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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
Manipulating the US president to make his domestic and foreign policy decisions as Stephen Miller of the White House (lead image-3) is doing with President Donald Trump (lead image-2) is not new.
Jimmy Carter tried to dismantle the bureaucracy and the mindset (ideology) of the “imperial presidency”, as he called the White House during the election campaign of 1976. But then Carter fell under the spell of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; he controlled what the president was told was the evidence for his policy choices, the risks, and the consequences. In this way, Brzezinski more than influenced the policy outcomes Carter believed he was deciding for himself.
(One of them was the secret US war [3] with the Kremlin in Afghanistan.)
Carter required that his decision-making process start and end on paper; he read reams of it in the personal study off the Oval Office. He demanded his intelligence briefing every morning. However, connected by an internal passage of connecting doors, Brzezinski supervised what was in the papers and vetted who walked in the outer Oval Office door to have words with the President.
Trump prefers pictures, screens of them, and he gets one intelligence briefing per week, followed by interpretation over lunch in the private White House dining room from Vice President JD Vance. Miller controls the paper, especially the virtual posts, the press gaggles on aircraft in flight and airfields at takeoff and landing, and in the Oval Office. Vance coaches Trump through his misspeaking, memory failures, political gaffes.
Listen now to the way in which the method and purpose of these new men differs from anything in the history of the American presidency; and how the leaders of the European allies, the UK, and Canada exploit what they believe they know in order to get the policy decisions they want from Trump — that is, after Miller, Vance and others have decided and Trump has been persuaded.
Then once you understand, ask whether the calculations of the allies, and also of the main enemy at present, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, are misjudgements of what serves their national strategies best.
Chris Cook’s latest Gorilla Radio show was broadcast on Wednesday evening British Columbia time. Our segment starts at Minute 29.35 [4].
[5]Source: https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-radio-with-chris-cook-chris [6] beginning at Minute 29:35
For the realization in London of Miller’s current role as Trump’s “prime minister”, click on this September 29 report of the Financial Times [7].
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