Did Trump Walk Into a Trap? – Wilkerson and Jay

Was it a deliberate plan to allow the rampage or just incompetence? Was it a plot by Mitch McConnell to discredit and destroy Trump or just the welcomed result? Wilkerson and Jay on the events of Jan 6th on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Note: This article is based on the introduction to the interview with Larry Wilkerson “Did Trump Walk Into a Trap”

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don’t forget the donate button at the top of the Web page.

Paul Jay

The disarray in the American political system, whose name is Trump, is coming to an end, he was Wall Street’s cash cow and now it’s time to dispose of him as he descends into full-on madness. The billionaires, the financial elites, and their political minions fed Trump’s starving giant ego for four years, got what they wanted in tax cuts and deregulation. And now it’s time to move on. This is all accomplished by Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence who have tired of eating Trump’s excrement and set a trap that The Donald walked into blinded by his adoring fans and delusions of grandeur.

Donald Trump

And God bless America. Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank you very much.

Paul Jay

While everyone knew for weeks the protest on January six was planned and would likely be raucous, the Capitol Hill police who answer to Congress, which means McConnell, were not put on high alert, pushing past overmatched and outnumbered Capitol Hill police.

Additional police resources were not put in place, even though the mayor of D.C. pleaded for it. And, of course, the protesters marched into Congress almost unimpeded.

McDonald, Graham, and Pence knew it was time to dump Trump, especially after the loss in Georgia, and had already made it clear they would approve the certification of Biden, they needed to find a way to sink Trump to keep their financial and corporate clients happy.

It was a piece of theater that pulled off the real coup that almost everyone wanted, and that’s the end of Trump.

Perhaps even Chuck Schumer was in on it. Credit him with the most exaggerated and ridiculous rhetoric, calling Jan six a day that will live in infamy on the scale of Pearl Harbor,

In fact, the crowds were smaller than expected, and once the order was given to the police to disperse the crowd, it didn’t take all that long to accomplish it.

I’m only going on what I saw on TV, but most of the crowd seemed to be wandering around the halls of Congress like tourists, gaping at the statues. The more militant group seems small, and most of that was pushing and shoving and a few broken windows, although it was reported that a policeman died the next day from injuries suffered in the scuffle. No doubt it seemed terrifying for police officers, staff, and members of Congress, but words like sedition, insurgency, and such are just an attempt to intimidate the members of Congress that were still hitching their wagons to Trump’s grotesque megalomania. Insurrections require guns, sections of the military, not just a crowd of angry people. 

It was clear that after four years of groveling and feeding the call McConnell plan today not to praise Caesar, but to bury him and the mission seems to have been accomplished. Now the leaders of the GOP can continue to build their far-right criminal party with a less insane and perhaps more dangerous leader. And in all likelihood, the Democrats will do very little to make people’s lives significantly better as the main leadership of the party answers to their own set of Wall Street and corporate lords.

And in that way will facilitate the rising from these sort of ashes by the Republican Party. There should be an investigation of the leaders of Congress who allowed this to take place.

Perhaps then the word sedition would be applicable. Even on the grounds of stopping a Covid super spreader event there should have been more security.

The full death toll from all this won’t be known for a few weeks. Of course, Trump should be charged with inciting a riot and perhaps responsibility for five fatalities. But he shouldn’t be in the dock all alone. Yes, impeach him. Use the 25th Amendment, get rid of the malignancy. But it won’t deal with a systemic cancer that eats at American society.

Now, joining us to discuss all of this is Larry Wilkerson. Larry is a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network. And as you all know, because if you’re watching the analysis, you know that Larry used to be the chief of staff for Colin Powell.

Paul Jay

Thanks for joining us, Larry. Good to be with you, Paul.

Larry Wilkerson

But let me say quickly, you’ve already covered it all.

Larry Wilkerson

I was listening to you mesmerized.

Paul Jay

Thank you. I’m kind of surprised how the media, you know, the MSNBC and CNN’s and such are all talking about why there wasn’t more security.

Paul Jay

It’s so damn obvious that it was deliberate. What do you make of all this?

