This transcript appears in the June 18, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Why Trump Failed—And Why Many Trump Supporters Fail to See Why
[Print version of this transcript]
June 12—The March 17, 2017 issue of EIR published the transcript of a presentation called “Why the British Hate Trump,” a presentation by this author. The article reviewed the primary issues proposed by Donald Trump during his campaign which won over the American electorate, including many working class and minority Democrats. Many of these issues reflected ideas which Lyndon LaRouche had initiated and promoted during his fifty years of political organizing in the United States and around the world.
Unlike Trump, LaRouche had also identified the core enemy of those ideas as the still-functioning British Empire and the Empire’s influence in both U.S. political parties, in the U.S. intelligence community, in the military-industrial complex, and on Wall Street—which had long since abandoned the American System of Physical Economy in favor of the British System of free trade, neo-liberalism, Malthusian ideology, and the geopolitical division of the world into warring blocs.
LaRouche Proposes, Trump ...
A review of a few issues which LaRouche promoted, and which Trump threatened to implement, will make this clear:
Russia. Trump emphasized, over and over throughout his campaign, that “Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.” LaRouche had carried out a back-channel contact with the Soviet Union on behalf of President Ronald Reagan in 1982-83, promoting LaRouche’s idea of U.S.-USSR cooperation on the development of space-based anti-ICBM defense systems, an idea that Reagan adopted under the name, Strategic Defense Initiative, intending, in his words, to “make nuclear weapons obsolete.” This was a policy which would end the British “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD) madness, which kept the world permanently divided between opposing blocs and in a perpetual state of nuclear war preparation, while also allowing the British (and their “dumb giant” American assets) to wage colonial wars, with less concern that it could escalate into a nuclear war.
When the Soviets rejected Reagan’s offer in 1983, LaRouche told them that their economy and their system of government would collapse within five years. It took six. When that collapse came, LaRouche established working relations with the scientific and political institutions in Russia, and later, following the 2008 financial breakdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, called for Russia, China, India and the U.S. to cooperate (with others) in a New Bretton Woods agreement, to put the post-2008 western financial system through bankruptcy reorganization. When Trump arrived, and threatened to build friendly relations with Russia, the British were so panicked that they deployed their leading intelligence operatives, including GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan and MI6 assets Christopher Steele and Richard Dearlove, to create and foster the “Russiagate” hoax and other coup attempts against Trump in the U.S.
China. Although Trump campaigned with a promise to resolve the huge U.S. trade deficit with China, he never blamed that deficit on China, but rather on the speculators on Wall Street and in the financial system generally, who sabotaged the industrial and scientific sectors of the U.S. economy in favor of maximizing short-term profit, “outsourcing,” “globalization,” and chasing cheap labor in China (and elsewhere) rather than protecting the U.S. economy and the American workforce. As late as May 2019, Trump told a rally: “I blame us, I don’t blame them. I don’t blame President Xi. I blame all of our presidents, and not just President Obama. You go back a long way. You look at President Clinton, Bush—everybody. They allowed this to happen.” LaRouche had introduced the term “globalony” into American politics, as merely a shorthand expression for imperialism. He denounced “deregulation” of the American System policies that had directed credit into the real economy and the “general welfare.”
Soon after taking office, in April 2017, Trump invited President Xi Jinping to Mar-a-Lago, followed by his own highly successful visit to Beijing in November 2017, after which he repeatedly referred to China as a “great nation” and Xi as a “great leader.” He was, in fact, well on the way to resolving the trade deficit through large-scale trade agreements, although he never endorsed LaRouche’s proposal for the U.S. to join with China in the Belt and Road Initiative. Here too, it was LaRouche and his wife Helga who had introduced the idea of the “New Silk Road” to China following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and published a 370-page Special Report, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge,” in 2014 as a contribution to Xi Jinping’s adoption of the concept in 2013 with his Belt and Road Initiative. Trump never accepted LaRouche’s proposal to join the Belt and Road Initiative, but nonetheless, it was only after the disastrous impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that Trump allowed himself to be convinced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that he needed to attack China, blaming it for the pandemic—one of the worst mistakes of his presidency.
American System. Trump made occasional references to the “American System” of Alexander Hamilton, as opposed to the free market system of the British. That British system is driven only by the profit margins of individual banks and businesses rather than the profit of the nation as a whole. LaRouche had much earlier taken the lead in promoting the restoration of the Hamiltonian system, writing extensively in EIR, and presenting numerous half-hour national broadcasts during his several presidential campaigns, educating the American public on the American System, and the economic disaster which would follow an acceptance of the British system taking over our economic policy, as it has, especially following the take-down of Franklin Roosevelt’s Glass-Steagall laws in the 1990s.
