Koup Aid: Trump's Lethal Brand Of Soft Drink Has Killed Populism

The murder-suicide of Jim Jones' 900 cult followers in 1978 was "the largest single incident of intentional civilian death in American history" - until Donald J Trump began wreaking havoc on society with his own lethal brand of soft drink: 'Koup Aid'. Those of his MAGA cult followers who managed to avoid injecting themselves with bleach now face unemployment, wealth & pension evaporation, incarceration, deportation, bankruptcy and/or starvation, thanks to his mindless, lawless public cost-cutting and destructive tariffs. And you can add to that list the many politicians around the globe who'd pinned their electoral hopes on populism as a route to power. That's over now. A new political strategy is required. 

Trump's global distribution of Koup Aid has been undermining populist regimes the world over since Brazil's Bolsonaro lost in 2018. Argentina's very own chainsaw-wielding maniac faces his own net disapproval ratings. And right 'whinge' leadership hopefuls have just lost their national elections - and their own seats - in Canada and Australia.

While Britain's own Brexidiot populist provocateur, Nigel Farage, continues to enjoy modest electoral success, that's only in a few of his country's predominantly white constituencies who actually suffer little from the 'channel crossings in dinghies' that he ironically clings to for his own political survival (we fear the unknown, after all). Last year's Labour landslide shows that the rest of the country isn't fooled on that front. And the Australian populist parties' own doomed electioneering demonstrates that directly copying Trump's DOGE approach to government efficiency, the "Make [your country's name here] Great Again" slogan and the promise of 'border control' do not carry you into the nation's top political job.

Nope, the populists must find a new route to political power. Gone are the days when the blithering idiots in the Conservative Party, for example, could try to 'out-Nigel' Nigel. And they can only go so far right, anyway, before they meet the blithering idiots on the far left, as Corbynites revealed. 

Such is the nature of what I like to call the Political Opportunity Donut. The Trump experiment in America - and recent electoral victories everywhere else - highlight the political vacuum that has emerged in the 'centre' of western democracies. And 'nature abhors a vacuum', as Aristotle observed, so every aspiring political leader worth their salt is now rushing to fill it.

Of course, the political Centre is also a tough place to be, as Tony 'Bliar', 'Wavy' Dave Cameron and Nick 'Tuition Fee' Clegg all found to their eventual cost in the UK. It's only so long before populists with their phoney issues and respective lethal cocktails emerge on the left and right to try to reclaim the ensuing vacuums elsewhere on the Donut. 

So it always goes. We are where we are.

I must say that I enjoy this Centrist phase. It's when genuine problems get identified and solved. The decent political leader need only focus on that process and demonstrate progress, because it's hard to argue with actual solutions. People even generally enjoy helping. Morale is boosted, which brings its own tailwind.

Of course, there are inevitably heated arguments about which socio-economic problems to solve first, their root causes and potential solutions; and which get more resources than others. But those are political arguments worth having, instead of washing down meaningless slogans with Koup Aid.

Our mistake is to allow politicians to distract us from the problems that remain.

What To Do About The Coup

It's clear that Trump 2.0 is a coup: an illegal and overt attempt to seize control of the United States government. Rather than operating as President (other than in name), Trump's plans involve him running the US government like a private corporation, with himself as chairman and Musk as CEO. Yet while we are in this 'move fast and break things' phase of American politics, Trump and his co-conspirators have opened the way for Congress to turn the tables on them in relation to each of their three key tactics, and it must do so swiftly. 

First, as Vance himself recommended, Congress, the courts and all 'paper protections' are being ignored. This means that Congress should be free to act against Trump, Vance, Musk and the other co-conspirators as it sees fit. Trump (then Vance) could be impeached under the 25th Amendment. Solitary confinement in Guantanamo Bay awaits, pending their trial under Chapter 115 of the US Code.

Second, in their efforts to purge the democracy and dismantle institutions every civil servant in the administrative state is either being fired or replaced by Trump's people. Congress can therefore treat every person who agrees to replace a civil servant as a conspirator in the coup.

Third, in the course of seizing control of government media and information to maintain power, all Government IT and payment systems are being expropriated and modified or replaced using private software and systems without recompense. This may be very difficult to undo, so Congress could simply nationalise all the replacement software and systems and service providers, also without recompense.

The consequences for a coup must be swift and severe. These people knew the risks...

Hey, WTF's Going On?

Well may you ask! I'm assuming you're referring to Trump 2.0: Revenge of the Musk? 

Well I've learned that this is a coup planned among Musk, Thiel and Sacks (Trump's new "Crypto Czar"), the South African members of  the PayPal mafia, with input from Thiel lieutenant, Vice President J.D. Vance. You can read a summary of The Plan by Gil Duran of the Nerd Reich, who has understandably experienced a surge in subscribers since January 20.

“Trump himself will not be the brain …He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of the board—he will select the CEO (an experienced executive). This process, which obviously has to be televised, will be complete by his inauguration—at which the transition to the next regime will start immediately.”

