Reflections on President Donald J. Trump

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   Because of my discussion of Deep State matters, exposure I hope is going to be verified and carried further by legitimate federal authorities someday soon, there are those asking me what my attitude is towards President Donald J. Trump. I have publicly revealed that I did not vote for him. However, my attitude towards him and how it plays into recent actions I took are fair and legitimate questions. I will give the Bottom Line Up Front of my analysis:

BLUF: Nowhere does my copy of the Constitution say, “…unless Trump.” There are a lot of people these days whose copies of the Constitution apparently do say, “… unless Trump.” But mine does not. I promise, I checked. I went all through it and did not find the phrase “… unless Trump” anywhere in it. That’s my full and thorough analysis of the moment. That is why I came forward.

While that is my analysis, there is still a legitimate question of what my attitude is towards Donald Trump. The main thing to know about my attitude towards President Trump is that it precisely 0 to do with my actions. That said, it is indeed a fair question, and one to which I will respond.

Before the 2016 election, when I was asked about Donald Trump, my general response began this way: Because I intended to say some critical things, I will start by saying two nice things. I would like to start the same way now, with two nice things, before I go further.

1)_In 1985 my father left GEICO for a new job, one that would keep him in New York. About 10 days after he did so, I was diagnosed with advanced cancer (I had presented when my organs began shutting down), and would go on to spend 21 of the following 30 months in-patient in hospitals. To be near my parents we chose for primary treatment a wonderful hospital in Manhattan that saved my life: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. My parents moved around among corporate apartments in New York those several years, so that I would be near my primary care-giver (my Mom). For ≈5 of those months (perhaps December 1986 – Spring 1986?), they stayed in a two-bedroom corporate apartment in Trump Tower, which had opened only a couple of years previously. When for a few days or a week I was furloughed from the hospital I would stay with them in Trump Tower, going in and out of the residence entrance in a wheelchair, and sometimes just being wheeled out a few yards to get a breath of fresh air.

During those days from time to time I became vaguely aware of a lad whom I saw coming in and out through the same entrance, backpack over one shoulder. My mother whispered to me was Donald Trump’s son. I remember him as being ≈ 10-14 years younger than I (perhaps 10-13?). The doormen were two large Black gentlemen in heavy overcoats. I observed that the lad was always exceedingly polite and well-mannered, not only to whomever was in the lobby (including myself), but especially, to the two gentlemen at the door. He always greeted them by name, “Mr. _____” and “Mr. ______”. They asked him about school, he asked them about sports and their families and such. He seemed to have a sincere and deferential attitude towards them, and theyaa genuinely avuncular attitude towards him. He had none of the brattiness or “to-the-manor-born” attitude that one might have expected in the child of a man who was on the cover of magazines and whose skyscraper bore his name.

One time, after the lad had passed through the lobby and gone up the elevator, the doormen and I caught eyes. I raised an eyebrow with respect. One of them nodded gently and quietly said to my mother and me, “Oh yes, he’s a fine young man.” I remember thinking that it said that there might be more to the lad’s father than I was gathering from the tabloids.  My mom and I spoke of this several times over the years. Since Trump’s political ascendancy I have deliberately avoided googling his family and figuring out which of his children it was.

2) In 2005 I began to understand how the financial Establishment was looting the savings of America. I tried to expose it, and discovered that the institutions that should have been interested were either disinterested or adversarial. Exploring that subject gave birth to Deep Capture. Readers of this website will remember the stories from back then, how yellow was the journalism, how “NPC” was the babble through which I had to cut, so it does not bear repeating.

One exception came from Bloomberg News. In 2006-2007, a producer there named “Gary Matsumoto” developed a half-hour documentary about me and my claims, called “Phantom Shares”. For months after its completion it faced opposition from within the Bloomberg News hierarchy, which refused to run it. I came across Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a Washington, DC cocktail reception, and brought the subject up. To his great credit Mayor Bloomberg whipped a note-card and pen out of his pocket and took some notes on what I told him. Weeks later it ran on Bloomberg. It was nominated for but did not win an Emmy (Gary told me once that his great regret was he had complied with a request to cut the opening seconds, a clip of the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up and a voice-over pointing out that the failure of such a large system had been brought about by the failure of one innocuous component in it, and that a man in Utah was claiming that the same thing was going to happen to the US financial system due to the arcane process of “settlement”, precisely as in October, 2008 Dr. Greenspan would confirm had happened).

