The anatomy of a hostile takeover

Approaching the midterms, never has it been more important to understand how we got here and the threats posed by a cornered regime.

Image - REUTERS

Yesterday, I tried to walk you through why I am critical of the Democratic leadership, because I don’t want people to think I’m doing it because it seems fashionable. I have been immersed in American politics for a while now, and despite what some might think, my criticism comes from a deep sense of concern that, unless there is a significant change of focus, i.e. away from special interest groups and towards people-focused policies, the so desperately needed transformative change required will never materialise.

For a society to succeed and prosper, there has to be people-centric governance. We are currently bearing witness to the antithesis of responsible governance; it’s been thrown under the bus in the service of power and greed. The truth is, as humans, we are capable of despicable acts of hate and cruelty towards each other, and it seems that the more power is bestowed on us, the more addicted we become to it and to the riches it can deliver at the expense of others.

There is no better example than Trump, who has become a magnet to every oligarch in proximity to him. To be clear, I loathe the man and everything he stands for, but nobody in modern history has so successfully weaponised the worst in human behaviour more than him. He’s a man who has been bankrupt six times, living his entire life exploiting and extorting others, with little regard for the law. His whole business persona is as fake as the ten wars he claims to have ended. He is unquestionably the king of leveraged debt, and it seems pretty clear to me that his 2015 presidential run was itself an attempt to escape debt that was closing in on him.

Image - Getty Images

The result is that the president of the most powerful nation on earth used the office of the presidency as a financial vehicle to escape debt and monetise it all at the same time, leaving businesses and individuals in his wake to pick up the tab for the fantasy world he inhabited as a fake reality TV ‘successful’ businessman. There’s no question he’s a malignant narcissist and a pathological liar, but his real strength is as a consummate creator of fairytales. This is a man who has managed to persuade millions that his truth is not fantasy. We can argue as to how he’s managed to deceive so many people, but deceive them he has.

What’s important to understand is that a broken US political system was the perfect incubator for the creation of the dangerous political monster Trump has become. Many will argue that he is just a symptom of a cancer that took hold in American politics long before he debuted on the political stage, and there is some truth to that, but he was the moment when that cancer spread to the political lymph nodes and metastasised to infect every lever of government.

What had come before had all led to a moment when the wealthy elite could nurture and encourage a useful idiot to do their bidding, in a world growing weaker under the weight of increasingly deregulated capitalism. Trump inhabited fertile ground where the shackles of social responsibility had been shaken off, and regulation had left the building. All that was required was an actor with name recognition who could star in a blockbuster fantasy film depicting a new emperor. And so the stage was set.

From the very outset of his 2016 run, he put down a marker that the game had changed. The new rules were that there were no rules, nothing was off limits, and deceit was the new weapon of choice. Nobody knew how to deal with him, as was evident in the presidential primaries, when he gave all his opponents derogatory nicknames to instantly devalue their political brand. At this very moment, flashing lights and red flags should have been waving in the offices of Democratic strategists.

Bear in mind, this was ten years ago, the year that the ‘crooked Hilary’ tag entered the public consciousness, as the floodgates opened to lies, calculated deceit, and the weaponisation of social media. It was so effective that Clinton’s ill-advised term ‘deplorables’ was weaponised against her. A decade on, and still nobody knows how to deal with him and his ability to create a fantasy universe that the world is forced to inhabit. What came before Trump should serve as a demonstration of just how potent an influence he was. The Heritage Foundation had been around for decades, shaping conservative policy since the days of Reagan, and even before that. What’s important to understand is that while it had been successful in shaping policy, it had not controlled it.

Image - The New Yorker

Trump changed everything. He was the perfect subject for the most insidious political experiment in history. Trump was not a politician; he was a narcissistic TV personality in search of political adulation to feed his narcissism. He was a gift from heaven, a fruit ripe for the picking. The Heritage Foundation had, over the years, become the brains of the outfit when it came to the Republican agenda. They’d built a coalition to develop policy and strategic goals for the apex predators of the monied class. It served as the incubator for ever more right-leaning ambition, but, much more than that, it incubated the cross-pollination of politics and religion, building the recipe for cult politics. All they needed to complete the circle was a messiah figure.

Trump is a guy who’s never prepared to share the limelight with anyone, and The Heritage Foundation understood that. They had no desire to have their name up in lights; they were quite happy to work quietly in the background to manipulate the master manipulator. They had long identified that Trump’s weakness was his ego; he had desperately sought praise and affirmation all his life. All they needed to do was keep stroking his ego while carefully shaping his political outlook. A measure of their success was that in his first term, Trump adopted around 64% of their policy agenda. This made the Heritage Foundation the go-to organisation for far-right policy implementation.

Illustration by Bill Kuchman/POLITICO (source images via Getty Images and AP)

What I don’t seem to be able to get people to understand is the untold power that has emerged from the convergence of political populism, embodied by Trump, and the meticulous behind-the-scenes work by the Heritage Foundation to completely reshape politics as we know it. It represents the perfect combination of a pliable, useful idiot with the same meticulous rigour adopted by the Nazi architects of the Third Reich. We are living through the implementation of the oligarchs ‘final solution.’ An attempt at the extermination of global democracy to be replaced by a new corporate world order. An aim that would be almost impossible without the cult of personality.

Trump’s loss in 2020 was, in many ways, a gift to their cause. However much Trump never accepted the loss. For those pulling his strings, it was a perfect opportunity to celebrate the success of implementing 64% of their policy agenda. They now had a chance to reflect on what worked and where the weaknesses were in their original first-term strategy. If they could help get him back in office with the assistance of a bought-and-paid-for Republican majority on the Supreme Court, it would be a precious opportunity to reimagine America in a way that exceeded their wildest dreams.

Project 2025 was born. While Biden put the economy back together from the economic wasteland left by Trump’s first term, a new, expanded Heritage Foundation coalition of partners could smell blood in the water. As a result, they came together to create a blueprint for the tyranny the world is now being forced to endure. They were so emboldened by what they had achieved in his first term that they now believed they had the data and the knowledge to lay the foundations for a reimagined theocratic autocracy. What’s more, they didn’t hide their plans; they wrote them all down and held conferences to plan their assault on democracy. They were out and proud.

There was a very harsh lesson to be learned from the 2024 election, and it remains a problem to this day for Democrats. Over the years, corporate interests have embedded themselves in the culture of politics on both sides of the aisle. This has led to over a third of Americans now identifying as Independents. If the core values of the Democratic Party are to represent the working class while creating the social mobility to build a bridge to and support a stronger middle class, where did it all go wrong?

We’ll take a closer look at that in the next piece.

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