THE DEEPER DIVE into the Deepest Swamp Ever

a.k.a. How the swamp drained Donald Trump!

Oct 21, 2024

[Do to health reasons this weekend, I’m having to make the Deeper Dive double as my Monday editorial with news; so everyone is getting it. You may not want it because this one is political.]

You could fault me for saying that President Donald Trump drowned himself in the swamp by draining all of it into his own White House, except I made that prediction before he even began his first term based on his own cabinet selections, which made the outcome obvious to me. In spite of how clear the outcome would be, I took criticism back then as having Trump Derangement Syndrome for failing to see how clever he was being by “holding his enemies closer” than his friends). Today, however, even Trump, who never admits his own failures, has actually admitted he failed on that one. (See interview that eventually follows.)

All I wanted was to see the swamp drained, and if Trump could succeed at that, fantastic; but all I saw was that he was clearly draining all of it into the White House basement! So, if you’re one who would criticize me for seeing the same thing today, just note that you would have criticized me back then, too, and you would have been wrong because even Trump admits it. He’s drowning in swamp today. What I want to point out is how clear it was that the swamp would only become more powerful because of Trump’s own actions … and it did!

Because we are within a fortnight of the US election, a broad look at what is happening to Trump as Kamala is given clear passage by the media and is tending to look and sound good to moderate swing voters but because she knows she doesn’t have to campaign for liberals at all. She has the Democratic vote locked down because they hate Trump so viscerally, they’d probably vote for the real Hitler before they vote for the one they call “Hitler.” Well, OK that may be a step too far, but they’d go beyond voting for a yellow dog. They’d vote for a dead one this Halloween before they’d let Trump win. Obviously, Kamala will never actually turn out as moderate as she is presenting herself to be. It’s a show for the center, which I’ll state up front leaves me with on one I will vote for now that Kennedy is effectively out.

As the media circus stands right now, it looks like Trump is heading for Bidenville. For some reason, he’s giving them abundant opportunity to make fun of his age. If you look at the abundance of media stories over the past two weeks showing him as demented, sleepier than sleepy Joe, ranting constantly, weaving without rhythm on the stage for 20 minutes as the pretends that sleep dancing is better than talking, etc., it looks like he’s having a breakdown hey blame on age.

I say, who could blame him, given the massive amounts of stress the deep state has layered over the top of him all these years. That would certainly swamp me; but it is abundant proof that the swamp has fully swamped him, and he’s showing the wear and tear as anyone would who is taking all of that.

It looks like a takedown by the deep state, but it is a takedown I saw coming based on his own cabinet choices that put the deep state in charge of everything back in 2016 before he even took office. I want to go over those 2016 predictions I made about where Trump’s chosen administration was headed in this Deeper Dive because, if you can lay out how and why it will happen before it does … and then it does, the predictability of the outcome is made certain by historic fact; and you have to ask what kind of leader makes such obvious bad choices over and over.

Before, I do, however, let’s look at the state of Trump today (as portrayed in the media, which could be all garbage, except its hard to make twenty-minute videos of his own flailing rallies before his favorite audience lie in that they are far more than sound bytes at that length, and some of them are looking pretty thin. The reason I want to take a look at how the media is showing his final-stretch meltdowns is to demonstrate how, swampishly-speaking, he’s ended up bogged down by the deep state’s attacks wearing him down. While the deep state is clearly stronger than ever, Trump’s looking weary, ranting and frenetic. His most ardent supporters will think otherwise, but I don’t think any impartial viewer will.

I am amazed at his stamina to make it this far, even though his total loss of the swamp wars was easy to see coming due to his own extremely bad planning. You can fault me for saying it all you like, but he ran, by his own many choices, the swampiest White House I ever saw. As someone who made the claim, in spite of losing readers, about how swampy his White House was going to be before he was even inaugurated, and then it all turned out that way for the reasons given back then, I think I’ve earned the right to be listened to when I make a similar claim today for the same reasons.