Larry Wilkerson

Well, I have to say deliberate or another show of the incompetence of the leadership of the Congress and elsewhere. I’m always torn between the one or the other. It almost always is one or the other. But I tend to fall on the side of incompetence. I don’t see really other than what you just said. And I don’t give them that much smart to take like you just expressed it.

Other than that is a provocation or reason or rationale for having put this together. I see it more as a display of incompetence.

Paul Jay

Well, I’ll tell you that. Tell you why I kind of really click on this is that I saw this happen in Baltimore in its own way.

When the Freddie Gray riots, protests were developing and everybody knew what was happening and they had everybody’s phones tapped and so on and so on, when the when it started reaching its peak at the on the main street there where the fire at the drugstore was lit, the police hung back deliberately.

They waited for fires to start. They waited for looting. And later it was actually the police union that accused the chief of police of doing this and actually quoting something he said in a meeting briefing the police officers ahead of time is let it run loose, let the thugs be seen, let it be seen as if they’re the aggressors, and then we’ll swoop up and crack heads. And I’m quoting almost verbatim. So I think this is actually not an uncommon practice.

I saw that the Toronto G20, where a group of protesters broke off from the main G20 protest and started marching down Queen Street and the police hung back. In fact, they left a police car out there to be burned and somebody, probably a provocateur, did set it on fire. There was a shit storm later about why had the police hung back. I think this is a tactic that is well known to these people, and I think they just did it again.

Larry Wilkerson

Tactic is your keyword there, though. I don’t put that beyond the capacity of a local police chief or union or whatever to achieve something like that. Although I will point out that being a military professional for thirty-one years in a war a couple of times, the ease with which civilians think something like that could be perfected and brought off appalls me sometimes because it’s not easy to do.

And when you take it up to the level that it would have had to be for this to have happened, as you so describe, it becomes a measure of coordination and execution that is beyond this group of people. You could do it in the aggregate and say, oh, OK, but you might die. And I don’t see any of these people willing to risk their lives at all. I see the most missing ingredient in the Congress of the United States being political and moral courage.

They simply have not. They’re bereft.

Paul Jay

Well, I think we had the same argument about 9/11 stuff because I think Cheney’s genius was he just essentially had to do nothing. And I think that’s what McConnell did. He just had to do.

Larry Wilkerson

Was PNAC’s (Project for the New American Century) most devout wish a new Pearl Harbor?

Paul Jay

Yeah, exactly. Well, let’s go into the repercussions of all this because whether it was deliberate or not, they got what they wanted.

Trump’s doomed, whether they use the 25th or we were just talking before off-camera, maybe it will become de facto 25th that people will just start going to Pence and not listening to Trump for the next two weeks.

Larry Wilkerson

I think they already are.

Paul Jay

So where does this leave politics? I mean, Biden gets inaugurated, he brings his team, and so I guess where does this leave the Republican Party that’s got this weird split? You got McConnell, Graham and Pence, and others around them that have now bailed on Trump and are now enemy number one. If you watch Steve Bannon show or they’re more furious at Pence and Loeffler than they are even the Democrats.

And you’ve got this rump of 100 House members that stuck with Trump.

Larry Wilkerson

You in your opening impressed me in two ways. One, it was rather eloquent, and two, it echoed and better, even in a shorter space than I’ve done in an academic article I recently wrote for Limes, one of the Italian leading Italian foreign policy security policy magazines. They solicited it from me.

They even solicited a postscript after I sent them the article. The article essentially says what you said, and they said, well, you’ve got to give us something on Biden because it was all on Trump and Bush and Clinton and the progression to where we got yesterday. But you didn’t start with Donald Trump. So I sent him a postscript on Biden and the postscript essentially said what you said, ain’t nothing going to change. There will be some serenity. They’ll be some better-kept alliances.

There will be some domestic action, maybe even domestic action that attempts to do something to the periphery of what is really haunting us, which is an amount of distribution of wealth, unprecedented in our history. But it really won’t change much because as Michael Lofgren pointed out and I used his piece to sort of backstop my own, the deep state’s in charge and the deep state ain’t Donald Trump and it ain’t Joe Biden. They are disciples and practitioners thereof, perhaps, and bought off by it, perhaps.

