The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism, by Steve Kornacki, Ecco / HarperCollins, 496 pages

Our semi-civil civil war continues unabated. Changing demographics remain a flash point, and the country’s cultural divides are as explosive as ever. The looming midterm elections and the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court are the latest installments in our ongoing scrum. Red and blue are no longer mere colors, but the war paints of choice of America’s dueling tribes.

Into the fray jumps NBC’s Steve Kornacki and The Red and the Blue, a smart and welcome take on U.S. politics over the past two decades. Kornacki traces how we arrived at we where we at to the 1990s, with Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich playing outsized and starring roles.

The Red and the Blue treats Clinton’s 1992 win and Gingrich’s ascension to House Speakership as pivotal moments in a decade marked outwardly by peace and prosperity, but with combustible waters bubbling to the surface in the face of political strains.

In the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Sister Souljah, a teenage recording artist and activist, had told the Washington Post in a May 1992 interview, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton adroitly seized the moment, telling her off, and came November he pocketed the electoral votes of Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, and West Virginia, states that have now become reliably Republican.

Looking in the rear view mirror, 1988 has now emerged as the last time a non-incumbent Republican actually won the popular vote. By the same measure, however, in neither of his presidential bids did Clinton ever garner a majority. America’s emerging divisions were coming into focus.

Specifically, his first time out, Clinton managed to score only 43 percent of the electorate in a three-way race that included Ross Perot. Four years later, running against a “snake-bitten” Bob Dole and Perot for a second time, Clinton still couldn’t break the 50 percent barrier.

Rather, his candidacy remained a fusion of graduate degree holders and minority voters, coupled with a significant number of working and middle class whites. Clinton remained an anathema to religious conservatives even if he frequently attended church.

Enter Newt Gingrich, an army brat, small college history professor, and conservative trend-threader. Kornacki tells Gingrich’s story too, namely how a Republican backbencher galvanized a party that had spent nearly 40 years as a permanent congressional minority into a focused force, with Gingrich at its helm until he could hold the speaker’s gavel no more.

In Kornacki’s telling, Gingrich grasped the tectonic shifts that undergirded American politics and technology early on, and embraced the politics of contrast. No longer would the congressional GOP be an enclave of well-mannered Midwestern Rotarians. Instead, the Republican Caucus would eagerly embrace the role of ideological bomb-throwers, self-styled revolutionaries in a war against liberals and the welfare state, with Rush Limbaugh providing the marching music. Fox News would come later in 1996, two years after Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution.

When George H.W. Bush broke his convention vow of “no new taxes,” Gingrich refused to provide the head of his own party with political cover. When Ken Starr supplied congressional Republicans with ammunition to impeach President Clinton, Gingrich, the congressional GOP, and the Republican base eagerly drank from the poisoned chalice—even as it ended an ethically-addled Gingrich’s congressional career and to Republican defeat in the 1998 midterms, a historic rarity for the “out party” in the sixth year of a presidency. A die for the future had been cast.

The Red and the Blue also captures the other players and hot-button issues that shape the politics of our day. The author recounts Pat Buchanan’s three unsuccessful presidential bids between 1992 and 2000. In the process, Buchanan bloodied a sitting president, scored several primary victories against the hapless Dole, and helped drive Republican platforms to the right. But Buchanan’s greatest accomplishment was in sounding the very themes that Donald Trump would come to voice on his road to the presidency: restrictive immigration and trade. America First.

Kornacki also notes Trump’s prior disdain for Buchanan in the context of the 2000 presidential contest where Buchanan ran on the Reform Party line. At the time, Trump and Buchanan both contemplated running for the party’s nomination. Back then, Trump was decidedly pro-choice, and bashed Buchanan for his take on World War II. Fast forward and Trump has left much of that behind, embracing the right and counting many of the the same Buchananite paleo-conservatives as his supporters.

The NRA and the gun debate also get their due. The book recounts how the Oklahoma City bombing helped restore Clinton’s luster after losing both houses of congress in the 1994 midterms. Clinton drew a straight line between the bombers, the Right and the NRA, earning votes from Cheever Country and soccer moms in the process. While the issue did nothing for President Obama and the Democrats in the late 2000’s, after a spate of mass shootings in 2018, high-end suburbia may be looking for more controls in the aftermath.  How will this translate at the polls next month?

