(Editorial Note: This piece originally appeared on Dave Martin’s site in May 2017 but has lost none of its timeliness since then.)
Now that our newly elected president has quickly and unceremoniously dropped all pretense of being opposed to the neocon-neoliberal American Empire agenda, one has to wonder why the mainstream media, led by The Washington Post and The New York Times, seem to feel the need to keep pounding away at him so viciously. His cabinet, with its Wall Street and Goldman Sachs connections, looks just like what we would have gotten had Hillary Clinton been elected, and so does his foreign policy. His United Nations ambassador, former Marco Rubio supporter and Republican pro-Israel establishment darling, Nikki Haley, has probably been more anti-Russian in her rhetoric and policy pronouncements than was her Russophobic predecessor Samantha Power, while her boss, Trump, has already done his predecessor one better in Syria by launching a criminal attack against a sovereign nation based upon wildly improbable “gassing” allegations that were no more substantive this time than they were when they were made when Barack Obama was the president.
Indeed, Trump’s 180-degree reversal of course from an America-first to the same globalist foreign policy against which he railed in his campaign, whether it be in confrontation of Russia with NATO or confrontation of China over North Korea, has been like a big pie in the face of many of the better informed people who voted for him. They knew all along that he had previously espoused “liberal” positions on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, but they were willing to set aside his apparent lack of any actual core principles because he was really the only candidate in the field in either party who said the right things about the invade-the-world, invite-the-world policies that have the country on the road to ruin. Now he has made it apparent that he never really meant any of it. He was only saying what he found it necessary to say to garner votes; either that, or he was just playing an assigned role all along.
The Accidental President?
Considering the over-the-top nature of much of Trump’s political rhetoric, from his characterization of illegal Mexican immigrants as “rapists” in his candidacy announcement speech to his call for an absolute ban on Muslim immigration and a return to torture in interrogation of suspected terrorists, one really have to wonder if his initial intention was to present himself as a serious contender for the presidency. Furthermore, his schoolyard bully-boy insults of his political opponents in the Republican primary debates seemed almost designed to alienate the members of what we might call “polite society” and to garner sympathy for those whom he attacked.
I don’t think that it’s at all far fetched to suggest that Trump was not put up as a candidate who had any chance to win but rather as something of a clown who would be the only one to give voice to popular and legitimate positions on immigration, trade, and foreign policy. The purpose was to package attractive ideas in the unattractive wrappings of real estate and casino mogul, reality show star and publicity hound, Donald Trump, and thereby discredit them. One might argue that the tactic had been used successfully before when the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, burst upon the national scene in 1950 with charges of widespread infiltration of the government by Communists. The charges were legitimate, but McCarthy had not previously exhibited much interest in the subject and he and particularly his young subordinates, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, made their case in such a way that the whole notion of Communist infiltration of the government ended up being treated as an issue that had no merit.
Then something unexpected happened. The sympathy for the establishment’s preferred candidate, the man against whom Trump directed most of his initial crude put-downs, Jeb Bush, completely failed to materialize. Trump, in his Jeb-bashing, carefully stayed far away from what we might call Roger Stone territory, but it turned out that the Bushes are so unpopular that being rude to one of them in public turned out to be not an unpopular thing to do. Rather, with his brashness and apparent iconoclasm, and because the issues he chose to run on are so popular, Trump found himself at the head of a popular movement. Even the Joe McCarthy-like treatment he got and continues to get from the mainstream press helped him instead of hurting him, because they are probably even more unpopular these days than the Bushes.
An important clue as to who Trump really is is to be found in what the mainstream media chose to emphasize in their attacks upon him and, even more important, the possibly very important negative things about him that they have consistently chosen to ignore. In the first category, the big one has been that Trump and his supporters are bigoted and racist. Trump played into those charges with his characterization of illegal Mexican immigrants in his candidacy announcement speech and his call for a blanket prohibition on Muslim immigration, and later with his claim that a Mexican American judge would be biased against him in a case involving Trump University because of the man’s ethnicity. The media went further with the characterization by calling attention to the fact that he had the support of such dubious white nationalism advocates as Jared Taylor, Richard B. Spencer, and David Duke and by publicizing the ginned-up disruptions often led by black people, which they mischaracterized as legitimate “protests,” at Trump’s political rallies. The manner in which Trump was painted by the mainstream media is well encapsulated in this short BBC clip.
What They Don’t Report
The media gave no emphasis at all, however, to the fact that Trump had the enthusiastic support of such a notorious Israel-first Islamophobe as Pamela Geller, however, as well as someone like former left-wing radical David Horowitz, another putative “conservative” with a similar Zionist agenda to Geller’s. Certainly we heard no call from the press or from the Democrats for Trump to “disavow” support from such people. Neither did they give any publicity at all to the ringing endorsement that Trump gave to Benjamin Netanyahu, injecting himself into Israel’s domestic politics on the right-wing, most Palestinian-oppressive side, back in 2013, long before Trump was a presidential candidate in this country.