Those who faulted me five years ago by telling me over and over how I clearly did not realize Trump was cleverly playing 4-D chess to throw the swamp off guard while gathering them all in for the slaughter have a lot of explaining to do to explain why they are all running free still, while he’s deluged in law suits.

I can easily explain why they are. He put them all in the highest positions of power … again and again. His administration never looked even remotely like a successful 4-D takedown of the deep state. After the fact, it is an impossible argument to make and not look like you already have a plate full of noodles running down your face because you do if you make that claim. The results of the swamp wars have left the swamp looking stronger than ever.

Here’ the media takedown on the fall of Donald Trump

That was the rationale; here’s the big picture: The media deluge is certainly biased, but there is also very little Trump is putting out at rallies or interviews that looks stable and strong right now. When you watch one-hour interviews, and they still look like his ranting is worse and more disorganized—even on friendly shows—and sounds almost craven in some of the comments he makes (typically to rile the media, but it’s hard to see how that is serving his best interest anymore) and you look at his performance in the last debate, which was OK but he fell into all kinds of baited traps, his ideas of how to do.

His promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare again was as thin as it was years ago and his endless absurd promises of “easily” getting Mexico to buy us a wall was. We know his supporters bought most of the wall with the rest being completed by a few funds already approved in military budgets. (Import tariffs and export tariffs to Mexico are all paid by American business people, and very little of those tariffs got passed along as price adjustments to or from Mexican businesses or consumers.) And Obamacare? Another total fail on his part where he promised in the debate, as he does again with the swamp, to do better this time, but he cannot offer a clear plan even today, five years after he was supposed to be forming “the best plan ever.” He just says he has concepts. Why would I trust that this time when he already failed so badly at coming up with any concepts last time. Fool me twice, shame on me.)

First, this weekend:

Donald Trump cut off mid-speech at ‘empty’ Michigan rally on stage after he nods off to sleep
During a rally on Friday night in Detroit, Michigan, former President Donald Trump experienced massive technical difficulties which caused him to stop his speech to the half empty arena after he appeared to nod off on stage at an earlier event.

It appeared, the Don, himself, experienced technical difficulties as his eyelids rolled shut while standing before the audience and he just swayed back and forth like he was falling asleep on his feet. Maybe he had nothing better to do with no working mic, but didn’t he know, after his last rally that went like that, that he was giving Team Kamala a wide-open opportunity to say he’s clearly exhausted and to wonder how he’ll handle the more exhausting job of the presidency if he can’t maintain a campaign schedule? He gave her exactly what she needed by looking asleep for the count, instead of filling the time by leading chants or something that would arouse the crowd and look dynamic and in charge.

Nnstated in her criticism, is that he has a deep, deep-state schedule to maintain in courts around the country as they continue to work him over. It would have to be hard to keep up on all of that for any human being, but that is what the swamp winning looks like. A Trump victory over the swamp would look like Comey and Brennan and many others all in court. He would have put people in the DOJ that could get that done.

The former president's mic appeared to cut out mid-speech and Trump was seen pacing around the stage while the screen behind him read " Technical Difficulties: Complicated Business." The event was two hours delayed, according to CNN.

Not exactly a high-energy look from the get go. While it’s easy to say Trump cannot be blamed for technical difficulties, this is the second event in a week’s time where the president went “dead air” and looked strange on stage for a long time. He and his poorly performing stage team are giving his detractors plenty to work with when he acts like that, and we’ll see they readily accepted all all the opportunities he gave them. At one event, he just swayed to endless music. He was either exhausted or didn’t care if he looked like he was.

At this point, however, you cannot blame his new “Sleepy Joe” demeanor, as he would have called it of Biden acted that way, on having nothing better to do during a technical glitch or on rallies that were rigged because the same thing happened at an interview in his own home run by one of his strongest supporters:

‘Exhausted’ Trump Can’t Make It Through Interview in His Home
Donald Trump didn’t even have to leave his building for an interview that streamed live on his friend and loyal supporter Dan Bongino’s video podcast Friday morning. But he still had trouble making it to the end….
After vamping for more than 30 minutes in Trump Tower as he waited for the ex-president to show up … it was [Trump’s] final moment with Bongino that caught the eye of Kamala Harris’ social media team….
“Trump abruptly ends his live interview after it is reported that he is canceling interviews because he is ‘exhausted,’” @KamalaHQ tweeted, referring to a new report from Politico that the Republican candidate is “exhausted and refusing interviews” with less than three weeks to go until Election Day.