Fittingly, The Red and the Blue ends by circling back to Gingrich and Clinton. Kornacki correctly observes that Gingrich was “half right” when he predicted that “definition and contrast” would drive the Republicans’ future. What he didn’t count on was that it would do the same for the Democrats.

As for the Clintons, they abandoned Arkansas, never to return. Instead, “Chappaqua, a tony suburb of New York City would be their new home. Like their party they could see where their future was.” But as the 2016 election teaches us, that’s not enough for the Democrats to get to 270. There’s the whole rest of America out there.  

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Say that you want to discredit the idea that Vladimir Putin’s Russian spies hacked the Democratic National Committee last year and weaponized the data via WikiLeaks. (Leave out, for a moment, whether or not Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russians, though that’s precisely what special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI are trying to find out.) You’d need a counter-theory, right?

For the past year or so, one of the most prominent counter-theories—involving a veritable field-full of rabbit holes, naturally—involves Seth Rich, a mid-level staffer at the DNC who was murdered on July 10, 2016. (The Washington, DC, police say that their investigation of the murder is still open, but their working assumption is that it was an attempted robbery.) It didn’t take long before conspiracy theorists, with zero evidence, pounced on the story. Rich, they declared, was killed (“assassinated,” as Newt Gingrich said) because he had stolen vast swaths of data from the DNC and handed it to WikiLeaks—so, voilà, both Moscow and the Trump campaign are innocent. The Democrats did it! The story bounced from Twitter to various conspiratorial rumor-mongers and onto websites such as Reddit and 4chan, thence to Breitbart News and eventually to Fox, where—as we shall see—it met its Waterloo.

Not to belabor the more-than-obvious, but if the police and the FBI had any inkling whatsoever that the WikiLeaks ammunition had come from Rich rather than Russia—say, by examining his computer—an army of federal investigators would have torn apart Rich’s apartment, interviewed his friends and colleagues, and a lot more. None of that happened.

The disproven and discredited story—which was grudgingly retracted by Fox in May, and extensively debunked by Olivia Nuzzi in New York magazine and by John Whitehouse at Media Matters—is now the subject of a new lawsuit, filed on August 1 in New York by one of the people originally mixed up in the attempt to spread fake news about Rich—and it sheds new light on how the story may have evolved. Rod Wheeler, a former DC detective and Fox contributor, is suing Fox News and two other defendants over what he says were deliberate efforts to falsify the story. According to Wheeler—in a 33-page complaint that was reviewed by The Nation—President Trump himself, along with then–press secretary Sean Spicer, participated directly in helping Fox spread lies about Rich. As the story unfolds, we’ll encounter Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and a wild cast of characters—one that, unfortunately, seems to include legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh.

In all of this, it’s important to remember that Seth Rich, 27, was a living, breathing person until the early morning of July 10, 2016, when he took two bullets in his back not far from his home in Washington. His family, in Omaha, Nebraska, agonized over his untimely death, and they’ve suffered doubly because Rich became a pawn in an ugly game to undermine the widely accepted notion that Russia was responsible for the hack-and-spearphishing attack against Hillary Clinton and John Podesta last year. The Rich family has repeatedly denounced the nonsense that has sprouted since his death, and they issued the following statement in response to the August 1 lawsuit filed by Wheeler: “We are hopeful that this brings an end to what has been the most emotionally difficult time in our lives and an end to conspiracy theories surrounding our beloved Seth.”

Right-wing and pro-Trump media and Internet sources aren’t the only ones who have given credence to off-the-wall theories about Russiagate.

Since details began emerging last summer about Russian involvement in the DNC revelations, a number of oddball stories have emerged encouraging critics to claim that Moscow wasn’t involved. And right-wing and pro-Trump media and Internet sources aren’t the only ones who have given credence to off-the-wall theories about Russiagate; so have liberal and left-leaning ones such as Counterpunch and Robert Parry’s Consortium News.

One that emerged in 2016 involved Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. Last December, Murray, who is a close associate of WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange, told London’s Daily Mail a fanciful story: that he himself received a package containing the purloined e-mails “during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University.” Murray also claimed that “neither of the leaks came from the Russians.” But Murray’s secret rendezvous—which no one has ever corroborated, and for which Murray himself provided no details—supposedly happened in September 2016, long after WikiLeaks published the Guccifer 2.0–linked DNC e-mails, which surfaced months earlier. Still, as Media Matters reported, the conspiracy-mongers started tying Murray to Rich, who of course had been murdered months earlier.

But it was the original Seth Rich story that had the longest shelf life.