But they’re not the deep state. The deep state is point zero zero one percent of the United States of America that owns the wealth equivalent to the GDP of Brazil. And they aren’t going to let anything change that’s against their purposes and their purposes are evolving and they scare me, they scare me to death because their purposes are looking more and more like IA and robotics, will eliminate what capitalism, predatory capitalism, in particular, has always wanted to eliminate its most precisely component, labor, get rid of it.

What does that mean? Well, it probably means a period of slavery. I mean, abject slavery for the average worker replaced by a period of we don’t need you anymore, so let’s conjure up a coronavirus or something, to get rid of you and let’s replace you with technology. This is scary, but I really think that is part of what’s happening right now. That’s the new dimension of the 21st century that truly disturbs me, along with nuclear weapons and climate change.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I agree with you. I’ve been talking about this, too. I mean, I don’t know how quickly it happens because it’s certainly going to be some time before they can really replace labor with cheap robotics but it’s certainly coming.

Larry Wilkerson

The period of slavery and it will be wage slavery, if not worse, in between, maybe just as disconcerting politically and disturbing politically as the period afterward. In fact, I would maintain that the period afterward would probably be much more simple in maintaining in a political sense, the interim period is going to be extremely dangerous trying to maintain it, because you’re gonna have more and more of what you saw yesterday, only probably with a very solid rationale for being in the streets.

Paul Jay

Well, I think that’s going to be the deciding question here. There’s a couple of things that I would put on the positive side of the ledger where maybe there could be something coming out of these next four years. The fact that the House majority for the Democrats is so narrow, it is going to give some clout to the progressives in the House, the fact that the pandemic is out of control and raging.

And this, you know, the vaccine is not going to be a quick fix to this means that there is, in all likelihood going to be some major lockdown to the economy again and a much more sustained recession/depression, this craziness in the stock markets

Again, yesterday, the markets, after all that crazy shit yesterday, the markets are again at record levels. 

Larry Wilkerson

They’re not at record levels of American participation therein.

Paul Jay

In terms of how many people benefit from it.

Larry Wilkerson

Yeah, and actually in how many people own outright own equities, what I call equities, you know, it’s not mutual funds or whatever. They actually own shares in a business or whatever. It’s really remarkable how few do and how few own the most.

Paul Jay

Well, I think that’s the thing is a lot of workers that have pension plans sort of have shares.

But if you actually look at who gains from the amount of wealth wrapped up in the stock market, it’s that top five, six percentile, I think gains about 80 percent of the wealth.

Larry Wilkerson

It’s an extraordinary indicator, I think, of what really is succeeding in our economy. Them.

Paul Jay

Yeah. So your party, you still call it your party? I assume so. You can still have a voice in what goes on there.

Paul Jay

The sort of the enablers of Trump are back in charge. They’re going to have to find another figure and I don’t think it can be Pence anymore. Pence is now a traitor to the Trump forces. Where do they go from here in terms of what they’re going to play?

I guess the normal obstructionist role that they play, they’re going to all of a sudden put the austerity hat on, I’m guessing, which is if they were in power, they probably wouldn’t as much. But when they’re not governing, they love austerity. Where does the next period of the Republican Party go?

Larry Wilkerson

I think there are three or four possibilities, and I haven’t made up my mind yet. Which one I want to pursue is a sort of most plausible to be defended against or to be aided and abetted. One, is it they fracture? And we’ve seen the lines along which they will fracture should they fracture. You see the Romneys (R-UT) on one side, you see people like Pennsylvanians losing him, but Thunes (R-SD), you see people like Sasse (R-NE) in Nebraska and so forth who are having some very serious, almost down-home thoughts about whether or not their party is going in the right direction.

Will they be able to interest enough of their colleagues in order to change the party in that respect? And the most important change, of course, would be to open the tent, as Powell told the RNC many, many years ago, to let a lot more people in the Republican tent, sexual orientation, race, color, creed, you name it, you’ve got to have a bigger tent. You can’t just have white men over the age of 50 and white women over the age of 50 who followed their men.

Like the Bible says they should. And a lot of that, you can’t base so much of your political party’s power on the one hundred million of whom you have about 60 million evangelicals in the country because the third Great Awakening is going to peter out. That’s one possibility. Another possibility is, like you said, that is more radical. There aren’t conservatives at all. Let’s just dispel that idea altogether. They’re radicals. They’re Trotskyites. They’re like Dick Cheney was there. They’re like the neoconservatives were with regard to warfare, that they’ll win out and that they’ll dominate the Republican Party.