Clearly, the article is biased and rigged: If you look at the short video clip in the article, you’ll see that the sleep pic. the article leads off with is nothing more than a microsecond where Trump blinked at the start of the video clip in the article, which makes it look like he’s nodding off. Cheap shot.

However, Trump does seem sleepy or low-energy in the way he talks throughout the video. Look at Trump in the Bongino video linked to in the article above, and you’ll see that, from the moment he walked in, he’s low-energy throughout. Bongino even asks if he just came from a workout and if he’s feeling all right. He only says, “I hope so.” He doesn’t look like he’s feeling so fighting hot.

Now, if I had everything the deep state is throwing at him coming at me, I’m sure I’d look worse; so, I don’t think it is due to age. It also clearly is not the Trump who campaigned five years ago. The MAGA champion is worn down from his battles, and the worst of those battles still lie ahead … unless he gets elected so he can pardon himself from federal court conviction and/or shut down any federal cases. He looks like an arena bull with the darts in his sides. If he had won any battles over the deep state, he’d have them in court with darts in their sides. He’d be the matador, not the bleeding bull.

Here is another peculiar article that popped up this weekend that looked and sounded like Trump is breaking down because of his truly odd behavior you can watch on video:

Trump kicks off a Pennsylvania rally by talking about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia

I mean, who talks about that kind at length about that kind of stuff at a political rally? Who wants ten minutes of hearing him name drop about dead Arnold Palmer and Palmer’s penis? His rambling is really starting to look like he’s losing it.

My article is not about whether Trump is too old, but about how much damage the deep state has done to him. To me, the Bongino video makes him look as bedraggled and worn out as I would think a man taken down and shredded by the deep state in a drawn-out battle would look. If he had won the war and the deep state was all tied up in court battles (that never even got started), I’d say he was a great and naturally exhausted champion after his hard-fought victory.

Fact is, the deep state is further from down than ever. It’s running the whole county, and Trump’s choice of how to govern assured this is where he’d wind up against such a formidable enemy because he put them in power EVERYWHERE! The very fact that he had to fire nearly all of them proved what bad leadership choices he made in hiring them. You don’t get a pass on that; it’s the number-one job of good leadership—assembling a strong team to carry out your vision. (They wouldn’t be so free to rule the world like its 1984, if he had locked a number of them up.)

Trump put them in the White House because he didn’t know what he was doing (unless he was a Trojan horse; but I think it was more likely he was just a poor-quality leader who empowered his enemy all around him because he was naive about who they were even though it was obvious who they were. (If I could see that so easily back then and lay it out in a number of articles, why couldn’t he?)

Obama also seized the opportunities Trump provided this weekend:

Obama Mocks Trump’s Competence: ‘You Would Be Worried If Your Grandpa Was Acting Like This’
“I do have to point out that along with his intentions, there is also a question of his competence,” he told the crowd. “Have you seen him lately? I mean, he is out there, he’s giving two, two-and-a-half-hour speeches. Just word salads. You have no idea what he’s talking about. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter. He’s talking about this. He’s talking about that….”
Obama then pointed to a recent town hall Trump held, where he ended up swaying back and forth on stage as music played for 40 minutes.
Let me explain because I’ve done a lot of town hall meetings,” Obama continued. “The point of a town hall meeting is to take questions. He just decided, you know what, I’m gonna stop taking questions and then he’s swaying to ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Y.M.C.A.’ for about half an hour. Folks are standing there, not sure what’s happening. Can you imagine if I did that? Can you imagine if Ruben did that?”

Trump and all the MAGA crowd would have shredded Obama or Harris if they did that. We all know it. They would have looked as bad as Biden in the debate.