While dark murmuring about Rich’s possible role in the WikiLeaks-DNC story began within days of his murder, the real impetus for the conspiracy-minded came from Julian Assange himself.

Though dark murmuring about Rich’s possible role in the WikiLeaks-DNC story began on the Internet within days of his murder, the real impetus for the conspiracy-minded came from Julian Assange himself. In a YouTube interview on August 9, 2016, Assange was asked whether WikiLeaks had “an October surprise” coming in regard to Clinton and the DNC, and, unprompted, he brought up Rich. Here’s a partial transcript:

Q: Is an October Surprise sitting in there?

Assange: WikiLeaks never sits on material. Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material, and often very significant risks. A 27-year-old, that works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered, just two weeks ago, for unknown reasons, as he was walking down the street in Washington.

Q: That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?

Assange: No. There’s no finding.

Q: So what are you suggesting?

Assange: I’m suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned at things occurring like that.

Q: Well, was he one of your sources then?

Assange: We don’t comment on who our sources are.

Q: Then why make the suggestion?

Assange: Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States. Our sources face serious risks…

Q: But it’s quite something to suggest a murder. That’s basically what you’re doing.

Assange: Well, others have suggested that. We are investigating to understand what happened in the situation with Seth Rich.

The implication of Assange’s comments was clear: that Seth Rich may very well have been his source. Days later, WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about the murder of Rich. The alt-right’s Mike Cernovich picked it up, Alex Jones’s InfoWars chimed in, and soon thereafter it was being spread on Sean Hannity’s radio show. A disturbing echo of the early 1990s conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton, such as the alleged “murder” of Hillary’s former law partner and deputy White House counsel Vince Foster (who, in fact, committed suicide), came from Roger Stone, the Trump-allied provocateur and former business partner of Paul Manafort, who managed Trump’s campaign last year. Citing Rich and other mythical victims of the Clintons, Stone tweeted: “Four more dead bodies in Clinton’s wake. Coincidence? I think not.” Stone’s tweet claimed that Rich was “on his way to meet with the FBI to discuss election fraud,” a claim manufactured out of thin air. The story was off and running.

For months, Seth Rich conspiracy theories bubbled up again and again on Gateway Pundit, Heat Street, the subreddit r/TheDonald, and elsewhere. But they burst into full bloom in mid-May of this year, just days after President Trump had touched off a firestorm by firing FBI Director James Comey, when a Fox News exclusive ran with the Rich story—and it’s that episode that is the subject of the new, and very revealing, lawsuit filed this month.

On May 16, Malia Zimmerman, a Fox reporter in Washington with a questionable track record, published a story on DC’s Fox 5 News outlining a conspiratorial view of the Rich murder. That night, Sean Hannity broadcast a lengthy segment based on Zimmerman’s story. And in both cases, in Zimmerman’s piece and on Hannity’s program, the star witness was Rod Wheeler. But in his lawsuit, Wheeler says that he was a victim of manipulation by others involved in the story, that he had been lied to by others involved in the investigation, that quotes attributed to him were fabricated outright, and—most explosive—that the White House itself was directly involved in helping to engineer a false story. Fox also attributed part of its story to an unnamed “federal investigator,” who appears never to have existed. On May 23, Fox would retract the entire story and purge it from its archives.

First, some background. Back in March, Wheeler, himself an occasional Fox News contributor and an African-American former detective in Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, was recruited to serve as a paid investigator by the Rich family. The person who recruited him was a Dallas financier, Trump supporter, and longtime Fox contributor named Ed Butowsky. Butowsky, who’d been a strong supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign and who claimed Steve Bannon as a personal friend, had already talked to the Rich family, and he had agreed to foot the bill for the family to hire an investigator to help solve the murder case. Even before securing Wheeler’s agreement to work on the case, Butowsky was already in touch with Malia Zimmerman.

Seymour Hersh said that Rich had created a Dropbox for DNC e-mails, that WikiLeaks had access to it, and that Rich had warned friends in case “something happens to me.”