They could attract a lot of people to their ranks, probably just through their incredible support for what is draining our Treasury more than anything else. And that is the defense budget. And they will never fall off of that. It’s the military-industrial complex in Congress. And there’s a third possibility that they’ll just fall all over themselves, all apart. There won’t be anything left of the Republican Party. And so then somebody’s got to pick up that mantle in, either change it altogether or keep it and change what’s underneath it.

That could happen also. That would take a lot longer. And I would see Democratic rule like it was in the last century for that period where it was, I think, almost 37, seven years where the Democrats had either one House and the White House or both houses and the White House. You may remember what Lyndon Johnson was able to do with that. For example, by the way, I watched his last interview with Walter Cronkite yesterday twice, about an hour long.

It is absolutely fascinating to hear him talk about how he got the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, how he did other things, alienated the South, knew he was alienating the South, a Texan, you know, the big guy from the Senate and so forth.

He’s just marvelously eloquent in that. And Cronkite knows all the right questions to answer. You say, well, he was backfilling. OK, fine. If you look at LBJ s time and the time he utilized the Congress, he got more done in that short period of time, the Vietnam War notwithstanding, than any president probably in the 20th century. Incredible what he did. If we had something like that, again, because of the retreat of the Republicans and the dominance of the Democrats and the progressives, as you pointed out, were able to bring their influence to bear in meaningful ways, we could have a different future in the next decade or two, then I think we’re going to have and hold out some hope for that.

But it means a retreat of the Republican Party. It certainly does.

Paul Jay

Honestly, I’ve not been very optimistic. I don’t think either of us have. But there is a moment here which has some potential, this crazy disarray, that Trump induced. I remember my first interview with you about Trump. I think the first words out of your mouth were Trump’s mission is to destroy the Republican Party. And I was kind of surprised that that was your take on it. And boy, boy, maybe he’s done a service here in some ways.

Larry Wilkerson

That wasn’t any original thought of mine. I got that from taxis in New York City. Taxi drivers. That’s what he’s going to do. You know, he’s a lifelong Democrat and he’s a New Yorker. And the Mafia is even scared of him. In New Jersey and New York, the mafia is even scarier. Donald Trump, he’s going to take on the Republicans and destroy them.

They didn’t say it with any positive nature, they just thought that was logical.

Paul Jay

Well, all of these events from yesterday have helped, one would think, to have a somewhat more progressive space, both for the progressives and even for Biden, if he actually is so inclined.

So it’s very incumbent on all of us to get an action here, because the thing at stake, as you said, you know, the pandemic, the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, and I agree with you, I think the issue of AI is being greatly underestimated, how much that’s going to transform society and maybe it’s not in the next 10 or 15 years, but it could be coming on quickly.

Larry Wilkerson

I mean, really quickly, looking at it through the military lens, it’s coming on much faster than I thought it was going to. Come on. We’re talking about spending billions, if not trillions now in the military

Paul Jay

On AI weaponry.

Larry Wilkerson

Yeah.

And it is going to revolutionize the whole landscape.

Paul Jay

Yeah, because once you’ve done it for the military, it’s not that big a stretch to turn it into consumer goods.

Larry Wilkerson

It happens all the time.

You know, interestingly, what you were just alluding to, I saw a minor example in the negative sense last night. I don’t know if you saw it, but Anderson Cooper was trying to interview Bernie Sanders and he began the interview and then had to cut Sanders off because Pence came on presiding over the Senate for the Electoral College developments. Then he went back to Bernie when Pence sat down. Then he left Bernie again in mid-sentence because he went back to I think it was Pelosi.

Then he went back to Bernie again, and then he cut him off again and went back to the Senate again because McConnell was speaking. And Bernie finally said you could hear him off-camera sort of, Bernie said, that’s all I got to get in the Senate myself.

But that’s how they treat Bernie and that’s how they treat progressives. And not just CNN.

