Captain Chaos Strikes Again

David Brooks, who is a conservative columnist for the NYT, appropriately attached the Captain Chaos label to The Donald in a recent op-ed.  Brooks is very close to Republican leaders and they expressed concerns about The Donald's management style which is to shoot first and ask questions later.  The Donald's most recent attempt to allay the fears of his base, whose fears he has cultivated, is a case in point.  He issued an executive order banning Muslim entry into the US from seven countries.  His order may be unconstitutional, but it may also be a conflict of interest.  His ban only applied to nations in which he has no business interests. Muslims from nations where he has business interests were excluded from his ban.  Since he refuses to release his tax returns it is impossible to determine the extent of his business interests in the nations excluded from his ban but there are Trump hotels and golf courses in several of them.

I attended a protest rally in Boston yesterday with my daughter.  Over 20,000 protesters took the opportunity to display their furor at Captain Chaos.  The protest in Boston was only one of several protests that occurred in many of our large cities whose airports admit international visitors to the US.  The posters on display by the protesters covered many of the concerns that people have about The Donald.  Most were about his ban on Muslims,  but even deeper concerns were evident.  Fascism was not an uncommon concern.  Nor was his elevation of Steve Bannon to his top national security group that does not typically include political advisers in its deliberations.  Bannon operated Breitbart News, which is one of many alt-right fake news organizations in the US, before Trump gave him a top position in his government.  Some view Bannon as the Joseph Goebbels of the Trump Administration.  Goebbels was not modest about his top position in Hitler's government.  He claimed that his propaganda was better than that of his opponents. His job is to turn a small base into the dominant political force in America.