Enter Sy Hersh. According to Wheeler’s lawsuit, “even before Butowsky had ever contacted Mr. Wheeler, Butowsky had already had a conversation on this topic with Seymour (Sy) Hersh.” Hersh claimed—and there’s a recording to support this—that he, Hersh, had had access to a secret FBI report about the Rich case. Hersh also said that Rich had created a Dropbox for DNC e-mails, that WikiLeaks had access to it, that Rich had warned friends in case “something happens to me,” and more. Here’s an excerpt from what Hersh told Butowsky, from an audiotape of parts of the conversation between Hersh and Butowsky, released by Butowsky, and published on YouTube by InfoWars:

He had submitted a series of documents, of e-mails. Some juicy e-mails from the DNC.… All I know is that he [Seth] offered a sample, an extensive sample, you know I’m sure dozens of e-mail and said “I want money.” Then later Wikileaks did get the password, he had a Dropbox, a protected Dropbox, which isn’t hard to do, I mean you don’t have to be a wizard IT, you know, he was certainly not a dumb kid. They got access to the Dropbox. He also, and this is also in the FBI report, he also let people know, with whom he was dealing, and I don’t know how he dealt, I’ll tell you about Wikileaks in a second. I don’t know how he dealt with the Wikileaks and the mechanism but he also, the word was passed according to the FBI report, “I’ve also shared this box with a couple of friends so if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problem.” OK. I don’t know what that means….

I have somebody on the inside, you know I’ve been around a long time, and I write a lot of stuff. I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy and he’ll do a favor. You’re just going to have to trust me.

Before we continue with the story, let’s unpack Hersh’s part in this. Contacted by The Nation via e-mail, Hersh affirmed that he didn’t know that Butowsky had recorded the call, for which both the text and audio have been made available. Interviewed by NPR for its story, he admitted talking to Butowsky. “I hear gossip,” Hersh told NPR’s David Folkenflik. “[Butowsky] took two and two and made forty-five out of it.” Indeed, Butowsky, focused on coming up with an alternate explanation for the release of the DNC e-mails, and did go a lot further. But Hersh appears to have provided Butowsky (and by extension, Zimmerman and Wheeler) with unsupported claims about an FBI report on Rich—coming from a single unnamed source, from documents that Hersh admits he didn’t see but only heard about—that concluded that Rich was involved with WikiLeaks. As Caitlin Johnstone, writing for Medium, notes, “Hersh owes the world an explanation for his Seth Rich comments.”

In an August 8 interview with Folkenflik, Hersh provided a partial explanation. Reported Folkenflik: “Hersh now says he was fishing for information from Butowsky. ‘I did not talk to anybody at the FBI—not about this,’ Hersh tells NPR. ‘Nothing is certain until it’s proved. And I didn’t publish any story on this.’” But that hardly explains his lengthy comments in the recorded call.

In his response to The Nation, Hersh was reluctant to revisit the episode. “I’d rather bay at the moon than say anything more about someone like Butowsky,” Hersh wrote in his e-mail. Pressed to explain his comments, however, he said, “What I write and what I say to someone…are different animals,” adding, “I did not write about the issue at the time.” Butowsky, he said, “used the tape to push a story that he wanted to believe.”

In a step-by-step account, Wheeler’s lawsuit outlines the alleged role of the White House in promoting the Seth Rich conspiracy story and in ultimately getting it onto the air in May, just days after Trump fired James Comey over what the president called “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia.” A day or so before the article was published by Fox, Butowsky texted Wheeler: “Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately.” In a voicemail message the same day, Butowsky told Wheeler: “A couple of minutes ago I got a note that we have the full, uh, attention of the White House on this.… The White House is onto this now.” Wheeler’s lawsuit adds that Butowsky had all along “kept in regular contact with Trump administration officials—including Mr. Spicer [and] Mr. Bannon.”

Weeks earlier, on April 20, Butowsky and Wheeler met with Sean Spicer at the White House. Spicer, who admits to the meeting, downplays its significance. “Ed [Butowsky] is a longtime supporter of the president’s agenda who often appears in the media,” Spicer told the Associated Press. “He asked for a 10-minute meeting, with no specified topic, to catch up and said he would be bringing along a contributor to Fox News.… The White House had nothing to do with his story.” Nevertheless, Douglas Wigdor, Wheeler’s attorney, tells The Nation that he plans seek sworn depositions from Spicer, Steve Bannon, and the president himself as the case moves forward.

“Part of our case is to corroborate our client’s claim that the White House was involved in preparing this fake-news story,” says Wigdor. “We’ll be seeking any and all communications, text e-mails, between Fox News, Ms. Zimmerman, and the White House or between Ed Butowsky and the White House and get phone records, logs, whatever.”