Paul Jay

And I also think there’s something happening amongst progressives on the left, there’s so much inter-sniping, there are certain people that are attacking AOC because they didn’t pressure Pelosi enough for this, something called Force The Vote.

Larry Wilkerson

They’re their own worst enemy.

Paul Jay

Yeah. I mean, I have no idea whether that’s a good tactic, a bad tactic.

But you don’t denounce people like AOC and others, sellouts and others, which some people are saying, because of some disagreement over it, a tactic that wouldn’t have succeeded. The amount of sectarianism is beyond belief. And that’s obviously not just in the U.S. You see it all over the world, but it’s if we don’t overcome that kind of fighting that’s taking place and develop a really broad, very broad front of forces.

Larry Wilkerson

It makes me think constantly. And I agree with you globally as well as nationally, that progressives really don’t want progress. I mean, it’s in defiance of their own title, but they really don’t want progress. They just want to be heard. They want to pontificate. They want to throw this or that idea out there. Sometimes the rarer and more radical the better. They don’t want progress. That’s not any way to accomplish a political goal.

Paul Jay

I’d agree about some.

Larry Wilkerson

I don’t mean all.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I think the Internet’s really spurred that. That kind of politics was around. But now you can make yourself a brand by being so controversial and so critical.

You get views, you get clicks and you make money out of it. You know, the more noise you make, the more following you have.

Larry Wilkerson

What’s in the Republican Party has been personified by Ted Cruz (R-TX) and now Hawley (R-MO), who seems to be the Cruz replacement. You make an ass out of yourself in the most austere body of the American government right off the bat, which is totally in contradiction of precedent. And you get a name and a following.

Paul Jay

Yeah, actually, that’s another thing which I still think McConnell did this deliberately because I think he’s very savvy. But they hung Cruz out to dry here, too. I think in one swoop they accomplished quite a bit. I do give them credit for this.

Larry Wilkerson

He’s a good one to pick, because if you look at his district in Texas and then you look at the state where you have to win as a senator and you look at his elections, he’s very vulnerable. It wouldn’t take a whole lot of money and effort to defeat him. And, you know, they know that. So they got to find somebody to replace him probably, or be willing to lose that seat to the Democrats.

Paul Jay

So let’s get back into the moment.

So I missed this, but you were saying Pelosi was on television just before we started talking, and she’s calling for the 25th Amendment is she?.

Larry Wilkerson

Yeah and so I have to believe that they are counting heads even now because you’ve got to have two-thirds. So that’s what I assume they’re doing. And I assume she’s cleared this with, not cleared, but coordinated it with McConnell.

Paul Jay

And Pence. I mean, if Pence isn’t in they don’t they can’t do it.

Larry Wilkerson

And he’s probably said, show me the numbers. You know, I’m not going to put my, you know, out there on the hacker unless you show me two thirds plus ten or whatever.

Paul Jay

Yeah, but at this point, he’s not got much to lose. He’s already burnt bridges with the crazy Trump people.

And now he needs to show that he’s the next face of a more quote-unquote responsible criminal Republican Party.

Larry Wilkerson

And this is a moment this is a rare moment if courage prevails and it would take a certain courage he has not demonstrated that in the past by any means. But if it were even if it’s politically motivated, I don’t care if he’s got a moment here where he can strike go. And if he’s smart, he could perpetuate that goal. He could be the savior, if you will, of the situation, not only nationally, as the media has now portrayed it, but also in terms of what the Republican Party might have to offer in 2024.

What will he do it? That’s the huge question. He seems a very cautious man.

Paul Jay

It’s certainly in his interest to try to at the last second recoup his profile. But I wonder if they do move on, that is a president allowed to pardon himself at the time they’re doing the 25th Amendment.

Larry Wilkerson

This is all just incredible defiance of what I thought was a legal principle and practice. You know, pardons are impossible without convictions. That is to say, if you haven’t been convicted of a crime and I was under the understanding it had to be a federal crime in a federal court or a federal legal proceeding, you can’t be pardoned by the president. Because there’s no crime to pardon, in other words, premature pardons or pardons just in case, can’t be done.

So, what are we doing here? We made a decision based on the flimsiest evidence in the world. And according to some injustice of flip of the coin, when we prosecuted Agnew, a sitting vice president, that a president could not be subjected to that. I understand the vote was three to three. And so they flipped a coin and there was more deliberation. The deliberation, of course, was this will be a political instrument in the future and it’ll turn into just a political instrument.

