John Bolton’s tell-all book was leaked yesterday (at least the part about Trump’s extortion of Ukraine) by someone, likely WH staff, and it says exactly what you think it does.  How did the WH get a copy? A transcript of the book had been provided to the WH on December 30, to review for classified information.  According to the NY Times, Bolton confirms that Trump told him personally that he was going to withhold military aid to Ukraine until Zelensky announced investigations of Joe Biden and his son Hunter.   The account apparently runs dozens of pages, describing not only Trump’s role, but also Giuliani, Mulvaney, Pompeo, and others describes events around Trump’s extortion plan from the Spring of 2019 up until his departure in September.  Of course, Trump lied via Twitter last night that he didn’t discuss Ukraine with Bolton.  Right. Trump NEVER talked about his Ukraine plan with his national security advisor.  That’s believable.

This should ratchet up pressure to allow witnesses in the impeachment trial, but it won’t and you can bet that Cornyn and Cruz will lead the way off the cliff.

Trump’s accomplishments in Davos:

1. Announced “reforms” (translation: cuts) to Social Security and Medicare will come early in his next term.
2. Announced further unwinding of EPA clean water rules to allow more free fouling of our waterways, returning to the bad old days.
3. Complained that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have not been awarded the Pulitzer prize.  Yes, you read that correctly.
4. Downplayed brain injuries to US servicemen who were in bunkers on the base attacked by Iranian missiles.
5. Called his Senate trial on impeachment a hoax (for the thousandth time).

Here endeth the lesson.

In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News.  In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s it.  That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld.  Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too.  In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it.  In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms.  The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7.  But that stopped working as the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media.  Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable.  In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin.  Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.

The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds.  He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream.  There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times.  They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.

The strategy works almost flawlessly.  This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?”    Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve.  The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying.  The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads.  Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.

This is how democracy is destroyed.  When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win.  Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid.  And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.

Trump’s normal response to one of his inner circle being indicted/convicted/named as one of his accomplices is, “I don’t know him, I don’t know what he does, blah, blah, blah.  It’s his trademark Throw Your Friends Under the Bus strategy.  This week, he did it again with Lev Parnas, indicted for campaign finance laws, when he started singing like a canary about his role in trying to frame Joe Biden over fabricated corruption charges.

Trump immediately declared that he didn’t know Parnas.  Sure.  He never heard of him –

President Donald Trump standing with Lev Parnas at the White House in Washington.

Here’s Trump’s normal response to being caught in a lie as applied to Lev Parnas:

So, let’s recap the week:

1. Trump, against all advice, unilaterally had the second most powerful person in the Iranian government killed by drone in Baghdad.  Seven others were killed along with him.
2. Trump informed Lindsey Graham before the attack, but apparently no one else.  After the attack he spoke only to Republicans and only now is congressional leadership being briefed.
3. Evidence to justify the killings has been described by congressional sources has been described as “razor thin”.
4. Trump has continued to threaten Iran with acts of massive destruction if they retaliate (via Twitter).
5. The Iraqi Parliament has voted to expel all US troops from the country.  The vote was taken at the request of Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.  He’s sure to sign it.
6. Today, Iran announced that it is now withdrawing from the nuclear treaty of 2015 and will begin enriching uranium immediately.
7. Pompeo was on all the news programs this morning freely lying and defending the indefensible.
8. Pence lied on Twitter yesterday that Soleimani was involved in 9/11, trying to give cover to Trump.
9. Trump played golf today.

Our government is run by an incompetent, totally corrupt moron who’s being enabled by lying radicals.  It will take decades to recover from this cancer on our republic.

Fox News talking heads are now trumpeting the accuracy of US intelligence that Trump claims to have used to justify the killing of the second most powerful member of the Iranian government, and all reference to the “Deep State” has ceased.  The reversal can cause serious whiplash if you’re not careful.  Even Sean Hannity got into the act, saying, “But I will say the big headline is, this is a huge victory for American intelligence, a huge victory for our military, a huge victory for the State Department, and a huge victory and total leadership by the president.”  Hannity has been railing about US intelligence for 3 years calling it the anti-Trump “Deep State”.

NY Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi tweeted earlier today that her sources call the evidence of imminent attacks was “razor thin” and leaves many questions.  Now that Congress is being finally briefed, the truth will come out, and I’ll lay odds that Trump and his enablers are lying about this, too.

Wag the Dog.