Even Trump finally admitted this year that he put the wrong people in charge because he couldn’t find any in Washington who were not deep state. Well, then don’t hire any from Washington! And don’t hire any from Wall Street! What do you expect you will find when you do all your hiring from inside the swamp?!

He was called out on his swamp fails back then, too, for anyone listening

How about not hire anyone from within Washington DC to run anything? How about not putting Goldman Sachs executives and ivy-league bankers in charge of every financial department in the US government? Why make excuses for that? Just to save one’s designated champion from the truth about how he drowned himself in the swamp?

In remainder of this Deeper Dive, I will prove by quoting articles I wrote during Trumps run-up to the White House how incredibly easy it was to see that the “great leader” was assembling the worst team one could ever imagine for taking down the swamp, but here are a few others who saw his plans getting swamped way back then.

The argument that Trump as just brilliantly “holding his enemies closer,” rounding them all up for the slaughter, became a major theme of the Q-Anon crowd. One Q-Anon publisher even called me at home to explain it to me; but even Trump admitted he hired the wrong team. (As a manger, I always made hiring the best team I could afford my highest-priority task because everything I did thereafter would go easier and look better if I had the right team supporting me. It’s basic leadership.)

I wasn’t the only one seeing early on how this didn’t look like a plan to beat the deep state:

Trump, throughout his tenure as president derided almost every leader he hired as being an “incompetent moron.” That’s like giving himself an “F” on his own report card for every leadership team choice he made. You wouldn’t win the NFL with those drafts skills. As RFK says in the video above about how obvious Trump’s wrong choices were, why would you give a guy who failed so miserably at the number-one promise he made (and number-one job of a leader) a second chance to get it right?

Trump, of course, says to one of his most starry-eyed, fawning supporters, he knows better now because he finally knows from experience who all the bad actors are. He’s trying to turn his learning through failures into a positive strength for the job going forward, saying this time he’ll be better at it. He’s gained battle skills and now knows his enemies:

Trump Cooks Up Defense For Hiring People He Later Deemed 'Weak' And 'Incompetent'

Giving himself bad grades because anything else is laughable and then saying he’s learned from it be honest good if learning fro it were true; but, if that’s the case, why is he already doing the same thing all over again? Just look at who is has surrounded himself with now:

Eight years ago, Trump vowed to ‘drain the swamp.’ Now he swims in it.

He always swam in it. He was born in it because he was born rich and has spent his entire life only building luxurious properties to serve super-wealthy clients. He hires only swamp creatures because those are the only creatures he knows! A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to put the proven creature from the black lagoon back in charge of the swamp (not that you have any better choice, except just to not take part in the foolishness).

Trump, in an interview with Fox’s Bret Baier in June, claimed one of every 10 of his hires were “fantastic” after the host listed former Trump job holders who haven’t backed his 2024 campaign.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has knocked Trump’s hiring skills as well.

1 out of every 10 were fantastic in his eyes?! The math here ins’t hard: that leaves 9 in 10 that were inept morons in his own eyes.

So, as Chris Christie summarized:

“It’s plain and simple: Either Donald Trump doesn’t know how to pick personnel, or he’s the worst manager in the history of the American presidency,” Christie wrote in a tweet. (Yahoo!)

Here is how totally predictable in detail the outcome was for Trump’s appointments the first time around

Now we get to where I laid out all this news long before it happened. The same people who will criticize me now for saying all of this are the ones who criticized me 4-5 years ago when I was pointing out how many of Trump’s appointments for cabinet posts were dripping with algae and weeds. You cannot put the creature from the black lagoon in charge of each department and expect anything different.

Trump assembled the worst team for taking down the deep state ever imaginable, leaving him an abject failure by his own design. Almost all of his team picks were deep state creatures, and the few that were not, such as Steve Bannon, he fired first while keeping the worst!