At the heart of Wheeler’s lawsuit is his charge that Butowsky and Zimmerman—the other two parties named in his suit, along with Fox News—deliberately fabricated quotes attributed to him. As stated in his complaint, the two statements in question—which appeared in the deleted article—are “My investigation up to this point shows there was some degree of email exchange between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks” and that either the DC government, the DNC, or the “Clinton team” are “blocking the murder investigation from going forward.”

In repeated messages to Wheeler, Butowsky said that the story would prove definitively that “the Russians didn’t hack into the DNC.” In one text message, archived by Wheeler and included in the complaint, Butowsky said, “The Russian hacking narrative of stealing the records from the DNC is officially dead.”

Ed Butowsky told Wheeler—in regard to the made-up quotes—“[O]ne day you’re going to win an award for having said those things you didn’t say.”

Somewhat hilariously, in a recorded conversation, Butowsky told Wheeler—in regard to the made-up quotes—“one day you’re going to win an award for having said those things you didn’t say.” Wigdor says that the myriad text messages, e-mail messages, and phone calls cited in the complaint are taken verbatim from exchanges between Wheeler and Butowsky, and are backed up by copies on file with Wheeler’s attorneys.

As reported by Snopes, the Fox report of May 16 had this to say:

An FBI forensic report of Rich’s computer—generated within 96 hours after Rich’s murder—showed that he made contact with WikiLeaks through Gavin MacFadyen, a now deceased American investigative reporter.… “I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks,” the federal source told Fox News.”

Headlines followed, in the predictable places. “not russia, but an inside job?” screamed Breitbart. “dead dnc staffer ‘had contact’ with wikileaks,” shouted Drudge Report.

Naturally, major questions emerged over Fox’s use of unnamed sources in its report. In both the print piece and the broadcast, Zimmerman and Wheeler refer to unnamed FBI and “federal” sources. It isn’t clear whether they’re relying on Hersh’s comments about an FBI source, whether someone else misleadingly told them that the FBI had the goods on Rich, or whether they just concocted a source out of whole cloth. “Butowsky and Zimmerman told Rod that they had an FBI source,” says Wigdor. “I don’t know whether that source was the same as Sy Hersh’s source, or was it a different source, or whether there was no source.” He adds, “Rod never met the alleged source, so he was relying on the representations from Butowsky and Fox.”

After an outcry, and with no corroborating information presented, on May 23 Fox withdrew its discredited report. Admitted Fox: “On May 16, a story was posted on the Fox News website on the investigation into the 2016 murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting. Upon appropriate review, the article was found not to meet those standards and has since been removed.” But Fox didn’t apologize for Hannity’s hyperventilating.

Meanwhile, though, both right- and left-wing conspiracy-mongering about the Russian hack-and-leak attack continues apace. (The Nation’s own Patrick Lawrence even tweeted on August 9 in support of the ongoing Seth Rich conspiracy talk.) Most disturbing, however, is Sy Hersh’s profanity-laced declaration to Butowsky, in that recorded call, that the whole Russiagate thing is “a Brennan operation,” meaning former CIA director John Brennan, aided and abetted by Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency. Said Hersh: “I have a narrative of how that whole fucking thing began, it’s a Brennan operation, it was an American disinformation and fucking the fucking president, at one point when they, they even started telling the press, they were back briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, fucking cock-sucker Rogers, was telling the press that we even know who in the GRU, the Russian Military Intelligence Service, who leaked it. I mean all bullshit.”

But Robert Mueller, the Justice Department special counsel, and the House and Senate intelligence committees are busily at work, seeking to reaffirm the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and to examine whether or not Trump or any of his allies colluded with Moscow. We should find out soon enough whether it’s “bullshit” or not.

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Trump’s National Security advisor Michael Flynn issued an unusual public statement last week, provocatively claiming that «Iran was being put on notice» for future unspecified actions, including military actions, over its recent ballistic missile tests. Trump himself has weighed in, scorning Iran for destabilizing the Middle East.

It turns out that an Iranian dissident group with suspected links to Israeli and Saudi state intelligence may have the ear of the president in setting his policy.

Trump’s newly confirmed transport secretary Elaine Chao and at least one of the president’s top advisors, former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani, have both appeared as guest speakers at rallies organized by the Iranian dissident group, Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK).

