WaPo story of an NSC ex-staffer's memo that cost him his job (McMaster fired him) while winning him a fan in Trump, who obtained the memo from Donny Jr. (And why is the
executive director of the Trump Organization getting such a memo? "Republicans have stopped caring about email security.").
The president’s enemies, Higgins claims, are employing “political warfare as understood by the Maoist Insurgency model.” Even Republican leaders have been subjugated, Higgins says, because they are “more afraid of being accused of being called a racist, sexist, homophobe or lslamophobe than of failing to enforce their oaths to ‘support and defend the Constitution.’?” (Yes, Higgins says you and I have a choice: Either don’t be homophobic or support the Constitution.) He concludes chillingly, “The recent turn of events give rise to the observation that the defense of President Trump is the defense of America.” [as kooky as anything WIS's moy writes!]
The roots of the Higgins memo go back decades in the history of the right. Extreme-right groups such as the John Birch Society have long warned of cultural-Marxist-led conspiracies. (The memo’s first footnote cites a JBS member’s interview with a Soviet defector on “how Jewish Marxist ideology is destabilizing the economy.”) Past Republican presidents didn’t mind getting these groups’ votes, but Birchers and their like were kept far away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Not so in Trump’s White House. Thankfully, Higgins’s time at the NSC was short. But the memo found its way to the president anyway, via a curious route. “Among those who received the memo,” reports Foreign Policy, “according to two sources, was Donald Trump Jr.” We may never know the reason an NSC staffer was sharing a “technical assessment” with the executive director of the Trump Organization, since Republicans have stopped caring about email security. But however Trump Jr. obtained the document, he “gave the memo to his father, who gushed over it, according to sources.” Trump “is still furious” that Higgins was forced out.
Trump’s attraction to an alternate reality where he is the target of the political elite, the banking elite, Marxists, the Islamic State, the deep state and professors from coast to coast fits in nicely with one of his rules: Nothing is ever his fault. He blamed a botched raid in Yemen on “the generals.” He blamed the failure of his Trump Shuttle airline on the economy. He blamed his failures in Atlantic City on two executives who died working for him. Facing declining poll numbers and an utter failure to “drain the swamp” or repeal major Obama-era legislation, the president once again has resorted to playing the victim. He remains, as one White House ally put it to The Post in May, “in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.”