With Musk as the “CEO”, they are systematically rebuilding the US government as if it were post-war Japan. They are replacing federal employees with their own “ninjas” - and extending this to academia and the media. They’re ignoring the courts and “paper protections”, as Vance told them to: 

I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. 

This is an illegal and overt attempt to seize control of the US government. A coup.

You can spot the growth of the techno aspect of their "New Reality" in Google's 2014 declaration of war on the human race and the creed of the techno-optimists. And much I've observed on these pages in between.

Much was made of their $1m 'donation' to attend the Orange Leader's inauguration, but you have to wonder whether Zuckerberg and the other tech oligarchs who were then featured in the front row were also in on the plan - or just presented as if they were.

Can America's institutions hold out? Or will the Republican Party remain complicit in the plan - wittingly or unwittingly?

Or is it too late?

Also bear in mind the leaders of this coup also have the world in their sights, riding the rails of their own borderless technology - AI, crypto meme coins and bubbling bitcoin and the social media - and they're attacking copyright and AI regulation worldwide in an attempt to free-ride on our privacy and creative content and make it their own. 

Now that Musk and the nerds from DOGE control the federal government IT and payment systems, you could replace Mad Marjorie Taylor Greene's "jewish space laser" geoengineering conspiracy theory with a Tesla-Starlink cyborg network fueled by $TRUMP meme coins bought with US government money.  

It's in our power to simply stop using their tech, and there are plenty of independent providers of social media, search, email and so on. 

Or is it too late?

Well, At Least We'll Learn A Lot From These Lunatics

"You only learn when things to wrong," my first legal boss used to remind me, and he wasn't wrong. Four years at the bar, sifting through the debris of old deals, taught me a lot about negotiating new ones. Observing the slow decline of Reuters in the mid-90s was another tutorial, as was enduring the tech boom and bust, working through a bunch of old loans that GE had bought a decade later and then launching Zopa into the teeth of the credit boom and ensuing financial crisis. Advising on the odd regulatory hiccup since then has reinforced the concept, which also helps with morale, of course. And with so much 'going wrong' on such a grand scale right now, maintaining morale is more important than ever. So what do we stand to learn? Well, I reckon the top 3 lessons of 2020 will be: the importance of facts, that the worst is yet to come and we need to figure out how to preserve government know how for when it can be used again...

You Can't Fight The Facts: The Truth Will Out...

The current crop of populist leaders have all seized power by targeting nationalistic lies at the gullible. The marriage of patriotism and intelligence has ended in divorce. Whether it's #ScottyFromMarketing downunder, Trump, Modi, Maduro, Bolsinaro, Erdogan, Orban or our very own #BrexitBoris, they've all avoided letting the truth get in the way of an emotive story. 

It's not unusual for politicians to lie, misinform and gaslight their voters. What is unusual is the sheer scale of the latest political mendacity. 

Yet, the bigger the lie, the harder it is to control or suppress the truth, and one by one these fascistic fantasists are finding themselves facing hot blasts of unadulterated fact. Eventually their lies will be exposed for all to see, and any majority support will melt away.

But don't hold your breath...

Nationalist Economies Will Get Much Worse Before They Get Better...

The 'quid pro quo' (to borrow a well-worn phrase from 2019) for this love affair with lies is that nationalist governments are not focused on their societies' genuine problems, let alone solving the root causes of those problems. Nationalism involves denying the real problems and blaming others for imaginary ones. This creates new problems while the country's infrastructure and governing processes decay. This has been a constant feature of the Trump regime, in particular (as Michael Lewis has observed), but is perhaps best encapsulated by Brexit. 

Reversing the decay will require an electorate to fall out of love with the lies and support reform. That would give politicians permission to identify and define the actual problems, prioritise the most pressing ones, burrow into the data to identify the root causes and the improvements that would provide the most bang for the buck, and put in place the warning systems to alert us to future failings. The changes would need to be communicated carefully, in the face of inevitable resistance by the rump of nationalist disciples. But that process would take a looooong time, since anyone who understands the issues today will have lost interest, retired or found a new role by the time things get bad enough for anyone to want to fix them, let alone muster widespread support for doing so.  

Compare that process with Dum Cummings latest blog post (ironically entitled 'Two hands are a lot' since he couldn't find his arse with both of them). His undoubted success as a right wing, nationalist, populist political strategist will be dwarfed by his failure as a government strategist. But the Johnson government will have to be seen to fail before anyone else will get a mandate to undertake the huge job of reversing the decline.

This raises the problem of how to avoid losing government know how in the meantime... 