Other senior political figures close to the Trump inner circle who are also associated with the MEK include Republican party grandee Newt Gingrich, former CIA director James Woolsey and former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

The MEK originated as an armed insurgency against the US-backed Shah dictatorship during the 1960s. It later fell foul of the Islamic clerical government that has ruled Iran since 1979. The Iranian authorities have designated the MEK as a foreign-backed terrorist group. It is estimated to have carried out up to 17,000 killings against Iranian citizens in an attempt to destabilize the Islamic Republic. The assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists in recent years has been linked to MEK operatives, orchestrated by American and Israeli intelligence. Republican elder statesmen Newt Gingrich, who is a foreign policy advisor to Trump, famously called for more such assassinations.

Oddly enough, considering the group’s connections to senior Washington figures, the MEK was also responsible for the killing of at least six American servicemen and military contractors during the 1970s, when it was opposed to the US-backed Shah. The MEK declares that it has since renounced armed violence, officially as of 2001, and it blames the earlier killings of American citizens on a splinter group. It was taken off the US blacklist of foreign terror groups in 2012 – a move that was earlier recommended by the Washington-based Brookings Institute in 2009, when the think-tank referred to the MEK as a useful «proxy for regime change in Iran».

According to a report this week from Associated Press, Trump’s transport secretary Elaine Chao received $50,000 for a five-minute speech she gave in 2015 at a rally held in French capital Paris, which was organized by the political wing of the MEK. Attending the same rally was Rudi Giuliani who gave a vehement speech calling for regime change in Iran.

Chao, who is married to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, received an additional $17,500 for a speech she delivered in March 2016 at another rally held in the US organized by Iranian dissident groups linked to the MEK.

Giuliani was considered by Trump for the post of Secretary of State before the top diplomat job was finally given to Rex Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil. Last month, Giuliani and other former US officials wrote a letter to Trump calling on the new administration to «establish a dialogue» with the MEK’s political wing, reported the AP.

This lobbying background serves to explain why the Trump administration has taken an abruptly hostile line towards Iran.

There have been reports in US media that one motive may be that the Trump administration is trying to split the de facto alliance between Russia, China and Iran. So far, that gambit does not seem to be gaining any traction. Both Russia and China have denounced the new American sanctions imposed on Iran as counterproductive to international relations.

Moscow has also rejected Washington’s allegations against Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that Iran was, on the contrary, a key partner in defeating Islamist terror groups in Syria and Iraq.

Moreover, Russia this week defended Iran’s sovereign right to develop defensive military technology and said that its testing of ballistic missiles at the end of last month did not violate the 2015 P5+1 nuclear accord. Nor did they breach UN Security Council sanctions, says Moscow, because the missiles in question were conventional in nature and not designed to carry nuclear warheads. On the face of it, therefore, the pretext for Trump’s hostile turn towards Tehran does not make sense.

Pertinent to the Trump calculus is the input from Israel and Saudi Arabia – both states rabid in their claims that Iran is a malign influence in the region. Trump is due to meet with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu when he flies to Washington later this month. The pair have already held phone calls in which they have reportedly discussed the need to «contain Iran».

Trump’s defense secretary James Mattis, who last week also labelled Iran the «world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism», has reportedly been sharing close communication with Saudi Arabia’s military chief Prince Mohammed bin Salman about regional security matters, including again the «need to contain Iran». The Wahhabi House of Saud views Shia Iran and its more democratically driven Islamic Revolution as an existential threat to its dynastic rule and that of the other aligned Sunni Monarchs in the Persian Gulf.

The Washington establishment depends on this Saudi-Israeli axis and its containment of Iran in order to maintain its petrodollar hegemony, upon which its entire economy survives. The symbiotic nature of the US relation with Saudi and Israeli despotism is systematic and immutable regardless of who is occupying the White House.

A senior House of Saud figure, Prince Turki al Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief and uncle of the present defense minister, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is also a patron of the Iranian dissident group MEK. He has spoken at rallies calling for regime change, according to AP. It is very possible that the House of Saud is a major funder of the MEK, otherwise it is hard to explain how the exile group maintains offices in Europe and the US, with such major political figures on its guest lists.

The tie up with Israeli military intelligence is also consistent. Iranian authorities claim that assassinations carried out by MEK agents are enabled by Israel’s Mossad.

It would appear that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the MEK anti-Iran exile group are major drivers of Trump’s policy towards Iran.

Certainly the uptick in belligerence from the Trump administration is strongly suggestive of undue influence.

