Review: Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear’

The elderly, confused Democrat Bob Woodward’s “october surprise” tell-all, Fear, is far less surprising than the mainstream media’s free book promotion campaign would have you believe. There’s nothing in here that would change anybody’s opinion about Trump at this point. We all know that he’s not a career politician and wasn’t walking into the office with the mastery of every administrative detail that Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton would walk in with. That was part of his appeal to the voters, after all.

Beltway insiders like Woodward are horrified by this sort of thing, and expect the reader to be, as well. But some of their anxiety is misplaced. My reading of Trump’s meeting about monetary policy which has been reported as proof of his idiocy actually showcases his sharp executive style, of probing situations for solutions hidden in plain sight. Why can’t we just print more money to goose the economy while the lending market is primed for doing so?

There are intelligent arguments for being cautious about the deficit. But Trump’s position that we should be investing heavily in infrastructure spending while raising tariffs to lure corporations and their manufacturing back to America isn’t breathtakingly idiotic in the way Woodward and the National Review would have you believe. Trump’s doing exactly what Woodward chuckles about regarding deficit spending, and it’s working great so far.

#NeverTrump TrueCons will kvetch that it’s saddling future generations up with debt. They’re not incorrect, but we have different goals. Personally, I look forward to a future where the federal government is pinched between its lending obligations and its disgruntled electorate. What TrueCons want is for Trump to cut corporate taxes instead of blowing money on infrastructure. Both involve more deficit spending.

With the aplomb of the little girl in the classic meme, Trump asks, “Why not both?”

The first section of the book leading up to the election is a massive disappointment. It’s obvious that Steve Bannon sat down with the Democratic operative to basically write this hit piece on Bannon’s former boss. From the looks of it, Bannon was perhaps his only source for the first part of the book, with every aside flatteringly depicting Steve as the sagacious outsider courageously taking on that big nasty media and saying smart things while everyone around him, including and especially his former boss, are saying dumb things. They’re all in awe of how smart, to the point of prophetic, Steve is.

What a maverick!

Is anybody surprised that the vain alcoholic dirtbag Steve would do this? Hope Hicks claims in the book that it’s the media who have Oppositional Defiance Disorder, a pathological desire to lash out at perceived authority for attention and self-gratification? But, honestly, it describes Bannon better. He’s more stoked on his old hollywood vision of himself as the shadowy mastermind of a populist revolt than he is on, you know, actually being the shadowy mastermind of a populist revolt.

In the final denouement, Bannon chose to betray actually leading a populist revolt in favor of cashing in on the glory of being popularly perceived as doing so. He would probably still be skulking around the White House coaching Trump with his watered down AltRight strategies if he had the humility and self-discipline to resist fame whoring and publicly reminding everybody that he’s so much smarter than Trump. As much as I regret that Jarvanka now hold more sway over Trump than the AltRight voices which actually got him elected, blame rests on Bannon rather than the shills set against him.

Trump had no choice but to sack Bannon.

There’s no mention whatsoever of the AltRight’s role in the election, not one reference to memes. And we only come up during a moral quandary about how to handle Charlottesville. Milo’s not mentioned. In Steve’s mind, all that was just himself and his Breitbart website. The historically unprecedented proxy campaign for Trump on social media by the emergent Millennial Right doesn’t merit mention, even as Trump and Hillary were fixated on the phenomenon at the time. While Trump’s not as ensconced in the ideology and networks of reaction as Bannon, he’s actually a more reliable populist than Bannon if only because he lacks Bannon’s cloying desperation for elite institutional validation.

A man who simply wishes to be loved by the White American electorate is more reliably /ourguy/ than a soi distant nationalist and populist whose locus of esteem is Beltway opinion of him. Wherever Bannon is right now, he’s half-smirking with the knowledge that millions of Democrats are reading this book about how smart he is right now. We deserve to keep losing as long as we lack the humility and patience to advance our principles instead of our egos. Hopefully the Hard Right takes these lessons being offered by the AltLite’s failures to heart.

Trump’s never going to build his wall, because even Trump can’t break through the (((establishment))) actually running this country to achieve the will of the people. But there’s tremendous power in the big, beautiful high wattage orange klieg light we now have on the fact that the kleptocrats will not let us have what we voted for. That’s really the only lasting win from this whole fiasco: a mandate betrayed. It’s not nothing.