Back in late 2016, I wrote,

Trump: Trojan horse for the establishment?
I crave the opportunity to see an anti-establishment candidate win the election. I would exult in seeing our corrupt establishment shattered. So, while I do not like Trump the man (as it would appear he has never done anything that didn't entirely serve his own self-interest and pompous ego), I have thoroughly enjoyed seeing him upset establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats alike….
I'll even acknowledge that perhaps it takes someone as brazen and blusterous as Trump in order to stand up to such a powerful assemblage of egoists as we have embedded in congress and in the president's [Obama’s] administration, which now rules by decree….

Trump was far stronger in standing up against all of that and surviving it than I ever thought he’d be. I’ll give him that and can’t fault him for looking like he’s breaking down now because I think most people would be if they took everything that has come at him.

The reservations I'm going to express about Trump in this short series this week are based solely on his political actions, not on the brassy stuff that I personally dislike….
Much to my disappointment, Trump's actions run completely opposite of his words every time we see him make an actual political decision….
Trump knows he can tap into a huge vault of anger; and, as a media mogul himself, he knows better than anyone how to play the media for free publicity by being outrageous — something for which he's always had a near whacky knack….
It's his latest political actions that concern me. In the few places where we have seen Trump make actual political decisions so far, his choices have been 100% pro-establishment….
From Trump's choice of a 180-proof neocon vice presidential candidate to an embedded Goldman-Sachs campaign financial manager to the Heritage Foundation's dream team of budget advisors he assembled, Trump has selected people who wholly embody the establishment. Everything these people have ever done or said has been in support of the Wall Street one-percenters, in support of financial deregulation, and, for the most part, in support of the military-industrial complex at the cost of any debt imaginable. The team he creates says everything about where he intends to head….
I think neocons have taken us into ill-conceived, unjust, pre-emptive wars aimed at recreating the world in our image. We have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of unseen people who never raised a finger against us and most likely never would have in wars that have been monstrous failures. After Iraq, we backed a coup in Crimea, a civil war in Libya, and seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot in Syria….
Politicians like … Trump's VP, Pence, backed these wars 100% and have spent a nation's ransom trying to force change upon a world that has no intention of changing — a world that, if it did become democratic, would use its vote to declare war on us for killing their brothers and sisters…. Pence strongly advocated for every one….
Power-drunk politicians in both parties support these missions in order to control the world and its wealth, for most of them are globalists and elitists at heart who serve Wall Street. The rest are misguided fools whose minds have been consumed by their own dogma. They vote for these wars because numerous American corporations get wealthy making equipment to replace the machinery that gets blown up; they get wealthy pumping fuel into the engines and making new tires to replace rubber that is too worn to meet the road. The more of that equipment we burn through, the more they can get the government to pay to replace it….
These politicians are owned by the corporations that make this hardware…. And why do I point all that out? Because these are the people Trump is assembling has his leadership team…. So, if you think Trump is any threat to the establishment, you may be riding a Trojan horse.
As soon as I learned that Trump chose Larry Kudlow and Steven Moore to be his Senior Economic Advisors, I feared he was selling out to the establishment in order win Republican support…. I have a file full or articles on Kudlow that I keep in my "Idiot Box" where I store the stupid things economists and Wall Street moguls say.
That is the team assembled inside the Trump horse. On the outside, it is all Trump, brazen and shiny and bold. On the inside, it is entirely Wall-Street warriors and neocon combatants. In the next article in this series, I'll dig into the Kudlow-Moore tax plan which gives us the major components of Trump's action plan in order to show how deeply establishment Trump's plan is in its debt-based economic expansion and its retreaded, spiffed-up, establishment ideas that got us where we are today.

(Which was DEEPLY in debt with the rich getting vastly richer than anyone.) Another article that followed up on that one was …

Trump: Trojan, Traitor, Or Tried And True?
Problematic for Trump supporters is Trump’s rapid melting back from sending all illegal aliens back to their home countries to just sending back those that are criminals. Trump says that, at some later phase, his administration will evaluate who among the remaining illegals should also go; but even that clearly says he has no intention of sending all illegal aliens home.
That is a sea change from his campaign position because, apparently, it no longer matters if millions are here illegally for the sole purpose of taking jobs, so long as they are behaving themselves. Trump even tested this on one audience, after securing the Republican nomination, asking if they really want to see him break up good families and good workers if they’re behaving themselves; but the audience wasn’t receptive to the idea of just sending out the bad actors.
Trump strongly indicated in an interview on 60 Minutes as soon as he was elected that he is not inclined to lock Hillary up because he feels she needs time to heal from her loss….

