It's season two of Trump soap opera - Quad-Cities Online

The ongoing soap opera of the Trump administration opened its second season with an exciting plot development: a messy divorce between Donald Trump and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

The opening installment contained an article in New York magazine by Michael Wolff, author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” a book to be released Tuesday. It is a tell-all tale of outspoken opinion from a bewildered cast of characters. If the dialogue is as true as it is frank, it explains why the 2017 season was such a mess.

True or false, the high-octane, pre-publication buzz should leave the author awash in royalties. I imagine almost everyone will want to read for themselves what Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus and others really think about our president and each other.

As in most divorces, it is a case of he-said-she-said and Trump has lost no time giving us his side of the story; not in book form - he’s not the literary type - but in a series of angry tweets. As you can imagine, there is little agreement and no love at all between the aggrieved parties.

Who can be trusted in this drama? Is this a sitcom gone awry or a documentary? Fact or fiction?

It is not a flattering story for any of the people involved and one wonders how Wolff got his information. According to the author, he spent a year and a half with the Trump campaign and in its early time in office. He found that no one seemed to be in charge, so he was able to occupy “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing.”

From that intimate perch he was able to spend a lot of time talking to everyone and, if the comments he gives are actual quotes, there will be a number of changes in this year’s cast.

If we have a hard time believing what we are seeing and reading, Wolff offers a simple explanation: neither Trump nor his staff expected him to win. They were stunned by their victory and had given no thought to actually governing: a situation that has not improved over time.

Still, the show is scheduled for at least three more years and hope for a more coherent plot is fading fast. It may provide fodder for late night comedians but there is little to engage the serious citizen - apart from the chance that the occupant of “Washington’s Daycare Center” may thrust the world into a nuclear holocaust through sheer petulance.

But the right way to view all this may be as a sideshow. As Trump puts on a performance that monopolizes the media, the real action plays out just down the street at the Capitol. There, the Grand Old Party is steadily advancing its Grand Old Plan to morph our democratic republic into an oligarchy.

The plot is well advanced. The recent tax deal (“reform” is a wildly inappropriate term) takes a decisive step toward ending the New Deal and Great Society programs of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, and all the other government programs designed to enrich the lives of individual citizens.

The president celebrates the tax vote as “a win” for his followers, but its true purpose is to set the country on track to eliminate those programs by privatizing them or simply letting them wither like Obamacare.

What we understand now is that the tax deal is a permanent boon for the very wealthy, corporations, and Trump himself, as an owner of real estate, golf courses, and restaurants. What we don’t see so clearly is how the temporary tax break for some middle-class families will be used to leverage support for ending those programs serving the average citizen.

The government has always supported welfare programs; but only for corporations, large businesses, and the ultra-wealthy. That changed with the New Deal, but now we are quietly heading back to the Age of the Robber Barons, while voters are distracted by the high-wire acts, low comedy, and shell games of the Trump “Reality” Show.

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