Fight or flight

Donald Trump is in the ascendancy after the assassination attempt on him – whether he will really take on the security establishment as president is another matter.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” or would you rather ‘Stay safe!’? With a great deal of luck and a keen sense of effect, Donald Trump has staged himself as a fighter who can't even be harmed by a bullet from a precision rifle. Most analysts now see him on the road to victory towards a second presidential term. The mentally no longer quite present Joe Biden no longer seems to have what it takes to hold a candle to the hero from Pennsylvania. But what happens then? His most dangerous fight could still be ahead of him, the man hardened in the battle. The US security apparatus, together with the arms industry, forms a shadow government that may not allow the old-new president to thwart its plans with too much love of peace. Donald Trump could adapt and spend a few quiet years in the Oval Office – or he could do what he suggests: fight against the “apparatus” and fire everyone who is not on his line. Then, however, no one could rule out the possibility that the next bullet fired at him would hit him better.
by Craig Murray

[This article posted on 7/19/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/kampf-oder-flucht.]

Six months ago, I told a well-known public figure that the US intelligence community had destroyed Trump's first presidency and that if he were to be given a second chance, he should fire their entire leadership or simply allow them to run the country while he focused on making money for himself.

My interlocutor replied that we had recently learned from Tucker Carlson that Trump was well aware of the danger of assassination by the secret services. So Trump would probably opt for the second option – the latter a thought of my interlocutor and not of Tucker Carlson.

I am not saying that the secret services are responsible for the assassination attempt at the weekend. I don't know that. However, I wonder what thoughts are going through Trump's mind about his near-death experience.

I tried to calculate, by the way, by what fraction of a degree the rifle was misaligned so that it missed his brain by about 2.5 centimeters from a distance of almost 110 meters. My mathematical skills were not sufficient for this, but it is the margin of a tiny tremor of the hand on the trigger.

I think it is safe to assume that Trump wondered whether the state actors coordinating his security did not cause the security breach, at least in part, through a lack of zeal and enthusiasm.

This is not a criticism of Trump's immediate bodyguards, who behaved commendably. To be fair, it must also be pointed out that Trump's own defiance was courageous. He could not have known whether there were any other shooters nearby, or how seriously he had actually been injured.

This personal attitude certainly increased his chances of being elected – and what's more, through a strange political alchemy that has little to do with logic, it now seems to be a generally accepted wisdom that this event makes it much more difficult for the Democrats to demand Biden's resignation.

In his White House address, Biden did not confuse Trump with Frank Sinatra; he also did not forget why he was there in the first place. It is claimed that (the address) restored his position. Nevertheless, it was a typical Biden performance: dismissive and partisan, especially in the repetition of his January 6 narrative, as if this were a serious threat to democracy, not an idiotic, isolated insurrection.

The fact that democracy in the United States is a farce is evident from the fact that voters have the choice between two incredibly flawed individuals. You couldn't make up a scenario like this.

If you put Donald Trump and Joe Biden in a random yoga class in Oklahoma, neither Trump nor Biden would be the person best suited to be president of the United States.

In one respect, however, US democracy is more vibrant than in the UK. In the latter, the establishment has chosen the politician they wanted in Keir Starmer, arguing with the Tories only on issues of competence.

In the United States, the establishment is worried that Trump's isolationist tendencies and lack of enthusiasm for starting wars could dry up the military-industrial complex's perpetual flow of fast money.

In particular, Trump sees both China and Russia as potential trading partners for mutual financial benefit. He does not primarily view them as a military threat.

In short, Trump does not buy into the propaganda narrative that requires certain enemies in order to justify massive defense spending and the continuous succession of invasions into other countries.

This is not an ideological rejection of war on Trump's part. It is simply that Trump, like China, recognizes that trade, finance, investment and soft power ultimately prove to be much more lucrative than the classic Western imperialist model of armed conquest.

Trump's problem is that the powerful interest groups that make money from the Western imperialist model include the intelligence agencies. That is why they have so unscrupulously undermined his first presidency.
We have seen the complete and utter nonsense of the “Russiagate” hoax, which I have written about extensively – but the simple fact remains that there was never any evidence whatsoever that Russia was involved in the leaking of the DNC, Clinton or Podesta emails.
We saw Trump's national security advisor, General Michael Flynn, get booted out of office for talking to the Russian ambassador, which turned out to be perfectly correct when it was finally released. We saw Roger Stone get arrested for lying to the FBI, which claimed he had connections to WikiLeaks that he did not. The media shamefully failed to correct this.
We saw the Guardian's famously vicious front page claiming that there had been meetings between Manafort and Assange that never took place.

To top it all off, there was the CIA-coordinated fabrication of the revelations from Hunter Biden's laptop two weeks before the 2020 election.

That this laptop, which everyone involved knew was real, was declared fake was perhaps the most significant example of fake news in world history. This lie narrative was coordinated by intelligence agencies and mainstream media worldwide and undoubtedly influenced the election outcome.
More importantly, both Facebook and Twitter cooperated to suppress the stories around Hunter Biden's laptop and reinforce the narrative that the laptop was fake. So the perfect alliance of intelligence agencies, state and commercial media, and commercial gatekeepers of alternative media worked together to spread a lie that would ensure Biden's election.

It says something about the world we live in that the most important and successful fake news in history was created by those who claim to be the judges of what is and is not fake news.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this article. What will Donald do about this when he returns to power?

I think Donald Trump is right to fear that he may be assassinated by his own security services if he negotiates a reasonable solution to the Ukraine war, rather than maintaining the multi-trillion-dollar bonanza of weapons, death and high energy prices that the war is now.

For Trump to truly govern the United States, it would require an unprecedented purge of the Clinton-era leadership throughout the security establishment, much deeper than a normal change of government. I think Trump has always been aware of this, but has considered it impractical to “drain the swamp.”

With the ailing Biden, it is obvious to everyone that he is not really in charge of anything. I predict that if we get a Trump administration, Trump will not really be in charge either, but will be content with an easy life while letting the establishment continue to run the country.

When Peter Cook founded the Establishment Club, no one mocked him by saying, “What a silly conspiracy theorist, there is no such thing as the Establishment.” I prefer that word to the term Deep State. It is the same thing, though.
Editorial note: This text was first published under the title “Assassination And Trump's Mentality”. It was translated by Gabriele Herb on a voluntary basis and edited by the volunteer Manova proofreading team.

Craig Murray, born in 1958, is a former British diplomat and now works as a human rights activist and blogger. He became known when, during his time as ambassador to Uzbekistan, he repeatedly criticized the Karimov regime there for its human rights violations. For more information, visit www.craigmurray.org.uk.

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