Preserving Government Knowledge

How to manage the transition from one manager to another (succession-planning) is a major issue for everyone, especially large organisations and government departments. Michael Lewis has revealed that it was not something that ever concerned Donald Trump, and there is plenty of evidence from British civil servants that it was not a high priority for Cameron or May, and it is certainly lost on Boris Johnson. Many senior civil servants have left government, often simply to retire. Their knowledge and experience will have been lost without adequate transition arrangements. Meanwhile, the ministerial leadership, policies and/or performance of departments like the Home Office, Health, Work and Pensions, Prisons and Transport seem on the slide from bad to worse.

Similarly, areas of policy and funding that the UK agreed to centralise within the EU, and the framework on which Britain trades with the EU and other countries under EU free trade deals will be lost. Britain doesn't have any civil servants duplicating tasks that were performed at EU level (like funding the EU's least economically developed regions, 6 of which are in the UK); and the EU trade deals cannot be replicated outside the EU (and certainly not within the 11 months May and Johnson negotiated).

In the microcosm of a large government department poorly overseen by ignorant ministers and deserted by seasoned officials, or a region dependent on development knowledge and funding, this represents a massive dislocation. To put this in context, Venezuela's institutions collapsed in under 20 years, and the Soviet Union fell apart in 6 years. Hell, it only took 40 years for Britain's entire economy to collapse after the Romans left. 

The history of the British civil service is littered with experiments on how best to equip the nation's institutions with the right knowledge, expertise and experience. It does not make encouraging reading, but if Britain's economic history is anything to go by, it seems likely to take at least 10 years to turn things around, if there's the will to begin the process and work at it...

Conclusion

If we only learn when things go wrong, we're going to learn an awful lot!  

It's Time To Focus On Johnson's AltRight And Russian Links

With Boris Johnson desperate for a quick General Election, it's important to be aware that the Trump Presidency is simultaneously unravelling over links with Dmitry Firtash, securities fraudster Lev Parnas and the mob and the British authorities are reported to have their own concerns about some of Johnson's relationships. The legality of these need to be clarified if we are to have any chance of avoiding another election featuring fake news and dodgy funding, though Facebook isn't proving helpful either...

Johnson's links with Trump's AltRight pals include Steve Bannon and the Breitbart Boys - like Trump's speechwriter and rally fluffer, Stephen Miller. Bannon has advised Boris Johnson, among other European right wing political party leaders. And Miller attended the Innotech Summit hosted by Johnson's pole-dancing "friend" Jennifer Arcuri, whose links with Johnson are also the subject of investigation. Matthew Elliott chaired Johnson's Vote Leave campaign, and brings an array of AltRight contacts and funding links.

Johnson has also been linked to Russian tycoons Lebedev and Temerko, while Tory Brexidiots and Vote Leave's campaign director and Johnson adviser, Dom Dum Cummings, have long-standing ties to Dmitry Firtash - the same Ukrainian 'oligarch' at the heart of Trump's attempt to lift sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and for the Ukrainians to publicly investigate his 2020 campaign opponent - for which Trump is now being impeached.

That's also important because Vanity Fair recently reminded us that:

"...Trump called Johnson on July 26, two days after the new U.K. prime minister took office, apparently to ask BoJo for help compiling evidence to undermine the investigation into his campaign‘s ties to Russia. For those of you keeping up at home, that’s just one day after Trump spoke to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and asked for “a favor...”

Note that US Republicans consider that donations arranged by Trump henchman Lev Parnas are so dodgy that they were simply returned.

All of this also makes you wonder again where Arron Banks' £8m donation to the Leave cause might have ultimately came from... even if it was not unlawful.

And with Fakebook determined not to police political advertising and yet to admit any wrongdoing to the UK's Information Commissioner over Cambridge Analytica, we could well be in for another dodgy British election.

Meet The Schadenfreuders

As the majority of voters in the western liberal democracies - ironically labelled the "liberal elite" - work their way along the 'change curve' after shocks like Brexit and the rise of Corbyn, Trump and others, their initial shock, denial, anger and blame is giving way to resignation and acceptance... and with it a little pleasure at the growing misfortunes of the 'winners'.

I'm the first to admit that the premise of "Lipstick on a Pig" was that 'people power' would be wielded more wisely than the power of the institutions they topple.  Yet I also pointed out that we are badly short of scepticism, that democracy should be a messy process, and that greed and stupidity are still winning. Pragmatism, after all, is not a destination but represents the constant struggle of "intelligent practice versus uninformed, stupid practice".

So it's all part of the familiar trends toward greater personal control that the Brexiteers can't agree what Brexit means; Corbyn is not proving the electoral champion that his supporters had believed; and Trump has had to concede that the US will in fact pay for any 'Wall' along its southern border, in the hope that Mexico will pay later... 

In other words, the recent populist 'victories' have merely wrung the same old institutional failings out of the same old political parties. And those who fell for the latest examples of 'stupid practice' will need to learn that lesson before we will begin to see the triumph of intelligent practice from genuine 'facilitators'. 

The question is how many more opportunities for schadenfreude there will be in the meantime...

I love the Germans. They've got a word for everything (as Nigel Farage will surely know).