Sidney Blumenthal on Trump’s 2024 campaign

Back in the mists of the past, in 1986, Ronald Reagan was in the White House looking like a mature statesman in comparison to the current Republican Presidential nominee. Americans were still cheering the Muslim jihadists, then known as the Brave Mujahadeen Freedom Fighters, who was battling the Soviet troops supporting the Soviet-allied government of Afghanistan. The Iran-Contra scandal broke into public knowledge late in the year. Reagan was getting along with the head of what he had called the Evil Empire, Mikhail Gorbachev, and they were making major progress on nuclear arms control.

Ronald Reagan: A Major Station on the Republicans’ Road to Donald Trump

And Sidney Blumenthal published a book on the neoconservative trend then ascending in influence in the Republican Party, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment (1986). It was an important analysis of some of the most influential neocon trends and institutions that provided a much more insightful and critical look at their movement than they were receiving from mainstream reporting or even from the liberal left. His son Max Blumenthal followed in his journalistic steps for a while, notably with an excellent report on the Christian Right, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (2009).

Max drifted into a left environment whose take on international events became more shrill and less rigorous than his early approach. But Sidney remained more within the confines of the Democratic Party, serving as a senior advisor to Bill Clinton during his second Presidential term. He also wrote a decent account of Clinton’s battles with what Hillary famously described as the VRWC (vast right-wing conspiracy), i.e., Kenneth Starr, Newt Gingrich, and various other more-than-dubious characters on the steadily-radicalizing Republican side, The Clinton Wars (2003).

As I recall, that was one of the very first e-books I ever bought and read on my Microsoft Pocket PC. (Yes, I was there in the Dark Ages already.) Once Microsoft gave up on the e-book market, I was permanently locked out of the Microsoft e-books I had bought. Which made me a major fan ever since of PDF books, because the format is so very widely used that when something eventually succeeds it, the PDFs are very likely to be convertible to whatever the Next Big Thing is.

Timothy Noah also recalls one of Blumenthal’s less inspiring projects, the “Third Way” alliance in which Bill Clinton and Tony Blair joined in an informal Neoliberal International in the effort to bury progressive economics. As Timothy Noah wrote:

Blumenthal was Clinton’s big-ideas man, the guy who got whisked into the Oval Office whenever the president wanted to consider his place in the cosmos. Blumenthal’s principal task was to organize a series of conferences on the “Third Way,” wherein marquee intellectuals and leaders from various countries gathered at swell places like Harold Acton’s Tuscan Villa La Pietra to steer the course of history, as the cliché goes, past the Scylla of collectivism and the Charybdis of market fundamentalism. Perhaps the only sincere compliment I can pay Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, is that he doesn’t go in for this sort of gum-beating. [my emphasis] (1)

Who would have guessed that it would be the staunch corporate Democrat Joe Biden who would make the major break away from delusional neoliberal economic policies back to something like a pragmatic Keynesianism – with impressive results at the four-year mark – and even be active in serious antitrust regulation and promoting the growth of unions?

All this is a roundabout way of saying that, for all his Third Way sins, Sidney Blumenthal still is remarkable good at describing what rightwing goons dominate the Republican Right. In a memorably titled essay, “Donald Trump’s freakshow continues unabated,” in which he demonstrates that he has lost his talent for describing how melodramatically disastrous the Republican Party really is:

Trump is hellbent to break through any “sane-washing” of the media smoothing over his viciousness and vulgarity. His call for an elaborate execution of a pre-eminent political opponent, a conservative Republican of the most partisan pedigree, is his definitive and final answer to those who quibble about his intentions and his unmooring from all traditional politics.

His fascist-themed freakshow in Madison Square Garden followed by his firing squad fantasy [against Liz Cheney] are an augury of a second administration. His closing act has overwhelmed any media reflex for euphemism and both-siderism. He contemptuously stomps on every effort at normalization.

Time and again, day after day, event after event, Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election, certainly about the candidate himself: are you crazier today than you were four years ago? [my emphasis] (2)

Notes:

(1) Noah, Timothy (2003): The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Slate 05/20/2024. (Accessed: 2024-02-11).

(2) Blumenthal, Sidney (2024): Donald Trump’s freakshow continues unabated. The Guardian 11/02/2024. (Accessed: 2024-02-11).