The only other exception was Trump Magazine, which ran a story at roughly the same time (I think it may actually have been in that doldrum of several months between Matsumoto finishing “Phantom Shares” and Bloomberg News running it). Trump Magazine’s story about my claims regarding Wall Street was fair. It was not “favorable”, it did not say, “Byrne is right”, but it reported my claims in an accurate and straightforward way. That is to say, Trump Magazine practiced what used to be known as, “journalism.” And it did so while the entirety of the mainstream financial press corps was spewing NPC nonsense and remained doing so up until the summer of 2008, when all the yuck-yucks went silent. I have no idea whatsoever whether Donald J. Trump played any hand in the publication of that story.  But I know he has never been too close to Wall Street, nor a fan of it. Now that I have come to see more of him, it strikes me as plausible, however, that he did have a role. Yet, I wish to emphasize, I really have no evidence beyond what I just shared.

I have always wondered about something, though. The two earliest honest publications of my claims, without Chewbacca Defense spin, was accomplished by two press outlets controlled by wealthy, powerful men beyond the kinds of pressures that could be brought on normal publications and reporters: Bloomberg News and Trump Magazine. Does that tell us anything about our country?

In the months leading up to the 2016 election, when asked my thoughts about Donald J. trump, I never failed to begin by saying those two positive things before moving on to critiquing him. I am not sure they ever appeared, but I know they are there, somewhere in the footages. Now I shall move to a more critical appraisal.

 Aesthetics – I don’t share Mr. Trump’s taste. I once took an Oxford friend into Trump Tower and he burst out in peals of laughter, exclaiming, “This is a noveau riche nightmare!” In his stuffy English accent he continued in imitation, “I know, let’s throw some pink marble over there, and some chrome here, and splash some more pink marble around the walls!” He was right: it was gaudy. And it was made all the more gaudy by Mr. Trump’s public insistence on how “classy” it was. However, there was also something a bit charming about that, too, something quintessentially American. I have not been in the place for decades now, and do not know if it has changed.

More recently, however, I have been in the Trump Hotel in DC for meals (there is a superb sushi restaurant there). Whether Trump has better décor advisors, or his sensibilities have matured, it expresses a more tasteful aesthetic. His instincts have been somewhat classicized. It is still Trump-classicized, meaning it is still busier and glitzier than it should be, but the classical shows through.

 I am acquainted with a couple people in Trump’s circle, and with one I drew attention to this aesthetic. Interestingly, he responded that Trump’s taste is the taste of a poor person, and the taste poor people think rich people should display. I asked if Trump did that on purpose, self-consciously, as a way of connecting to poor people. His response: “No, that really is just Trump. He really does think that is tasteful and classy.”

 Candidacy – When Donald J. Trump came down that escalator in Trump Tower and said things about “Mexico sending us their rapists” and followed it up shortly thereafter with diminution of John McCain’s war record on the grounds that he had been shot down and was thus not a hero, I took everything named “Trump” off the Overstock website. There were only a dozen or so products, but I had them removed.

I did so, I wish to note, even though I sympathize with his concerns about illegal immigration. An old friend of mine lives in San Diego in a “Weeds”-type suburbia, and over two decades I have seen her neighborhood turn into one where one has to be cognizant of the true local power structure, and which homes belong to people who are “connected” and to whom neighbors must pay deference in as simple a matter as parking one’s car, just as one has to do in Third World neighborhoods lacking in rule-of-law. I am from New Hampshire, and as a poet there once said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Liberalism is about “consent of the governed,” and the last I checked in the USA, “the governed” had not consented to abandoning-without-evidence the Westphalian nation-state system which has served the world well for a few centuries.