Colonial wars. Under Bush and Obama, the U.S. proved itself to be what the British refer to in their expression, “British brains with American Brawn,” allowing the U.S. military to fight illegal, genocidal wars—essentially colonial wars—on behalf of the Empire, the British-American military-industrial complex, and their Wall Street-City of London financiers. These massive crimes against humanity were a major reason that LaRouche demanded the impeachment of George W. Bush (although he added, “Impeach Cheney first”) and, later, Barack Obama. Again, Trump terrified the British with the echo of Lyndon LaRouche when he kept insisting on an immediate end to the “endless wars.” But when the Commander-in-Chief, President Trump, ordered the Pentagon to get out of Afghanistan and Syria, they refused. Treason? Indeed.
Space exploration. One of Trump’s greatest accomplishments was the restoration of the space program, dramatically dismantled under the Bush and Obama administrations. The launching of Artemis—with NASA and private sector companies collaborating to return human beings to the Moon, establish permanent settlements there, and to use those settlements to proceed on to Mars—provided a major spark of optimism to American citizens, and citizens around the world, that mankind is not Earth-bound, but has an entire universe to explore.
Such optimism frightens the British Empire, as a scientifically optimistic population will not succumb to the “limits to growth” fraud or the Green New Deal Malthusianism. LaRouche had fought for a renewed and expanded space program throughout his life. During his 1988 presidential campaign, he produced a half-hour national TV broadcast called The Woman on Mars, in which he described a 40-year program to colonize Mars (that would have been accomplished by 2028!). For years the media slanders of LaRouche would include the accusation that he must be crazy, since he wants mankind to go to Mars!
And yet, neither Russia nor China are to be part of Artemis as currently structured. Perhaps the greatest example of international cooperation between powerful nations to achieve the common aims of mankind was the Apollo-Soyuz program, with the Cold War opponents, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, working hand-in-hand to build an International Space Station (ISS). When the U.S. foolishly gave up its capacity to lift astronauts into space, the Soviet (and later, Russian) Soyuz rockets graciously carried their American (and others) friends to the ISS. Why did President Trump, who understood that “it is a good thing, not a bad thing, to be friends with Russia,” allow Artemis to exclude them? Again, the military-industrial complex won the day.
Climate hoax. Trump never directly exposed the scientific fraud which asserts that carbon is the cause of an impending climate disaster, as LaRouche did, in collaboration with real scientists and scientific organizations internationally, as opposed to the computer programmers who are passed off as scientists by the climate hoaxters. But Trump nevertheless threw a massive scare into the Royal Family and the Bank of England by pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord (although he described it only as “unfair” rather than as an anti-scientific and genocidal fraud).
The recently published pamphlet by The LaRouche Organization, “Great Leap Backward—LaRouche Crushes the ‘Green New Deal’ Fraud,” details the role of Prince Charles and former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney in running the climate hoax, to the purpose of justifying their Malthusian hatred of humanity and their frantic effort to divert credit away from scientific and industrial progress in order to bail out the bankrupt western financial system. But Trump essentially agreed with the premise of LaRouche’s 1983 book, There Are No Limits to Growth, and fought against the shutting down of fossil fuels. Trump created an even greater panic when he brought Professor Emeritus Will Happer—a highly respected physicist who had been chairman of Princeton’s University Research Board—onto the National Security Council with the explicit intention to hold a public debate on the science behind climate change. Dr. Happer, who co-founded an organization called the CO2 Coalition, has scientifically exposed the lie that carbon dioxide causes climate change, including in his presentation to a Schiller Institute conference on March 20, 2021.
The British React
The British imperial interests were openly terrified that Trump would implement these and other policies which they had believed were adequately contained by the demonization of LaRouche in the media and the Congress, and by the illegal criminal prosecution of LaRouche and several of his associates by a Department of Justice which had abandoned the Constitution, functioning as a “Star Chamber” to prosecute political enemies of the City of London and Wall Street. Not coincidentally, the FBI operative who was chosen to run the “Get LaRouche Task Force” in the late 1980s, Robert Mueller, was subsequently chosen to run the “Get Trump” operation—the “Special Counsel Investigation” of Trump’s supposed ties to Russia.
Although the Mueller investigation of “Russiagate” failed to find any evidence of Russian collusion, it played a significant role, together with the media (both “left” and “right” mainstream press and networks) and the massive corruption of the Congress (both parties), in sabotaging each and every significant policy which Trump had originally supported.
