Uncle Sam’s gone crazy
THE scandal and revelations surrounding Donald Trump’s American presidency are pure theatre, far beyond any Shakespearean drama.
A cast of fame and notoriety features porn stars, Russian spies, dictators, sporting legends, TV celebrities, the Ku Klux Klan and five-star generals — all observed through the warped prism of a dizzied media divided into worshippers and enemies of the state.
A splintering plot careers violently from cyberspace espionage, school shootings and nuclear obliteration to political conspiracy, whitecollar crime, voter fraud, great walls, internment camps for illegal-alien children, and trade wars.
It is calamity on an unprecedented scale, vaudeville on steroids, with most scenes narrated in misspelt, often illiterate tweets like poorly constructed cartoon bubble captions.
In the same way postmodernism brought a cynical third dimension to the linear thought of Enlightenment rationality, the Trump show is delivering a giddy fourth to the Theatre of the Absurd.
It is a photographic negative of Waiting for Godot in which Didi and Gogo cannot be seen, upstaged behind a crowd of extras who incessantly rhubarb over the script.
Where Samuel Beckett’s famous play is pregnant with meaning, albeit difficult to define in its haunting exploration of the nature of existence, the Trump show appears bereft of meaning.
Human existence is reduced to a nonsense, like a virtual-reality game with no consequences in the corporeal world.
Potential nuclear annihilation is but a whim, akin to choosing between the brands of soap suds for your kitchen sink.
To throw into disarray international trade that has been decades in the making and ruin businesses and livelihoods is but the toss of a coin.
HARD- WON global agreements on peace, the environment, trade and human rights are written away with the stroke of a pen, without thought to the hours devoted to their construction, or the lives that depend on them.
Military and strategic alliances that millions have relied on to provide security and a semblance of international justice, fairness and rules-based law are subject to one man’s rampant ego and fancy.
Retired American four-star general Barry McCaffrey says Trump seriously threatens US national security by refusing to protect vital American interests from “active Russian attacks”, and that he seems “under the sway” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian involvement in cyberattacks and clandestine internet deception, which have ignited conflict and unrest in American society and undermined democracy, have been exposed by public inquiries in the US and Europe.
The tentacles of the cyberwar reach around the world, with the Cadbury factory in Tasmania shut down in June last year by a malicious computer program known as Goldeneye, which spread from the Ukraine to India, Denmark, Poland, the US, Spain and Australia.
Cadbury’s four Australian factories, including the one at Claremont, were infected and crippled via their computer system links to American parent company Mondelez International.
The Goldeneye attack initially appeared motivated by ransom, but is now regarded part of a broader assault emanating out of Russia using a top-secret Microsoft Windows tool, designed by the US National Security Agency to hack into computers, that was stolen or leaked from what was once regarded as one of the highest security systems on the planet.
Waged with the latest, most virulent malware, this cyberwar has the US intelligence community on edge.
When combined with documented Russian meddling in the American presidential race, the 2014 shooting down of MH17 over the Ukraine, and four baffling cases in England of poisoning, including one death, involving a nerve agent suspiciously like Novichok, which was invented by the Russians in the Cold War, it is cause for serious concern.
It is time for caution, analysis, cool heads and international co-operation.
That is why an exasperated former CIA chief John McLaughlin said of Trump’s chummy meeting with Putin in Helsinki last month: “We’ve been attacked and the President has sided with the enemy.”
IN the days leading up to the Helsinki meeting, US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats briefed the American President on Russian interference in the presidential race and continuing threats, but Trump responded by first siding with Putin and the next day taking the polar opposite position.
Coats has been observably mystified by his President’s indecipherable statements.
There are two theories emerging to explain why Russian forces demonstrably supported Trump and opposed Hillary Clinton in the presidential race.
One is that Russia has dirt on Trump of a personal or business nature from his dealings over decades in the world’s largest country, or scandalous information on his close associates. Once elected, Trump would be their puppet, a marionette of unprecedented reach and power.
The other is that Trump was regarded as a destabilising force that could fragment American society, undermine Western alliances and in the process forge a new world order. If that’s the plan, it appears to be working.
It’s the stuff of Marvel comics, only more bizarre, dangerous and confusing than any script writer could possibly imagine.
It is time for caution, analysis, cool heads and international co-operation.