As much as the press would seem to want to discredit him, the failure of the press and Trump’s other opponents to give any publicity at all to the “Battle of the Billionaires” and the “impromptu” wrestling match in which he engaged with WWE head Vince McMahon, also in 2013, is quite remarkable. It’s really hard to think of anything that makes Trump look more like a phony and a fraud, whose promises and threats alike are completely empty and without meaning, than these episodes with the professional wrestling king, McMahon.
But think of it. How often have critics of the modern American political system called it “one big professional wrestling match?” (For one example, see here.) It really wouldn’t do to let the public in on the fact that the bunch of politicians that our controlling criminal elite allow to wield the illusion of power—at least ever since John F. Kennedy was assassinated—are really nothing more than just so many professional wrestlers putting on a show of opposition to one another.
Donald Trump and the Mob
Speaking of our ruling criminal elite, one would have thought right off the bat that Trump’s biggest vulnerability would have been his connections to organized crime. He built buildings in New York City and he owned casinos, after all. One hardly needs to be a scholar to know that the New York construction industry and the casino industry are almost synonymous with organized crime. Concerning the matter, David Marcus of The Federalist has this to say:
Trump was building his eponymous empire of hotels, casinos, and high rises in the early 1980s in New York City and Atlantic City. In both places, the construction industry was firmly under the thumb of the mafia. And in both places there are literally concrete connections between La Cosa Nostra and Trump’s lavish projects. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for decades, has written a very useful list of questions for Trump. Many focus on his ties to the mob. In addition in his 1992 book, “Trump, The Deals and the Downfall,” author Wayne Barrett lays out a slew of suspicious dealings and associations.
Writing his article in late July of 2016, Marcus, who is clearly a strong left-wing opponent of Trump, seems puzzled as to why the press is not picking up on this potentially huge scandal lurking in Trump’s past:
As one of a handful of people within reach of the most powerful office in the world Donald Trump must explain why so much of his early career is peppered with appearances by powerful underworld figures. Had Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, or Scott Walker bought so much as a used car from a known mafioso, it would be front-page news. Trump bought a piece of land for $1 million from the son of Philadelphia’s former mafia Don, and used it to launch a gambling empire.
It isn’t only Trump who has a responsibility here. The news media, which is enjoying his playful romp through electoral politics, needs to wake up on this story. Trump isn’t just fooling around this time. He wants to play in the big leagues, and in the big leagues they play hardball. The major investigative news outlets in this country with the resources and wherewithal to seriously scrutinize Trump’s ties to the mob need to start doing so, sooner rather than later.
But they didn’t and they haven’t and if Marcus is going to hold his breath waiting for them to get onto this story he’s going to be a goner pretty soon. Our controlled press would much prefer to chase the phantom of Trump’s collusion with the Russians rather than his verified collusion with known mobsters like the late Roy Cohn—yes that Roy Cohn.
Some pretty strong hints are to be found in the article behind that “Roy Cohn” link, which is primarily made up of a long excerpt from the late Michael Collins Piper’s book, The New Jerusalem: Zionist Power in America. Here is a sample:
Everyone knows, of course, about Trump’s gambling operations and of the wide-ranging links of the gambling industry to organized crime. But the story is much bigger than that. In his own memoir, The Art of the Deal, Trump proudly described how in 1987 he bought his first casino interests when he purchased 93% of the voting stock in the Resorts International gambling concern.
What Trump doesn’t tell his readers is what the late Andrew St. George reported in The Spotlight on October 30, 1978 (and in the previous September 25, 1978, issue): Resorts International was established and controlled by front men for the Rockefeller and Rothschild families and their “enforcers” in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its allied intelligence agency, Israel’s Mossad.
What made the report so explosive was that this newspaper pointed out that the illegally rigged casinos were being operated with the collusion of “respectable” politicians, law enforcement officials, Wall Street financiers who floated loans to finance the gambling resorts and the high-profile gambling resort operators themselves.
In 1987, upon the death of longtime CIA front man James Crosby, the nominal head of Resorts International, up-and-coming young New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump stepped into the picture and bought Crosby’s interest in the gambling empire.
Trump soon became a household name, with his colorful personality and his insistence upon naming a variety of luxury hotels, apartment houses and other commercial ventures after himself. But while the name “Trump” appeared in the headlines, the names of the real movers behind Resorts International remained hidden from public view.
One can connect a few more dots by going back to my review of The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America by Sally Denton and Roger Morris, especially the section, “Media Front Men?” We discuss the longtime close association between organized crime and the CIA, but go further to show how the association also involves the major news media, The Washington Post in particular. Not mentioned in that article is the fact that Jeff Bezos, the man who ostensibly bought the big money loser from the Graham family, has a $600 million contract to provide certain computer services to the CIA.
So insofar as The Post is representative of the mainstream news media, they are no more likely to start writing about Trump’s mob ties than they are about what’s really behind the devastating U.S. heroin death overdose epidemic. Even less should we expect to see them writing about where Jewish organized crime and virulent Zionism come together with Trump, in the person of his powerful son-in-law, Jared Kushner. We should not forget that on Trump’s first day in office he went over to CIA headquarters where he made a warmly received speech to some 400 employees of the agency.
