communicate their policies convincingly to the public. This makes them particularly vulnerable to demagogic attacks from the populist nationalist right to which they appear unable to respond effectively. A reason for this may simply be that decent, serious people, who want to do good, are not instinctively good at counter-demagoguery.
An important reason why Starmer and Reeves are such easy meat is that they cannot raise taxes, after the commitments they made during the general election campaign, or borrow more expensive money. Hence their endless talk about “growth”, and headline-grabbing promises about a third runway at Heathrow and our very own Silicon Valley between Oxford and Cambridge. As with HS2 after the 2008 economic crisis, gargantuan projects are given the go-ahead to create optimistic mood music and offer proof that the British economy is not entirely moribund.
The problem is that the economy is dead in the water, for reasons stretching back to de-industrialisation and privatisation in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher. It will be extremely difficult to reverse the UK’s relative decline until the overall international economic climate improves.
As Ronald Heifetz said in Leadership Without Easy Answers, the art of political leadership is “to disappoint followers at a rate they can stand”. Starmer and Reeves are not good at this.
Below the Radar
The CIA has long said that it was undecided about whether or not the Covid-19 pandemic had originated from a fresh meat and produce market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak from a research laboratory in the same city.
But the CIA issued a new study last week, commissioned in the last days of the Biden administration but released by the new Trump-appointed director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, that favours the belief that the virus came from the Wuhan laboratory carrying out civilian and military work.
The implication is that the Chinese scientists may have been studying the virus as a potential biological weapon when it escaped. As a China hawk, Ratcliffe previously claimed that the CIA knew more about the emergence of the virus than it had admitted in order not to fuel a crisis in US-China relations. Some 104 million Americans caught the virus and 1.1 million died because of it.
I have a natural disinclination to believe anything said by a Trump appointee, but an extraordinary scoop in Seymour Hersh’s Substack just published reveals that “a US intelligence asset at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where the Covid virus was first observed, is safe and out of danger. The asset, highly regarded within the CIA, was recruited while in graduate school in the United States and provided early warning [in 2019] of a laboratory accident at Wuhan that led to a series of infections that were quickly spreading and initially seemed immune to treatment”.
As is once again the case in Washington today, senior US officials back in 2019 did not want to tell President Trump about the threat because they knew he would not want to hear bad news about anything, and particularly not about an impending epidemic in the US that would capsize the economy in the run-up to the presidential election in November 2020.
Hersh says that early studies dealing with “how to mitigate the oncoming plague, based on information from the Chinese health ministry about the lethal new virus, were completed late in 2019 by experts from America’s National Institutes of Health and other research agencies. Despite their warnings, a series of preventative actions were not taken until the United States was flooded with cases of the virus”.
Measures that could have been taken include greater protection for the elderly, particularly those in care homes, as well as for the poor – notably black people and Hispanics – living in cramped accommodation.
It is not a surprise that the CIA were able to recruit a Chinese virologist in Wuhan since so many Chinese earned their doctorates in the US (in 2019 there were 372,000 Chinese students studying in the country). Before Christmas 2019, the CIA and the medical and scientific bureaucracy had put together a lengthy report on the potential danger of the epidemic. Even so, Trump and his senior officials failed to act in time, though they knew almost as much as the Chinese who had immediately started mitigation measures.
Cockburn’s Pick
For a merciless but amusing account of why Pete Hegseth should not have been confirmed as US Defence Secretary, read this 33-page letter from Senator Warren detailing his appalling track record.
翻译：
This Labour Government is about to get a whole lot more Tory