He never made any effort to lock her up at all for her deep-state email scandals and referred to her and Bill as “good people” after months of promising to route them out of Washington and into prison for running the deep state for year. Crooked people are good people?

If Trump had called Hillary “crooked” just once, you might say, “OK, he got a little carried away back then and said more than he meant,” but Trump continually did everything he could at every chance he could find to work his supporters up with the hope that crooked people like the Clintons (his words) would go to jail. Less than a week after he was elected, he washed his hands of it and rendered his judgment that Hillary and William are good people….

You don’t beat the deep state by sympathetically keeping its leaders out of jail.

Said Trump, “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons. I really don’t. She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways….”
Trump also said on 60 Minutes that, rather than scrapping Obamacare as he had promised, he’d keep the best parts of it — the parts that people like — and replace the rest. That’s not likely to work out too well, as the plan’s funding doesn’t work when the pieces get parted out. We’ll see.

It didn’t work out at all! He didn’t repeal it, and he certainly didn’t replace any parts of it with something better. He scrapped one part. That’s it. It was empty talk. To this day, he has no plan to replace any part of it.

As 60-Minutes said in its summary of the interview,
“What we discovered in Mr. Trump’s first television interview as president-elect, was that some of his signature issues at the heart of his campaign were not meant to be taken literally, but as opening bids for negotiation….”
Seems like the only thing Trump is certainly sticking with is his tax plan. And why not since every part of his tax plan benefits him and his family directly? They’ll save enough millions to fill a bank vault! That is apparently the only sacrosanct part of all of his promises. The rest wilted down in less than a week.

Even Leslie Stahl saw right through the deep-state failure built into his plan right up front, showing Trump has NO idea how to ditch the swamp in order to drain it:

Lesley Stahl: Your own transition team, it’s filled with lobbyists.
Donald Trump: That’s the only people you have down there.
Lesley Stahl: You have lobbyists from Verizon, you have lobbyists from the oil gas industry, you have food lobby.
Donald Trump: Sure. Everybody’s a lobbyist down there–
Lesley Stahl: Well, wait….
Donald Trump: That’s what they are. They’re lobbyists or special interests—
Lesley Stahl: On your own transition team.
That’s the only people you have down there? He admits that’s what his team is? If your plan is to drain the Washington swamp, why would you be starting with a team that is mostly swamp dwellers?

As RFK pointed out in the video above, and as I wrote back then …

Trump’s transition team started off looking like the Who’s Who of the Wall-Street-Washington corridor — i.e, “the establishment.” Many of his transition team members came from industries that will be under regulation by people the transition team is putting in place — some of the biggest corporate lobbyists that Trump said he was going to drain out Foggy Bottom — lobbyists for Goldman Sachs, Aetna, Microsoft, etc.. The consultant who was helping Trump pick the head the Environmental Protection Agency is a lobbyist for Koch Industries!
I can see that you might work with some people in Washington who have been around the block a few times and know where others stand … if you can find some who have been pretty straight players or people whose loyalty you are for some reason certain will supersede their corruption (mafia style loyalty); but why would you load your team with lobbyists as the ones to preselect all candidates … when lobbyists are the main ones you said you want to get rid of? Won’t they just make sure that every option that is presented to you is someone who will give them a back door of access?

And that, of course, is EXACTLY what they did! How could Trump not see that coming? That is why I figured he must be a Trojan horse—something disguised as an anti-establishment candidate. He was either incredibly naive when such a certain outcome was pointed out to him by Leslie Stahl, or he never intended to drain the swamp in the first place anyway because many of his friends live in the swamp.

