Trump’s Brain

Brainwashing

In 1967, Michigan Gov. George Romney was being considered as one of the potential Republican candidates for president; America was trying to emerge from the shock of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (it would enter into shock once again a year later with the murder of his brother, Bob) and Lyndon Johnson, the vice president who had taken his place, was reaching the conclusion that he should not run in light of the Vietnam disaster Kennedy had caused.

So, Republicans saw the possibility of reconquering the White House, and the candidacy of the Mormon George Romney (father of Mitt, who would then challenge Obama in 2012) appeared in many ways the favorite compared to that of Richard Nixon. But his race for the presidency came to an end before it even started after he made one of the most uproarious gaffes in the history of U.S. politics: During a televised interview, in order to justify his change of opinion on the Vietnam War (from pro to con), he affirmed that his previous support had been the consequence of “an effective brainwashing” that he had undergone at the hands of “the military and the diplomatic corpus.”

For Americans, the image of a president who can be manipulated in his convictions and who is therefore not an independent decision-maker was unacceptable, so the GOP discharged him for Nixon.

Moreover, in those years of full-out Cold War, the symbolic imagination of Americans had been shaken by one of the most conspiracy based films in the history of Hollywood: “The Manchurian Candidate,” the story of the “brainwashing” to which Soviet Communists had subjected a group of American soldiers captured in Korea in order to kill a U.S. presidential candidate.

The theme of manipulation is a constant one in American politics; a U.S. president must be decisive, determined, but above all capable of defending the national interest through autonomy of judgment and liberty of thought; “brainwashing” is the most serious kind of corruption because it implies an even deeper corruption capable of putting the nation in danger.

Is Trump the Manchurian Candidate?

Today, one of the accusations of the Washington establishment is that Donald Trump is precisely “a sleeper candidate,” a “Manchurian Candidate” instrumental for foreign powers that want to destroy America.

In fact, the accusation came about as a joke more than anything else: In September of 2015, during Bill Maher’s TV show, Salman Rushdie joked about the fact that Trump was Hillary’s Manchurian Candidate, infiltrated by the Clintons in order to destroy the Republican Party. But at that time, Trump had just entered the fray, was a simple and improbable outsider among conservatives, and was the subject of derision for those same smartypants of the radical-chic left that in the U.S., just as in Italy, compete to show how little they understand about what happens outside of their living rooms.

But now that Trump is really playing the match to become the 45th president of the U.S., the accusation of him being a puppet controlled by something outside of America is becoming serious.

Last July in The Washington Post, Anne Applebaum, a Polish-American intellectual of the neocon school, affirmed that behind Trump is the inevitable Russia of Putin (with all of the hidden conspiracy theory stupidities). And even more often, American government workers, former CIA agents and mainstream experts have feared that the Trump danger presents a risk to national security.

Trump versus Neocon and Liberal

In reality, Trump scares the powerful America not because of his ideas about immigration or Islam, not for his economic prescriptions, but for his foreign policy positions, which are light-years away from the warmongering hysterics of the last 20 years of neocons and Clinton liberals.

Trump recalled that the war in Iraq came out of a lie (the one about chemical weapons, something that has now become official) and that invasion was “the worst decision” for America; that the intervention in Libya was wrong, that Putin’s Russia is not necessarily the enemy of the U.S., that NATO is an obsolete alliance, and that the U.S. can no longer allow itself to sustain the expense of protecting and defending rich allies like Saudi Arabia and Japan.

All this sounds like heresy to the ears of those who, in the past few years, have prospered on the farce of “humanitarian wars,” on the war on terrorism that produces more terrorism (as we have shown here), and on the idea that the U.S. is the policeman of the world and must maintain its global role at all costs.

For this reason, last March, some of the most influential neoconservative intellectuals published an open letter in which they distanced themselves from Donald Trump; and some of them, like, for example, Robert Kagan, theorist of global American war (and husband of Victoria Nuland, an architect, on behalf of Obama, of the crisis in Ukraine and the face-off with Russia) have gone lock, stock and barrel over to the Clintons and Democrats; that’s the paradox of those who accuse Trump of being a tool for foreign powers and then choose a candidate who receives millions of dollars in financing from tyrannical foreign governments.

Trump’s Realism

In reality, Donald Trump does not want to reduce America but wants to reassign its role in a multipolar world. His foreign policy positions harken back to the tradition of the great American conservative realism: He is aware of the disaster of the past few years in the Middle East and of the fact that America is no longer an economic superpower capable of solely maintaining order in the world; and with the world, it’s necessary to take stock. In reality, he who is depicted as a daredevil candidate is the most attentive to the complexity of the international scenario and of the real situation the U.S. is experiencing (and some are starting to recognize it).

Barack Obama had fascinated the international community with his vision of a multipolar world that would have restored America its role as a moral guide, no longer that of the world’s policeman. Then, once he was elected and pocketed the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of good faith, he became the most warmongering president in history: He has increased the U.S. military commitment, multiplied humanitarian wars, financed international destabilizations (from the Arab Spring to Ukraine), definitively transformed NATO into an instrument for American expansion in Europe, filled Africa and Asia with secret bases from where he sends lethal drones for safe bombings, approved the Pentagon’s plans for the “invisible war,” and stationed special forces and contractors trained by the CIA within dozens of countries in the world where there is conflict.

Trump, at least based on what he says, intends to do exactly the opposite. The most unlikely presidential candidate in American history seems to have, at least in foreign policy, very clear ideas; for this reason, it was arranged that in the first televised debate with Clinton these arguments would go unmentioned.

The whole American power system is against Trump, not just his immediate political rival: Wall Street and Goldman Sachs are fighting him, the CIA and part of the Pentagon, the mainstream and diplomatic environments, and the circle of intellectuals influenced by Hollywood. In a democracy where much less than half of the citizens vote, all of this matters.

But Trump’s brain is not manipulated. On the contrary, it works very well; and that’s what his adversaries cannot accept.