The Ruling Class Coups Against Nixon and Trump

Donald Trump with his legal team in court on April 4 after being indicted on 34 felony counts. [Source: usatoday.com]

Jeremy Kuzmarov

History as usual provides a cautionary lesson

On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace with impeachment proceedings underway against him for the Watergate affair in which five men from his presidential election reelection committee were caught trying to break into and undertake illegal wiretapping in Democratic Party headquarters.

Liberals at the time celebrated Nixon’s downfall, believing that the rule of law had been upheld and that Nixon had been held accountable for his abuses of power.[1]

Poorly understood was the fact that Nixon was set up and was the victim of a plot by a cabal within the military and CIA that paved the way for the ascendancy of neoconservatism.

As Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin detailed in their book, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), the CIA secretly infiltrated the “plumbers” and staged the break-in in a sloppy way—likely without Nixon’s approval—in order to get caught.[2]

The key culprits were CIA officers E. Howard Hunt and James W. McCord Jr., a top aide to former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who were coached to change their testimony before the Senate Watergate hearings to be made more incriminating to Nixon and his top aides.[3]

Another key participant in the plot was Alexander Haig, Nixon’s chief of staff (1973-1974) and Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, who engineered the exposure of the secret White House taping system that recorded all of the President’s conversation in the Oval Office, and subsequently stacked the deck against Nixon’s legal defense.[4]

White House Counsel John Dean III played a crucial role in deceiving Nixon into joining a conspiracy to obstruct justice to cover up a crime he had not actually committed but that Dean had helped orchestrate.[5]

The final revelation that helped undermine Nixon was made by Alexander Butterfield, the White House deputy assistant in charge of supervising the President’s recording system, whom CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr called “the CIA’s man in the White House.”[6]

Mark Felt (AKA “deep throat”), who had overseen COINTELPRO operations before becoming assistant director of the FBI in 1972, leaked the story of the break-in to Bob Woodward, who had an intelligence background going back to his days in the U.S. Navy when he was a briefer for Alexander Haig. Woodward worked for The Washington Post, whose owners, Philip and Katherine Graham, routinely used their newspaper to promote CIA disinformation.

The connection between Woodward and Haig has led some researchers to suggest that Haig was the real “deep throat,” not Felt, whereas others believe the real “deep throat” was someone else high up in the CIA.[7]

The reason that Nixon was targeted was because a faction in the ruling class felt that he was too divisive and could no longer rule by consensus.

Forging an alliance with the Rockefeller wing of the GOP that was part of the East Coast establishment, Nixon adopted tariffs and price controls opposed by high finance, furthermore, and backchannel diplomacy with both Russia and China as a prelude to his support for arms control agreements (notably the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty-SALT I) and détente policies that deescalated tensions in the Cold War.[8]

Nixon additionally opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy, using the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger as a weapon against them after having grown skeptical of their conformism, inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch.[9]

The above policies ignited opposition among neoconservatives, including figures such as Paul Nitze, Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Walt W. Rostow, who mobilized in opposition to détente and rallied support behind Ronald Reagan.[10]

[…]

History Repeating Itself in a Different Way

Fifty years after Nixon’s downfall, the dominant faction of the ruling elite has been involved in another effort—less secret and sophisticated this time—to politically destroy a president who resembles Nixon in certain ways and even shares a key adviser in common (Roger Stone).

Donald Trump is a megalomaniac who presents himself as an outsider like Nixon and whipping boy of the Eastern establishment, while railing against a largely invented left (Trump called arch-capitalist Joe Biden a “trojan horse of socialism”) and calling for law and order.

Like Nixon, Trump is also very polarizing in a way that threatens domestic stability.

The part of the ruling class that hates Trump is in favor of aggressive imperialist actions to strengthen the U.S. empire, whereas the wing supporting Trump is less aggressive internationally because their economic base is rooted in domestic manufacturing, which Trump had promised to revitalize in part through revival of Nixonian protectionist policies, and less in finance.

