Traitor or Useful Idiot?
Donald Trump has nominated Tulsi Gabbard to be his director of national intelligence. Gabbard is an overtly pro-Putin propagandist, an apologist for communist China, a willing and unmasked agent for foreign tyrants with blatantly anti-American agendas. Does Trump know this, and is he choosing her because she will compromise America’s national security for the sake of furthering totalitarian goals in Europe and East Asia? Or is he so blinded by flattery that he somehow remains oblivious to her positions on the key foreign policy threats of the age, positions which make Tucker Carlson’s pro-Putin propaganda seem almost mild by comparison?
That is, is Trump himself a deliberate traitor or a de facto one, which is to say a useful idiot of world-historical proportions? Anyone who would have questioned my pre-election (pre-multiple-elections) declaration that voting for Trump is voting against the United States, now has as clear a proof of my point as any that could be offered. If Trump gave a national address from the Oval Office announcing that he was actively taking steps to facilitate the gradual absorption of Europe by Putin, and the immediate concession of Taiwan and most of the rest of East Asia to Xi Jinping, it would not make the case for his unfitness any more clear than he has made it by nominating Gabbard for a strategically essential national security post.
If there were still any reason to care about the Republican Party as a formerly viable vehicle for rational republicanism in the U.S., this would be a litmus test or line in the sand moment for the GOP members of the Senate. Voting against Gabbard’s nomination — the only path consistent with the ideas of American sovereignty and political liberty — would be an open admission that the GOP Senate was unwilling to accept the product for which it recently paid so dearly. It would be a repudiation of the Trump presidency and Trump’s personal authority as a leader. Luckily, we needn’t worry about such things anymore, since the Republican Party has already delegitimized and beclowned itself so thoroughly that it no longer matters what they do. The party, like the country as a whole, has surrendered its moral core and its common sense reasoning to such a degree that we are now merely waiting for all the sundry parts to hit the ground, so the rest of us can assess the extent of the damage and figure out how we are all supposed to make our way into a very bleak future without America as the “shining city on a hill” that it once was but never will be again.
