Donald Trump Archives - Page 2 of 3

Our Alphabet Soup is Rotten

8 April 20203 May 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

Donald Trump’s threat to freeze World Health Organisation funding has sparked a flurry of press interest and comment from around the globe. Not surprisingly, these hot takes on the situation range from “orange man bad” on one side of the aisle to “4-D chess” on the other. In fact, neither of these knee-jerk responses teaches us anything useful as they miss a much bigger and far more revealing picture

Whatever you might think of the President’s current attitude to the WHO, taking a step back to gain a wider view shows that far from being some Trumpian outlier, questioning the legitimacy of the WHO is in fact part of a wider pattern of dissent. The sense of weariness, disenchantment and growing hostility towards the alphabet soup agencies entrusted to run international affairs with no direct democratic mandate is now palpable, especially here in the West. Everywhere we look, nationalism is on the rise as once unimpeachable institutions are revealed to be rotten with corruption, incompetence and shameless self-interest.

This shouldn’t be surprising really, as Oscar Wilde pithily pointed out how bureaucracies primarily exist to meet their own needs and only secondly to execute the functions they were designed to carry out.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look.

Modern Heretics

Brandon Straka – Modern Heretic

23 July 201930 April 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

Brandon Straka has become something of a living meme since the US election of 2016. Like many Democrat voters and avid Clinton supporters, Straka was not only disappointed at the election result; he was also bewildered, angry and afraid. As an openly gay man, Straka was convinced that the US had taken a sharp turn towards state sponsored oppression and bigotry. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he believed that he was in great danger following the 2016 electoral upset.

Prior to the election, Straka was pretty much a run-of the mill, box ticking American liberal, and it was those professed values of inclusivity and compassion that led to his now famous #WalkAway journey. Although he was doing the usual crying and condemning on social media following the Trumpocalypse, Straka possessed enough self-awareness to realise he must’ve missed something really big to be so badly blind-sided by Clinton’s defeat.

So began his quest to understand why millions of ordinary Americans had voted for a man the mainstream media had declared officially off limits due to his racism, bigotry, misogyny and stupidity. What was happening? Were all these voters just dumb, easily fooled, or were they all just secret racists?

Media

The US Media are Acme’s best Customers

3 February 20191 May 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

You’ve gotta hand it to the Yanks. They make the best cartoons by miles.

Over the past couple of years the American mainstream media has unwittingly produced an endless stream of hilarity, setting new standards for schemes involving ludicrously unlikely devices of destruction.

The first ground-breaking classic was the unprecedented hostile campaign the Democrat establishment and their media allies catapulted at Donald J Trump while he rallied his way towards the White House. In time-honoured tradition, that impossibly heavy mass of hysterical hyperbole completely missed its target, rebounded off a sceptical public and crushed the cable networks with a resounding crunch. Trump was elected President while the media’s already dubious reputation was squashed flatter than a cartoon cat beneath a falling anvil. Thud!

Never the sort to let physics or practicality stand in their way, the US establishment tried again with its increasingly desperate and derided Russian collusion hoax, but that unstoppable snowball of scandal simply melted away as it rolled down from the top of the mountain, reduced to nothing more than a grubby ice cube in a small puddle. Splosh!

US Politics

The Democrats’ New Coke Calamity

7 October 20181 May 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

That angry wailing noise emanating from Washington right now is actually the sound of the slow, painful and undignified death of the Democratic Party and everything it has come to represent in recent years. That’s a pretty bold statement I’ll admit, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that history will remember the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh as the DNC’s very own New Coke moment.

For those who aren’t familiar with the phrase, the New Coke analogy is often mentioned in both business and political circles. It originates from Coca-Cola’s calamitous, damaging and completely unnecessary re-branding exercise in 1985, when one of the strongest and most iconic brands on planet Earth decided to ditch the very formula which had made it into such a global phenomenon in the first place. Predictably, it wasn’t long before the Coca-Cola board and their overpaid marketing people were scratching their heads as to how an indestructible brand was very nearly destroyed. Ironically, the only thing that saved Coca-Cola was reverting to the tried and tested and well-liked recipe of the past. Alas, the New Coke debacle is a political lesson that the DNC seems hell-bent on ignoring.

We are now witnessing Coca-Cola’s once toxic combination of hubris and panic being replicated in today’s marketplace of ideas. It’s this lack of either perspective or principle which has led a seemingly intelligent group of people to throw their considerable weight behind a brazen, desperate and completely unconscionable attempt to defame a thoughtful, decent and boringly honourable man as some kind of serial sex offender.

Media

Print Propaganda 101

3 February 20185 May 2020 - by Charles Naton - Leave a Comment

So it’s finally happened. With the DOJ, FBI and committee Democrats holding out until the eleventh hour, the controversial FISA memo has at last been revealed in all its Machiavellian splendour. You can click this link to read the original document should you wish.

Predictably, the spin masters in the paid-for corporate media are working overtime to downplay, minimise, ridicule and dismiss this official document as a nothingburger, after giving huge amounts of free airtime to those dedicated to preventing its publication in the first place.

It’s been especially instructive to see how the mainstream media is operating right now, with any pretence of objectivity or even reasoned opinion suddenly swamped by a surge of increasingly blatant and desperate propaganda pieces. There is no better illustration than an opinion piece by Walter Shapiro for the Guardian. It’s a classic by-the-numbers propaganda device designed to frame anyone who pays even the slightest attention to this recently de-classified document as some kind of swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist.

Let’s unpack just some of the propaganda contained within.