John McCain and I once met and had an interesting conversation, but I was never a supporter. For one thing, McCain was the lone Republican among “the Keating Five”. Charles Keating ran and looted an S&L in Arizona, and whenever he needed to keep federal regulators at bay there were five US Senators he could call upon to run interference because he greased their palms with political donations: four were Democrats, but the Republican was John McCain. In addition, Senator McCain sponsored McCain-Feingold, a change in campaign financing laws that permitted unions to make unlimited political donations. It has been said he did this by way of apology to the Left in the hope of keeping alive his vaunted aspiration to run for president someday, and that it was something of a surprise to him that it was later upheld by the Supreme Court. Their decision to do so locked them later into the Citizens United decision so as to avoid a perverse outcome which said that unions could move unlimited cash into politics but corporations were prevented from doing so. For these two reasons I think McCain career as a Senator had a largely pernicious impact on the United States.

So if I have sympathies towards Mr. Trump’s concerns about controlling our own border, and his attitude towards John McCain, why would I take anything named “Trump” off the Overstock website in the first few weeks of his campaign for president? The answer seems obvious, but in today’s age one should not take anything principled as “obvious”. The reasons are: one should not disparage the military service of a man who spent 6+ years as a POW nor disparage him for having been “shot down” (especially when one received deferments to avoid military service). And one should bend over backwards to avoid tickling latent racist sentiments while discussing legislation, even over matters of legitimate concern. I am just old enough to remember the fight for civil rights of the 1960’s, and the social consensus that was reached by 1970 on that score was that politicians should never, ever seek get votes by tickling racial sentiments, even slightly. There are legitimate ways to raise one’s concern over illegal immigration without speaking like that.

Trump’s psychology – Trump is the son of a dominant alpha man. There is a way to understand much of Trump’s peculiar quirkiness when he speaks. His is the voice of a beleaguered 7 year old speaking to his father: “Dad, my buildings are the classiest, my glitz is the glitziest, my hands are the biggest, my marble is the most-iest…..”  I wish someone who knows him would give him a hug and say, “It’s OK, it’s OK. You are beyond having to do that anymore.”

Racism – I think that we live in an age that is racist (or “racialist”, to borrow an AliG-ism) and growing increasingly so.

Let me distinguish between “Archie-Bunker-racism” and “Klan-racism”. When I consider all the times in my lifetime I have heard a White say in private something that I might call, “Archie Bunker-racist,” or worse (say, “Klan-racist”), I think I can count them on one hand, perhaps two. A guy at a pool in Ocean City, Maryland in about 1981. A guy in a bike shop trueing the wheels on my Cannondale as I bicycled through Indiana in 1990 or so, who turned out to have a copy of “American Eagle” (the Klan’s magazine) on his workbench. About five years ago, in a reception I was attending in Indiana, a White woman some shitty things about Hispanics, Catholics, and gays. In sum, it just does not happen much in my experience. I understand that this may be a reflection of a skewed lifetime experience. I understand that behind closed doors in the South it is done, but I am a Yankee, so perhaps when I am in the South people keep it in check around me. Whatever the reason, that kind of bigotry is as rare as a comet in my life’s experience.

There is a different kind of racism, however, that is not only prevalent in our culture, it passes without comment. I will call this form of racism, “Lefty-racism.” I remember watching one of Hollywood’s Lethal Weapon movies in a theater with a Black friend, and an hour into the movie he jumped up and pulled me out, pointing out that while the Mel Gibson character had all kinds of depth, development, and history, the Danny Glover character had been running around for the whole movie shouting, “Riggs! Riggs! You crazy bastard, Riggs!”  About a decade ago I stopped watching Saturday Night Live, wondering, “Does anyone else notice that there is never a Black character who is just, ‘a character’? There is the Black transvestite spaceman, there is the outrageous Black TV host, there is the Black crackhead discussing politics…. But there is never just a normal Black person, even in skits with roles for people who are simply normal? What does this say about how New Yorkers see Black people?” In my experience the most virulent, toxic, and common form of racism today was described in an insightful phrase uttered by George W. Bush (and would be better remembered had it been uttered by anyone else), “the soft bigotry of low expectations”: I have sat in academic environments and heard things said that shocked me to my toes, uttered by well-intentioned but bigoted Lefties, unaware of and uncritical towards the background assumptions which one had to hold to make sense of the sentiments they expressed.