Personal dynamics also come significantly into play. Trump has shown himself to be something of a dilettante and ignoramus on foreign matters. He doesn’t read books, gets his information from cable TV news, and appears to be reliant on advisors and nebulous details to formulate «policy». Trump’s echoing of «state terror sponsor» charges against Iran suggest that this is a president who is prone to malign influence.

And on the matter of Iran, there is plenty of malign influence feeding into Trump’s brain.

Though the Cold War ended authentically on Russia’s side in 1991, it never really did end on the U.S. side (that was just a lie) — and Obama-Clinton were hoping soon to culminate the U.S. aristocracy’s conquest of Russia. I remain a committed progressive journalist but am no longer committed to any political party, because now both of the major political parties are vile and no third party in a Presidential system of government stands a realistic chance of controlling either the Executive branch or the Legislative branch of government — its only function is to serve as «spoiler» for one or the other of the two. So: I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, nor a supporter of some ‘third’ Party, but remain unchanged throughout, consistently a progressive, which means totally dedicated to truth and against lies (such as dominate all forms of conservatism). My criticisms of ‘news’ media reflect that, no political-party orientation.

* * *

On November 9^th, Salon’s reporter Brendan Gauthier headlined Salon’s top-of-homepage headline of the day, «In Donald Trump’s cabinet from hell, corporatism and cronyism run rampant — and Sarah Palin may be there, too» and reported what was at the time speculation that was sourced to an NBC news report, titled «Gingrich, Giuliani, Priebus Eyed for Top Jobs in Trump White House: Sources», which stated that:

Among the names being considered, according to conversations with three campaign advisers who requested anonymity to speak freely: Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Newt Gingrich for secretary of state, retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn for defense secretary or national security adviser, Trump finance chairman Steve Mnuchin for Treasury secretary, and Republican National Committee finance chair Lew Eisenberg for commerce secretary.

Trump himself has not taken an active part in transition efforts, in part out of superstition: He fears too much planning before a victory might jinx the campaign. In 2012, he was shocked to read detailed stories on Mitt Romney's preparations for the White House long before election day…

Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, a loyal supporter, has taken a major role managing the transition effort, especially as the official transition chief, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, has drifted from the campaign…

Asked for comment on the above names floated for cabinet posts, Trump campaign spokesman Hope Hicks replied by e-mail that «none of this is accurate».

That statement about Flynn is outright false. Here is all that Flynn’s op-ed — Gauthier’s cited source — actually said concerning his having been fired by Obama: 

Two years ago, I was called into a meeting with the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the director of national intelligence, and after some «niceties», I was told by the USDI that I was being let go from DIA. It was definitely an uncomfortable moment (I suspect more for them than me).

I asked the DNI (Gen. James Clapper) if my leadership of the agency was in question and he said it was not; had it been, he said, they would have relieved me on the spot.

I knew then it had more to do with the stand I took on radical Islamism and the expansion of al Qaeda and its associated movements. I felt the intel system was way too politicized, especially in the Defense Department…

I was pissed but knew that I had maintained my integrity and was determined in the few months I had left to continue the changes I was instituting and to keep beating the drum about the vicious enemy we were facing (still are)…

We’re in a global war, facing an enemy alliance that… picks up radical Muslim countries and organizations such as Iran, al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State.

That’s a formidable coalition, and nobody should be shocked to discover that we are losing the war.

There was no indication whatsoever in the article, that Flynn had been fired on account of any «hawkishness». That allegation by Salon was simply fabricated.

The reality about Flynn’s firing was the exact opposite: he was too ‘dovish’ to suit the neoconservative Barack Obama, who was now demanding that all of his top military generals support his goal of going to war against Russia. Flynn objected to that by saying that only one war at a time makes any sense, and that this war must be the defeat of jihadists, nothing else — certainly not a war against the other nuclear superpower.

Rather than Flynn’s support of Trump being a reflection of their shared ‘hawkishness’, it reflects their strong belief that the view that Barack Obama holds and that Hillary Clinton holds even more strongly — that the war against jihadists must be subordinated to the war against Russia — is a totally upside-down view of the priorities, and that instead of the U.S. supporting jihadists who are warring against Russia and its allies, the U.S. ought to be supporting Russia and its allies who are warring against jihadists.

If Salon wants to support the Obama-Clinton view and oppose the Trump view on the basis of truthful assertions, then that’s journalism and it is not mere political propaganda.

But if Salon wants to deceive its readers into holding the political viewpoint that they hold, then what else is there to call Salon but a propaganda-site?