Trump’s Anti-American Cabinet
While it is popular among Trump supporters to blame the amorphous “Deep State” for undermining Trump’s efforts, the culprits were in fact within his own Cabinet, and whose allegiance was to British intelligence. That Cabinet was made up of representatives of precisely those institutions denounced by President Trump. His defense officials were all from the “military-industrial complex” which Trump correctly identified as hating him, saying on September 7, 2020, that they “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.” They were also the same people who gave us the “regime change wars” starting with Iraq, which Trump had correctly described as “the worst single mistake made in the history of our country.”
And yet his Defense Secretaries were Gen. Jim Mattis, who led forces in Afghanistan and Iraq; Patrick Shanahan, who oversaw military helicopter and missile defense programs during his 20 years at Boeing; and Mark Esper, who came to the position from his role as a lobbyist for Raytheon. It was Mattis who refused the order from his Commander-in-Chief to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan and Syria.
Similarly, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was not only a leading hedge fund operator on Wall Street, but was infamous by the fortunes that his OneWest Bank made by pumping up the housing market, then foreclosing on homeowners, often outside of existing laws, following the 2008 mortgage bubble collapse. He exemplifies those who ran the transformation of the U.S. economy from a scientific and industrial power into a “Casino Mondial” of wild speculation and massive financial bailouts of the speculators.
Although Trump had campaigned on a promise to rebuild the U.S. manufacturing base, and small gains were made during his administration, he refused to acknowledge that the massive money printing by the Federal Reserve, known as Quantitative Easing, was the source of the speculative bubble on Wall Street—in fact, he over and over again pointed to the stock market as “proof” of a booming economy, rather than as a speculative bubble ready to burst.
Regarding China, despite his praise for China and for President XI, Trump appointed Peter Navarro as his trade representative. Navarro is notorious for his anti-China rantings, having authored a book in 2011, Death by China—Confronting the Dragon, A Global Call to Action.
Although Trump regularly denounced the intentional lies of the Bush and Obama intelligence communities (as in the G.W. Bush Administration’s claim that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and the Obama Administration’s claims—based on British intelligence fabrications—of Russian collusion with Trump and interference in the 2016 election), he nonetheless appointed “more of the same” to run his intelligence agencies.
Perhaps the most extreme case of subversion from within was Trump’s choice of Mike Pompeo to head the CIA, and later to serve as Secretary of State. At CIA, Pompeo refused to refute the fanciful January 2017 report by the Obama intelligence team of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, which claimed without evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in support of Trump, based on the totally discredited report provided by MI6 operative Christopher Steele.
Trump later instructed Pompeo to get briefed by Bill Binney, the former head of the technical division at the NSA and a collaborator with the LaRouche movement, on Binney’s proof that the Obama Administration claim, adopted by candidate Hillary Clinton, that Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee emails and forwarded them to Julian Assange at Wikipedia, was a total fabrication. Pompeo took the briefing, but proceeded to cover it up. Had it been properly promoted, the entire Russiagate operation would have been exposed as a fraud and a coup attempt by British and U.S. intelligence networks.
As Secretary of State, Pompeo (and his cohort from West Point, Defense Secretary Mark Esper) worked hand-in-hand with British intelligence to feed Trump the lie that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had “used chemical weapons on his own people,” leading Trump to agree to U.S. bombing raids on Syria twice (although Trump limited the raids to small, pinpoint attacks with few casualties). When Pompeo and Esper called for a bombing raid on Iran after Iranian military forces shot down a U.S. drone in June 2019, Trump refused, openly saying that the projected death of 150 Iranians was not proportionate. But when they later presented the President with a plan for the assassination of Iran’s military leader Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, Trump agreed, allowing the killing of Soleimani, along with four other Iranians and five Iraqis, on Iraqi soil—an act of criminal barbarism.
Russia and China: From ‘Friends’ to ‘Enemies’
“The National Defense Strategy” (NDS) prepared under Secretary of Defense Mattis, and released in January 2018, turned Trump’s policy of building friendly relations with Russia and China totally on its head. Before that time, terrorism was defined as the primary military threat to the U.S. and the world, and Trump was essentially cooperating with Russia in defeating the terrorists in Syria through a “deconfliction” agreement for U.S. and Russian forces in Syria. But the NDS dropped terrorism in favor of defining a supposed threat from Russia and China as the primary danger to the U.S.