Unfortunately, a proper understanding of racism is gummed up in a discourse that holds without argument such university canards as, “Only White people can be racist because racism = prejudice + power.” A moment’s reflection will show that discrimination = prejudice + power, and that racism and prejudice are virtually synonymous. Thus, discrimination = racism + power. Therefore, it is possible for non-White people to be racist (whether or not they have power). Such elemental truths are lost on a youth who have enjoyed four years of indoctrination in our universities. This also makes a statement such as Thomas Sowell’s defense of markets as a tool to address racial inequities (on the grounds that “prejudice is free but discrimination is expensive”) something that is literally unthinkable within the Newspeak that passes as modern discourse.

Given my view of racism…. what about Trump? Clearly he is not Lefty-racist. Is he Klan-racist? Some allege this, and find proof in such events as Klan-racists showing up at his inauguration weekend. But the last I checked, Trump cannot declare who rents a hotel ballroom in Washington, DC, and in any case, I recall reading that the 150 or so Klan-types who showed up for that were outnumbered by the members of the press who wanted to cover and amplify it.

There are also Mr. Trump’s left-footed comments on the Charlottesville incident: no, there were not good people on both sides. There were people who want to bring down hateful symbols of treasonous slave-promoting thugs but who do not understand (due to a weak education in the principles of liberalism provided by our government school system) that the answer to hateful speech is better speech. On the other side there were people who wanted to protect and safeguard symbols of homage to treasonous defenders of slavery, symbols erected not at the conclusion of the Civil War, but erected at height of the Progressive Movement when Klan-resurgence reached its apogee under the nation’s racist-in-chief Woodrow Wilson, the darling of Progressivism, long the vehicle for racist oppression in the United States (another fact whitewashed out of history by our government school system). Too few of our government-school-indoctrinated youth understand why the Democratic Party was the party of Indian-killing, the party of slavery, and how and why the Klan was the militant wing of the Democratic Party. Therefore these protests against Southern statues amount to Democrats wanting to rip down statues of Democrats: that is a fight in which I, for one, do not have a dog. Still, I winced when I heard Trump’s statement about there being good people on both sides of that debate, and wondered if it was another moment of react-speak-think, or a dog-whistle, as some claim. I am also aware of claims that this is was a distortion of what President Trump said, but I lack the bandwidth (both intellectual and literal) to research it properly at this moment.

Is our president Archie-Bunker-racist? If I am not mistaken, they are both from Queens. They seem to share a certain cultural indifference towards appearing racist which may be a function of growing up in Queens in the time and place that he did.  One wonders if that indifference is a calculated signal, and if so, to whom the signal is intended.

In conclusion on this point, I think President Trump should be quite a bit more careful about his speech whenever it touches on matters of racial sensitivity. One does not have to kowtow to the control-freaks of political correctness to understand that by showing such care one displays a sensitivity to our nation’s checkered history on these matters, and this does not make one weak.

Trump as President –The press forgets that it created President Trump. They wanted to set up a straw man whom Hillary could destroy on her way to her coronation, whjich they considered pre-ordained. In that the year leading up to the nomination they gave the candidate they thought was most beatable by Hillary several billion dollars in free publicity. In the process they created a movement that got away from them (of this no one is more guilty than CNN, incidentally). The embarrassing degree to which the mainstream press and the DNC were absolutely in the bag for Hillary Clinton against first Bernie Saunders, and then Donald Trump, is a series of events that remains barely discussed since the Trump election, and have instead been flushed down the Orwellian memory hole. They created the movement that rolled over them.

In answer to some of the criticisms I have made above, Trump could rightly point out such things as the fact that 1/3 of the women in migrant caravans to our southern border get raped, which to a small degree makes me rethink the offensiveness of the statement he made while announcing his candidacy for President. Senator McCain’s involvement in the unverified piss-dossier revealed him to be precisely the unprincipled political actor at whom Trump scoffed (in his typical blustery and thoughtless way). Most of all, Trump could answer many allegations of racism by pointing out that 36% of Black America now support him.