Trump’s process looks a lot less like draining the swamp and more like putting the alligators in charge of protecting the flamingos.
The transition team met regularly with the Financial Services Roundtable, an association of lobbyists formerly called the Bankers Roundtable that represents Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and other large banks. One would presume, since Trump’s transition team has 4,000 positions to fill in a very short time, that the team was going to the bankster’s roundtable to form a list of candidates for several of those positions. Aren’t they an organization whose business is to make certain they, in the very least, have back doors of access to the president?

And that is exactly how it turned out: Goldman Sachs executives and other ivy-league bankers filled all the financial halls of government. Who could have seen that coming? Certainly not Trump … unless he’s just a fraud and wanted it to come. “4-D chess said all his believers.” Nope. Those people ruled Washington all four years. They still do.

As RFK specifically called out later, I wrote back then …

The oldest game in the swampy Wall-Street play book is to get your own executives in charge of all the government’s regulatory agencies. I mean, who would be better to head the Food and Drug Administration than a former vice president at Monsanto — the experts in what food should be … or become?
“Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you the American people [Trump said in his campaign].”
Hmm. Really?

By putting them all in charge? All swamp all the way.

With all of that — and that’s just my opening bid, a mere introduction to this exposé — is it still unreasonable that I wonder if Trump is a Trojan horse for the establishment that he was born into and has lived in and had as customers all of his life?

I wrote, at least, three other articles that looked like a biographical book full of specific headshots of the swamp creatures with brief bios about their swamp credentials, but somehow they did not survive the transition to Substack, or they, at least, won’t come up in any searches. By April of 2017, I recapped some of what I had forewarned about:

“You got Trumped!”
…Trump’s most ardent campaign supporters now publicly deem him Traitor Trump. The rest are simply hoping against hope that he is not. Everyone, conservative or liberal, is seriously starting to wonder what happened to Candidate Trump.

One of those, of course, was Ann Coulter, who eventually dumped Trump because she saw how far he had moved away from most of his promises.

I closed that article by asking, “Is he force or farce?”

Trump put the top brass of the military industrial complex in charge again and again as gatekeepers to the White House because he loved being served by “his generals.” Big ego stuff. He hired John Bolton, one of the biggest hawks in past administration. Everyone knew that about Bolton!

To that I wrote a followup article in April of 2017 about how Donald buried himself within the White House in military brass who controlled access to the president as chiefs of staff:

You Got Trumped! The Donald’s personal military revolution is just Trump change
… After he was wheeled inside the Washington city gates, however, he opened up with overnight military attacks around the world and, in the same week, declared in the solitary point of harmony he could find with Putin that Russian relations had become worse during his first hundred days than they have ever been….
In less than a hundred days, Trump has managed to make Russian relations worse than Hillary did in years! And that’s even by Trump’s own admission that Russian relations are the worst they’ve ever been! By Putin’s, too! And Putin hated Hillary! Yet, he already sees things as worse under Trump. Of course, Candidate Trump hated Hillary, but I remind you that President-Elect Trump showed an instant and total reversal post-election day when he announced she’s “good people” and, instead of saying “lock her up,” said, “I don’t want to hurt her….”
Trump gets serious in Syria and kracks down on Korean krackpots….
I have to wonder if Trump’s swift change toward a military footing has anything to do with changing the conversation in Washington away from those endless allegations about him and Russia. Has anyone noticed that the entire nation’s stopped talking about the Trump-Russian connection last week? The one-two punch of Syria and Korea plus a groin kick with the largest bomb in Afghanistan knocked the headlines for a loop over the past two weeks….

In that article, I quoted The Rutherford Institute’s assessment of Trump’s military turn:

Waging endless wars abroad (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Syria) isn’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, it’s certainly not making America great again, and it’s undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt. In fact, it’s a wonder the economy hasn’t collapsed yet…. What most Americans—brainwashed into believing that patriotism means supporting the war machine—fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. The rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and now Syria. However, the one that remains constant is that those who run the government—including the current president—are feeding the appetite of the military industrial complex and fattening the bank accounts of its investors.