Rest assured, dear Democrats, that Jon Huntsman, Nikki Haley, or any one of the other hundreds of GOP careerists in the White House would quickly snatch an order to fund the border wall off of Trump’s desk. For years and years, I’ve been assured that there are all these /ourguys/ secretly infilitrating the Beltway, ready to step forward when the time was ripe. With the exception of Ian Smith, peace be upon him, it appears they were all lying. Nationalists failed to seize this historic opportunity because we suck. Our leadership is foolish and inept. Our wings melted as black swan events thrust our little movement into the stratosphere and we’re now left grumbling and grousing instead of steadily pushing for more wins.

The lactose intolerant Jewish neoliberal Democrat Jared Kushner is drinking our milkshake this time around. And if we don’t learn and grow from this experience, Jared and his globalist cousins will continue to do so.

Woodward is fixated on the Russian meddling thing, even though his own book very much corroborates Trump’s own accounting of the situation. Sure, Russia was trying to bungle up Hillary, but Trump’s political machine wasn’t even sophisticated or competent enough to achieve any sort of meaningful collusion if it wanted to. Russian operatives surely had the same problem trying to find a Trump campaign to work with that the rest of us did back in 2016. At this point, the delusional notion that Russia helped Trump steal the election from Hillary is the greatest panicked mass delusion in America since Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast.

Trump’s analysis of Charlottesville was correct. While many of us were indeed explicitly pro-White, hundreds of guys who showed up for Unite the Right were indeed Trumpy conservatives innocently showing up to protest the removal of the historic statue. The fact that several minorities, dozens of Invictus’s AltKnight rainbow reactionaries, and a lot of Milo-loving #MAGApede deplorable types were caught up in the melee has been forgotten by absolutely everybody except Trump.

Trump’s most endearing character trait is his commitment to always love back anybody who loves him. It’s clearly an ego-driven Citizen Kane sort of love, to be sure. But it’s a more functional way of feeding one’s ego than Bannon’s cloying and scraping at the feet of his neoliberal overlords for a shot at more attention. Andrew Breitbart’s surely spinning in his grave that his protege dropped the ball in the hour of truth, leaving responsibility for the populist revolution to actual nationalists. Thanks, economic nationalists. We White Nationalists will take it from here!

Everyone around Trump was terrified about his “trade wars.” If only the political class would be as terrified of actual wars as they are of trade wars; several thousand honest American servicemen would still have their lives and limbs. Once again, Woodward and pals see Trump as too clueless and foolish to see the wisdom of the status quo. They insist that America’s trade policies are integrated with our foreign policy objectives in this sophisticated and effective diplomatic machine that serves America’s interests. One can’t help but wonder how many previous presidents have simply went along with the globalist agenda for fear of being given the “dumbass” treatment Trump’s currently getting.

The political class have been buying America’s global empire by trading the blood, sweat, and tears of America’s White American underclass for generations. In every negotiation, they’re all too eager to squeeze America’s working class just a little harder at the negotiation table in exchange for more access, more influence, and more empire. Trump’s instincts are right, and my only regret is his caution in the process of evaluating and renegotiating this insurmountable pile of bad deals.

At this point, Trump’s political machine is completely encircled by the swamp. His political movement he needed let him down, and he also let down his political machine. Most of the authentic nationalist leaders and organizations melted under the pressure. Milo’s retired from promoting Trump in favor of snorting cocaine off his mandingo husband’s muscular black ass that he bought with funds stolen from his “white scholarship” scam. Even though Trump understands on some level that he needs to achieve at least part of his populist mandate to retain his legacy, the Brazil-style tactic of using “corruption investigatons” as a tool for corrupt bureaucrats to hamstring democratically elected officials is tearing him and his administration apart.

Trump won’t build the wall. His tweets will continue to be directed at Mueller or perhaps at Jeff Sessions who’s merely doing what he needs to do to protect his own ass from the investigation circus. Trumpism only retains value to the extent that it’s greater than Trump. There’s political capital to be exploited for decades to come from the mandate claimed in 2016. They can take everything away from Trump and his constituents, but what Woodward, Comey, and Mueller can’t take away is the fact that Trump pulled back the curtain to reveal the authentic will of the White Majority.