Since he became President, Donald Trump has grown in my estimation for other reasons. He seems like a more sober and thoughtful man than he was when he started. The executive in me responds well to things like his State of the Union addresses. Every State of the Union address of my adult lifetime has been filled with aspirations expressed (to the accompaniment of House members of the same party jumping up and applauding with fervor) such banalities as, “I call on Congress to pass a law that doubles exports in five years! I call on Congress to pass a law that makes our children the best educated children in the universe!” President Trump has delivered three excellent, business-like State of the Union addresses that reflect his background as a CEO.

I still have deep reservations about aspects of his management and decision-making. His current job is one that requires a temperament that is unlike what he has displayed so far.

I think that Trump is set up to be the Herbert Hoover of the 21^st century. Let me say now that when the systemic failure comes, it is not going to be Trump’s fault. Nor is it going to have been Obama’s fault. Or Bush’s or Bill Clinton’s. It will be the result of the fact that in the 20^th century up until about 1980 we discovered various political methods to loot each other’s pockets, but eventually we found ways to block each other from continuing to do so. We got through the impasse when we found a group whose pockets could be looted and who could not object: the group of future humans. Alas, future generations have a way of showing up eventually, and they have done so. We have put off the reckoning via the magic of a debt-based, fractionally-reserved, Keynesian-multiplied magic money tree financial system, and that is going to die the ignominious and deserving death of all magic-based systems.

I think it will happen on Trump’s watch. The only chance we have of getting through without such a collapse would be switching to blockchain-based yet still Central Bank -issued digital currencies: the US tax avoidance rate is 40%, and this hole would be plugged in a  blockchain world. As a classical liberal I am not crazy about providing government a way to collect more tax: on the other hand, I am a rule-of-law kind of fellow, and what’s good for illegal immigration should also apply to tax collection. If the laws say that the government should be collecting $X in taxes but it is only collecting 60% of $X in practice, a blockchain-based monetary system could fix that, and provide just about exactly what we need to see our way through without a collapse. Otherwise, I hope he has people in the Treasury researching dual-sovereign-currency alternatives.

Yet in truth, the main reason for my improved appraisal of Trump comes from seeing what he has done with, by, and to the press. When I look back at what I went through in 2005-2008, one thing I of which I was always confident was that I would never see anything again like that in my lifetime. I was frequently told there would never be another person who would subject himself to it. But I confess what Trump has gone through from the Newspeak press has exceeded anything I saw in my own mitzvah. I can only stand back in admiration for a 70-something year old man who has stood up to the distortion and vilification which I have seen thrown at President Trump in the last three years.

Now having laid out all these thoughts about Trump, his history, his psychology, my read of his racial attitudes, his stubbornness, and so on and so forth, I repeat that it all has precisely 0 to do with why I came forward as I did to the authorities and on national television. I came forward because I (practically alone among Americans) knew the abject falseness of the entire Russian Collusion narrative, and beyond that, the degree to which (as I said on television in August) our national security apparatus has been hijacked to deliver political ends. I wish the fellow did not have such an infinitely high appraisal of himself as to foreclose deliberation over this, or such a tin ear when it came to discussing that…

But what has been going on for three years is wildly anti-Constitutional, so I came forward. It is that simple. I would have done it for Barack Obama if I had seen happening to him what happened to Trump, and the truth is, I would likely have done it more quickly. I bent over backwards so as to avoid any accusation of partisanship, and the rest of my life I will wonder if I bent over too far, and delayed too long in coming forward. I do hope I did not wait too long, or else, I am going to be working on my tan for a long time.

But I somehow think we are going to see our way through this. I think the Department of Justice is going to emerge the hero that saved the republic just as much as our War Department did in the 1940’s. As Bismarck said, “God has a special Providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” That may even extend to Donald J. Trump.

So once again here is my analysis: Nowhere does my copy of the Constitution say, “…unless Trump.” There are a lot of people whose copies of the Constitution apparently do say, “… unless Trump.” But mine does not. I promise, I checked. I went all through it and did not find the phrase “… unless Trump” anywhere in it. That’s my full and thorough analysis of the moment. That is why I came forward.

This story was first published on Deep Capture. Deep Capture features original investigative reporting on the all-too-cozy relationship Wall Street has with regulators, media, government and the intellectual establishment.