Further down in my article, I wrote,

Neocons, war hawks, and NeverTrumpers are Trump’s new supporters
As further evidence that the establishment has changed Trump, I give you the words of the military-industrial establishment’s kingpin, John McCain, last week:
Three months after his inauguration, President Trump has shifted positions on Syria, China and other key issues — and Sen. John McCain said Sunday he hopes it’s because the “Washington establishment” has gotten into the president’s ear…. Mr. McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had a simple answer when asked if Mr. Trump has been sucked in by establishment forces. “I hope so…. On national security, I do believe he has assembled a strong team and very appropriately he is listening to them.” (The Washington Times)

He didn’t go as far as they wanted, of course, and he eventually fired John Bolton for being “more of a hawk than I am.” How could he have been surprised by what everyone knew about Bolton? Yet, he gave McCain & Co. plenty.

He turned even more strongly toward the banksters … at least when Yellen was in charge and creating all the money and cheap credit he wanted. Not so much when Powell turned the tables:

You Got Trumped! Trump not yellin’ about Yellen anymore!
Having castigated Janet Yellen for keeping interest rates artificially low in order to help the Obama Administration keep a Democrat in the White House, Trump now likes Janet Yellen and likes low interest rates, too — so much so that he decided this week that it is finally time to get honest with America about his latest flip-flop:
“I do like a low-interest rate policy, I must be honest with you. I think our dollar is getting too strong, and partially that’s my fault because people have confidence in me. But that’s hurting—that will hurt ultimately,” he added. “Look, there’s some very good things about a strong dollar, but usually speaking the best thing about it is that it sounds good.” (The Wall Street Journal)
…Candidate Trump always said he loved a strong dollar. Now that he’s the president who benefits from this easy economic juice, he’s reversed positions on low interest and high dollar…. This month brought another massive change from a guy whose orange color and constant flip-flopping make him look more like King Salmon than anti-establishment president….
Just as Hillary and Bill became “good people” as soon as Trump won the election, so Yellen is now a person about whom he says, “I like her, I respect her.” Is that any wonder, since Trump’s Goldman Boys, Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, have done nothing but praise Fed Chair Janet Yellen?
In an article last year, “Trumponomics: Going for a Ride on the Trump Train,” I warned that Trump’s Goldman-Sachs cabinet members were an almost certain sign of where his administration would head once he got in office. A lot of readers on Zero Hedge were upset that I wasn’t giving Trump a chance to even get into office before I pointed out that Trump’s promises were going to run off the rails quickly, but I call things as I see them, regardless of how popular that is….
The bottom line is that Yellen’s Federal Reserve remains fully in charge of the economy, and the Fed is nothing but a legal cabal of the nations greatest bankers.

Trump did ultimately put Powell in charge of the central bank, instead of Yellen, but he always rued the day he did because he didn’t like Powell’s tightening of monetary policy at all.

The truth is Trump sees rising interest as rapidly eroding the hopes for his stimulus plan, which depends on a huge increase of debt at a low level of interest — another problem I pointed out last year when I wrote about how Trump’s stimulus plan contains the seeds of its own destruction.
If you hoped a vote for Trump would reform the Fed, guess again. Trump isn’t even going to reform monetary policy as the chosen way to stimulate the economy, much less audit the Fed, much less do away with a cabal of banksters owning the US monetary system. A vote for Trump was a vote for more of the same when it comes to the Fed and its economic recovery program … until it all comes crashing down of its own dead weight.

The Fed certainly did not get reformed in the slightest, and Trump expanded the federal debt every bit as quickly as Obama had in any of his four months coming out of the Great Recession, and then amped it up like never seen before in history during his final year to give vast amounts of money to his business friends and the Trump Corporation:

Trump never saw a debt he didn’t like.

Trump also recently reversed his long-held position that the Export-Import Bank (which loans taxpayer money to aid big businesses like Boeing) should be defunded. Sounds like the Goldman Boys are, indeed, in the economic driver’s seat at the White House. Trump likes whatever they like.

So, establishment all the way when it comes to banksters, the military industrial complex, government regulators imported from big corporate to rule almost every government department, etc.