Though escalating the drone war and provoking confrontation with China, Trump met with American adversaries like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un, and expressed scorn for the CIA in a way no president ever has, suggesting that U.S. intelligence officers are “disgraceful, “politically motivated” and “sick people,” who “spread fake news.”

Trump further earned the ire of many in the ruling class by a) vowing to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, b) cutting back on U.S. troop levels in Iraq, Germany, South Korea and Somalia, c) questioning the legitimacy of NATO, and d) blocking the U.S. from joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” policy that promised endless corporate profits.

Additionally, Trump adopted extreme immigration policies that threatened to undermine cheap labor supply; and advocated at times for an “America First” program that harkened back to early 1930s isolationism.[12]

More recently, Trump offered a stinging rebuke to the Biden administration’s foreign policy, stating in a February 28th speech that “for decades, we’ve had the very same people, such as Victoria Nuland and many others just like her, obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO, not to mention the State Department support for uprisings in Ukraine. These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time, much like in the case in Iraq and other parts of the world and now we’re teetering on the brink of World War III.”

Trump’s volatility, thinly veiled bigotry and crudeness was not in the manner expected of imperial statesmen.[13] Calling his generals “dopes” and “losers,” Trump admitted that America was not really exceptional; stating that Americans had occupied Syria to steal its oil; and telling a Fox News reporter who asked whether Putin had killed his opponents that: “there are a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?”

This isn’t what presidents are supposed to say.

In 2017, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow after Trump challenged the claim that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Bernie Sanders was also seen as a threat to the ruling class in the 2016 and 2020 elections that was successfully contained when he was removed through a rigged primary process by the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Since Trump made it past his party’s gatekeepers, he had to be dealt with by other means.

From Russia-gate to the April 4 Indictment

These means have included the artificially manufactured Russia-gate scandal, which was initiated by the “deep state” as a 21st Century successor to Watergate.

Hillary Clinton, a key mastermind, had herself commenced her career as a Watergate lawyer on the House Judiciary committee, where she began to develop her reputation as a liberal Nixon for her use of political dirty tricks.[14]

The supposed smoking gun in the Russia-gate proceedings was the Steele dossier, which was exposed as a hoax produced by a British spy, Christopher Steele.

An alleged email hack by the Russians that purported to expose their election interference was shown by former intelligence American professionals to have been a leak undertaken somewhere in the U.S. based on the speed of the modem.

When Special Counsel Robert Mueller released a report, it determined there was no evidence to corroborate that Trump had colluded with the Russians to rig the 2016 election.

In 2019, the Democrats tried in vain again to impeach Trump by accusing him of withholding $400 million in military aid to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an attempt to pressure Zelenskyy to launch an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s appointment to the board of a natural gas company in Ukraine, Burisma.

[…]

In 2022, the House formed a select committee to investigate the January 6 Capitol riots, headed by Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-WY), which recommended criminal charges against Trump—now a private citizen—for triggering the insurrection.

While the latter charges held merit, the committee’s singular focus on Trump’s role in provoking the riot left unanswered questions about FBI informants and possible provocateurs among the rioters and other oddities surrounding the events, including some unexplained deaths and the placing of pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before.

The latest salvo in the ruling class plot to remove Trump appears to have taken place on April 4, 2023, when Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records as part of a scheme to cover up two illicit affairs.

Legal experts quickly pointed out that the offense in which Trump is charged is normally categorized as a misdemeanor.

Bragg said in the indictment that Trump made false statements to cover up crimes related to the 2016 election, though he does not lay out any evidence of this—causing Trump’s supporters and many legal experts to question the validity of the case.[16]

Last year, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee agreed to pay fines of $8,000 and $105,000 respectively, for mislabeling a $175,000 expenditure on opposition research, namely the long-discredited “Steele dossier,” as “legal expenses”—which is very similar to what Trump is accused of doing in a slightly different context.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2023/04/26/ruling-class-faction-mounts-coup-against-nixon-and-trump-should-progressives-support-such-efforts/