And any time we don’t like a president, we’ll indict him, and then we’ll tie him up and so forth. So they didn’t do it. But if you were going to parse that one, how about this one? How about the idea of the president being above the law to the extent that he can pardon himself and his family for crimes for which they have not been convicted?

This is absurd. This is Giuliani law. So I don’t know where we’re going with this, I really don’t. I’d like to see every pardon he gave in that sense. Expecting a crime, expecting a conviction overturned immediately, just thrown out immediately as being a violation of the basic law, but I don’t know what will happen.

Paul Jay

Well, if tradition holds its course, kings don’t prosecute kings, which like Obama, should have gone after Cheney and Bush, he was legally obligated to do so.

In fact, he, in a sense, participated, he instead, participates in a war crime by not going after Cheney and Bush. It was an obligation under international law.

Larry Wilkerson

Yeah, it’d be tough to go after a president. And I gave him the benefit of the doubt there. But I certainly would have gone after the SecDef and I would’ve gone after the vice president. After all, we got Agnew, who’s to say we couldn’t get Cheney and the evidence was just so manifest. I don’t think it would have been a case politically.

Yes, but not legally. What do you do to him when you’re finished? That’s the real question. Do you actually jail them? Is it in Maryland and the general prison or?

Paul Jay

You know, I don’t know if I’ve ever said this on camera or not, but I’m not for the abolition of capital punishment. I am for executions only, though, for high crimes and misdemeanors. When you get people at the level of the presidency, the vice president, maybe the majority leader, when you get to that level of responsibility, I can imagine.

Larry Wilkerson

Yeah, a Benedict Arnold, you know, you could make a case, as was made by Omar Bradley and George Marshall in the Senate in testimony that wasn’t revealed immediately for MacArthur. You know, that this was treason at the very highest levels, especially when he started soliciting the Chinese nationalists to come into the war in Korea and started talking about nuclear weapons all across the peninsula and tried to get the Republican Party to back him in that regard so he could do it.

He wanted to build a radioactive belt all across North Korea by exploding nuclear weapons. You could say, well, similarly, there’s probably some truth to that.

But nonetheless, I kind of agree with you, with these high-level traitors.

Paul Jay

And what happened yesterday, it’s incitement to riot. It’s a crime. If, in fact, McConnell deliberately did not have security in place, at the very least, it’s gross negligence. But I think it’s, you know, gross negligence leading to death.

But then also a friend, a friend of mine pointed this out to me just as I was writing this thing, just the Covid thing, how many people are going to die and be terribly sick as a result of thousands of people without masks?

Larry Wilkerson

And look at the people in Congress who are still not wearing masks. You know, there’s a power in the Congress. That has not been exercised in some time. In fact, I’d have to check my data, but I know it was exercised in some cases at the beginning of the Civil War, we actually unseated serving Congress members, Senate, and Representatives, and we sent them home. That should be done. That’s within the prerogative of the leadership of the Senate and the House.

The guy last night, Hawley (R-MO). Show the photograph, leading them on, you’re unseated senator, go home. Your state needs a special election for you. Go home now.

Paul Jay

 I think this may be and that we can end the interview on discussing this point if Biden is going to be any bloody different.

He needs to use the moment to crush the Republican Party at this point, there’s never been an opportunity like this except maybe after the Bush administration and Obama didn’t take the opportunity. But now’s the time to crush it otherwise. And I’ll say the reason he probably won’t is because his financial master is Wall Street and so on.

They need both parties. They need the Republicans to be a brake on the Democratic progressives.

Larry Wilkerson

You’re making my postscript note in that article I wrote.

Yeah, I don’t know how we get out of this Paul. I really don’t. As a nation, as a people, I don’t know how we get out of this. We’re tracking hard for the edge of the cliff. It could take us another 50 to 60 years to get there. And, of course, climate change, nuclear weapons could bring us immediately to that and push us over. But we’re headed for the cliff. All right.

Paul Jay

Well, let’s build a broad front and change this bloody situation. I agree. Thanks for joining me. Thank you.

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