Donald Trump and Christopher Ruddy
The article linked to above on Kushner suggests that Trump has changed now that he is in office, having been taken over by his Jewish mob-connected son-in-law. Certainly, as we note at the beginning of the article, Trump has certainly radically changed his policies in the foreign realm from those that he ran on and probably got him elected. My experience with longtime Trump crony and Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy suggests to me that these two New Yorkers are very similar people, that although both can exhibit a chameleon-like ability to change political coloration and positions, they remain the same people that they have always been.
When Ruddy came along several months after the death by gunshot of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, Jr., those of us who had seriously looked into the case wanted very much to believe that he was different from the other journalists. He gave every indication that he, in contrast to virtually the entire journalistic community, was actually interested in investigating the case and was not just content to parrot or even amplify the government line. He became the face and the voice of the opposition, the point man for what Hillary Clinton called the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that was “out to get the Clintons,” but like the coyote chasing the road runner, never managed to get them. As of 2014, though, as we quote from Businessweek in our article, “Double Agent Ruddy Reaches for Media Pinnacle,” “He has become friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton and won’t rule out supporting Hillary for president in 2016.” He has also been a big contributor to the Clinton Foundation and has traveled internationally with them on their airplane.
Where was the old truth-seeking, current Trump buddy Ruddy back in May of last year when Trump made the statement that there was “something fishy” about the Vince Foster death? If ever there was anyone who knows the truth of those words, it is Ruddy. Did Ruddy have his friend’s back? Uh…no. Like the fox in the famous Uncle Remus tar baby story, “Brer Chris, he lay low.” To my knowledge, there was not a peep from Ruddy personally, but his “conservative” news organ Newsmax joined the baying hounds of The Washington Post, CNN, and their ilk, screaming outrage. Newsmax spotlighted the Washington Post op-ed piece that I believe Hugh Turley and I have pretty thoroughly demolished respectively with “Vince Foster’s Indignant but Curiously Unconcerned Sister” and “Sheila Anthony Defends Her Changed Foster Story,” and Newsmax further referenced scurrilous, indefensible attacks on Trump for his remarks by Jake Tapper of CNN and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.
A normal person, particularly a supposedly vindictive person like Trump is painted to be, one would expect would be upset at this apparent knife in the back by Ruddy on the Foster issue. Instead, as we saw in that C-Span interview of Ruddy, their relationship seems to be closer than ever these days, with the Clinton-schmoozing Ruddy even having been invited into the Oval Office for a get-together with the president. Trump’s critical observations on the Foster case, it turned out, were just so much pre-wrestling-match bluster to get the partisans worked up, which, in the final analysis, was all that Ruddy’s supposed “investigation” of the case amounted to, as well. Had Trump been serious and if he had really wanted to respond with real effect to those who had attacked him over his Foster remarks, all he had to do was to call attention to the attachment to Kenneth Starr’s report on Vince Foster’s death, ordered put there by the judges who had appointed Starr, that completely destroys the conclusion that Foster committed suicide. Instead, he announced that he would have nothing further to say on the Foster case unless some “new evidence” came to light, when, in fact, the best evidence he had was the old evidence that the supposedly hated press had, to their eternal discredit, universally ignored.
Perhaps there is a connection to Trump’s ultimate reticence on the Foster case and the unpublicized fact that Foster spent his last weekend along with Webster Hubbell at the estate of Nathan Landow on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Landow is a major political contributor to the Democratic Party whose nomination to be Ambassador to The Netherlands once ran aground when his joint casino investments with the Gambino family and the Meyer Lansky organization came to light.
In my “Double Agent Ruddy” article I argue that Ruddy has never been the person that he has been presented to be. Particularly in his role as founder and CEO of Newsmax, it is clear to me that he has never been anything more than a front man. Who he is likely fronting for is found in this passage from the article:
Maybe the answer is to be found in an important bit of information that is left out of the Businessweek article. They tell us that Ruddy studied abroad at the London School of Economics, which is unusual enough for this 12th child of a policeman and a homemaker, but they fail to tell us where else he has studied abroad, at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Imagine that. Businessweek says that Ruddy comes from a Catholic family that didn’t regularly go to church. Did the mother, perhaps, take them to the synagogue, instead?
It’s not just because of Ruddy’s studies in Jerusalem and the conventional pro-Israel neocon politics of the Newsmax web site that I raise the question. Once I happened to make some rather routine critical comment about Israel, and Ruddy’s sharp rejoinder in disagreement really surprised me. He seemed to take what I was saying about Israel personally. I recently ran across an observation by Professor Kevin MacDonald that reminded me very much of how Ruddy reacted at that time: “I have encountered many liberal, politically correct Jews who react vociferously (almost violently) to the most innocuous comments about any topic related to Israel or Jews.”
Now take another look at the close relationship that Ruddy has with Trump and at Trump’s own close relationship to hidden and not-so-hidden Jewish power. Ruddy and Trump look to me like they are fronting for the same people.