Political crisis of US rulers stokes liberal drive to indict Donald Trump

BY SETH GALINSKY

Liberal Democrats and their allies in the mass media, consumed by hysteria over the presidency of Donald Trump, are campaigning to get him indicted, or at least impeached. Their real target is the workers who rallied and voted for him, seeking change and to “drain the swamp” in Washington. The propertied rulers see — and fear — the threat of bigger class battles in the future. Getting rid of President Trump is a way to tell them to stand down.

“Trump gives voice to a faction of America that also feels aggrieved,” Charles Blow writes in his New York Times column Aug. 7. “Trump won because he whines. He whines in a way that makes the weak feel less vulnerable and more vicious.

“The way they see it,” Blow continues, “they are victims of coastal and urban liberals and the elite institutions — economic, education and entertainment — clustered there. They are victims of an economy evolving in ways, both technical and geographic, that cuts them out or leaves them behind.”

And you can find dozens of similar commentaries in the Times, the Washington Post and CNN, as well as the morning “news” and nighttime talk shows.

Their gripe isn’t really that Trump’s policies are so different. He’s a billionaire who shares the goals of Democrats and Republicans alike to defend the interests of U.S. capital at home and abroad.

Millions of workers have been pushed out of jobs, with the “labor force participation rate” at record lows. They face a growing crisis in finding — or affording — health care. Infant mortality is going up. Life expectancy is falling. And there’s an explosion of opioid addiction.

For Blow and his ilk, workers seeking a solution to this state of affairs are just the “waning power of whiteness, privilege, patriarchy,” and a desire to go back to the “good old days” when women “got back-alley abortions and worked for partial wages” and “coal was king.”

He and his ilk see workers — especially workers who are Caucasian — as a big, dangerous mob of racists and reactionaries.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson Aug. 3 tells workers who back Trump they don’t much matter. “The voice of a laid-off West Virginia coal miner is no more authentic than that of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur,” Robinson says, “or — and this may be shocking — an opinion writer for a mainstream news outlet.”

“Frustrated with a political system that seems incapable of getting much of anything accomplished,” he says, “they decided to lob in a grenade, blow it to smithereens and start over.”

That’s true.

Facts that don’t match their assumptions don’t matter to the liberal media. After months of articles with the wildest insinuations of Trump administration collusion with Moscow, they have little to point to that makes the case, but that doesn’t stop them.

And they lionize Special Prosecutor William Mueller, former boss of the FBI, the rulers’ political police, who’s been tasked with bringing Trump down.

Mueller impaneled a grand jury at the end of July with power to subpoena documents, grill witnesses and make indictments. He has assembled a gang of FBI agents, prosecutors and hot-shot lawyers to do the job.

Workers have seen this type of operation before. The rulers pick a target, then turn special prosecutors and grand juries loose until they find something to pin on them. They spin off leaks and do everything possible to make the victim look like a criminal.

Mueller decided he wanted some papers from former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Instead of asking for them, he got the FBI to carry out a predawn raid on his home to seize them. Then he got the raid leaked to the Washington Post, which made it the lead story on its website Aug. 9.

It turns out that Manafort had already turned over many of them to a congressional committee also “investigating” Trump.

Big Trump rallies

Despite wishful thinking by liberals that support for the president “is collapsing,” Trump has called out supporters in the face of this witch hunt in big rallies in working-class cities like Youngstown, Ohio, and Huntington, West Virginia.

“Are there any Russians here tonight?” Trump asked to laughter from a crowd of thousands Aug. 3 in Huntington, in the heart of coal country. “We don’t’ need advice from the Washington swamp,” he said to cheers. “We need to drain the swamp.”

“The reason the Democrats only talk about the totally made up Russia story is because they have no message, no agenda and no vision,” the president said. Under his leadership, Trump promised, “American workers will build the future and American energy and American clean coal will power this future.”

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