This was the beginning of the endless drone of accusations of “malign” activity and “acts of aggression” by Russia and China, the unleashing of the McCarthyite witch-hunt against students, professors and scientists of Chinese nationality, or even of Chinese ancestry, by the FBI under Christopher Wray. Trump, for all of 2018 and 2019, and well into 2020, only criticized China in regard to trade issues, not indulging in the hysteria about the Hong Kong anarchists and terrorists being “freedom fighters”; nor about Xinjiang “genocide”; nor accusing China of trying to “take over the world” with the Belt and Road or with “debt traps.” EIR published a 23-page report in 2019, “End the McCarthyite Witch Hunt against China & President Trump,” which showed that in fact the anti-China hysteria was aimed at Trump, to destroy his friendly ties with Xi Jinping, just as the Russiagate operation was aimed at breaking his friendship with Vladimir Putin.
After his 2016 election, Trump appointed as his National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, who had exposed the Obama Administration as arming terrorists in order to overthrow the sovereign governments of Libya and Syria. The “Get Trump” team at the Justice Department went into full gear to (illegally) maneuver Flynn out, to be replaced by Gen. H.R. McMaster, who then produced the disastrous “National Security Strategy” which, along with the National Defense Strategy, destroyed Trump’s efforts to build friendly relations with Russia and China, naming them instead as America’s primary adversaries.
Indeed, Trump’s Cabinet, his intelligence community and the Pentagon were preparing for war with Russia, moving NATO troops closer and closer to Russia’s borders, accusing Russia of “aggression” in Ukraine for supporting Ukrainians who opposed the neo-Nazi coup in 2014 (which had been run, openly, by the Obama administration). They were also preparing for war with China through the vile demonization of China and all things Chinese at home, while deploying massive nuclear armed forces in a hostile embrace of China’s Pacific coast. They threatened all other nations not to do business with Chinese companies like Huawei, nor to join the Belt and Road. Refusing to follow such orders meant facing sanctions and a cut-off of aid from the U.S.
In rejecting the anthropogenic climate change hoax behind the Green New Deal, Trump moved to counter the pseudo-science behind this fraud when he brought Prof. Will Happer, the retired Princeton University physicist, onto the National Security Council, with the intention of holding a public scientific debate over the real causes of climate change. Dr. Happer, among others, has proven definitively that carbon dioxide, the food for plant life, has a miniscule impact on the climate, if any. That debate never happened. Sources told EIR that it was the same military-industrial figures who rejected Trump’s demands to end the “endless wars” who also refused to allow Happer to present his scientific evidence in a White House sponsored public debate.
After a year at the National Security Council, Dr. Happer gave up and returned to Princeton. Now, the Green New Deal is being imposed globally, threatening the collapse of the industrialized nations and a holocaust in the poor nations of Africa and South America.
Whither Trump?
We often hear it said that Trump’s Cabinet can not be blamed, since Trump chose them. True enough, Trump chose them, but the only serious question is, who could he have chosen to make a difference? He campaigned against both political parties—against the “Bush-league” faction of neocon warhawks and Wall Street hustlers in the Republican Party during the primaries, then against the Obama-Clinton neoliberal warhawks and Wall Street hustlers in the Democratic Party during the presidential election. Who was left? Who existed outside of the establishment and the military-industrial complex who could provide support and advice on those policies he originally espoused?
There is an answer, but Trump never acted on it: Lyndon LaRouche and his associates. With the exception of Roger Stone (the person most responsible for convincing Trump to run for president), who has since 1980 considered Lyndon LaRouche one of the great geniuses of the 20th Century, Trump was surrounded by establishment figures who concurred with the Anglo-American fear of LaRouche’s policies even more than they feared what Trump was intending to do.
Had Trump exonerated LaRouche of the false charges brought against him, by the same corrupt Department of Justice which was out to destroy Trump’s presidency, and had he openly collaborated with the LaRouche organization in the global effort to end the British Imperial “regime change” war policy and its “Green New Deal” destruction of industrial progress globally, and called for a New Bretton Woods conference with Russia, China and others to put the bankrupt western financial system through bankruptcy reorganization, with Hamiltonian credit policies available in all nations—had he had the courage to do that, he would still be President, and the world would likely be on a road to recovery and perhaps a new Renaissance.
Whatever happens to the former President, the only path to global survival is through the LaRouche policies, which can only be implemented through the global cooperation of all nations of good will. The LaRouche Organization and the Schiller Institute are dedicated to that result, exemplified in a series of forums bringing international leaders together to deliberate on the means to achieve a world based on the common aims of mankind.
