Prediction: President Donald Trump will not last the full four years.

Some might say, “who cares? Pence will be just as bad, and do we really want the CIA and FBI involved in taking a US president out of office?” They miss the point: We who remember the fall of President Nixon with the Watergate scandal remember the huge political turmoil that swirled around this. It was a political crisis for US capitalism. Now, since November, they were trying to reconcile themselves to this unpredictable lunatic. They were thinking – hoping – that they could control him.

The Russia affair proves they cannot.

One of 7 Trump branded luxury towers in Florida along with Russian investors Alexey Ustaev (right) and Pavel Uglanov (left). Uglanov is posing with leader of the fascist Russian motorcycle gang, the Night Wolves.
Russian capitalists have invested some $100 million in these Florida towers.

I’ve been watching CNN, which I never did before. Every night they tear into Trump as they never do towards a US president. The reason is that Corporate America – the tops of the US capitalist class – have concluded that Trump is not acting in their interests. That’s why they are increasingly revealing the ties between Trump operatives like Carter Page and the Russian regime. This information has been known for months, and in fact oaklandsocialist wrote about it back in February.

So far, though, what they haven’t raised is the direct financial ties between Trump, himself, and Russian financiers. (We wrote about those in that same article.) But they will bring this out too, if they have to.

Their concerns are two fold:

1. They are furious that Trump is placing his own financial interests over the interests of the US capitalist class itself. (See the same article.)
2. Trump and his mouthpieces, especially press secretary Sean Spicer, have lost all credibility. So much so that the US corporate media can no longer even try to convince either the “American public” or the rest of the world of anything they say. As corporate media mouthpieces, plus corporate politicians, have said over and over, “what happens if there’s a national emergency and we have to intervene with North Korea?” The same thing was said regarding Syria. Nobody either at home or abroad will believe the reasons the Trump administration give.

The tops of the US capitalist class – especially the Wall Street executives – were hoping they could get Trump under control. They are coming to the conclusion that they can’t. They cannot and will not tolerate this (as far as their interests are concerned). The signs are there: The same media campaign is now developing that developed when they decided that Nixon had to go.

US Senator Dianne Feinstein.
She is reported to have said about Trump, “I think he’s going to get himself out.”

Although the corporate media has many times less credibility than it did at the time of Watergate, it still has a lot of clout. In other words, the tops of the US capitalist class are still more or less in control. The die hard Trumpistas will just reject everything they hear, just like they reject the fact of human caused global warming. But they are a minority. For the great bulk of the US population the idea that a president is not representing “our country” is totally unacceptable.

That’s why Trump will be gone. Maybe by the JFK solution. Maybe by a “heart attack” or a “stroke” – through natural causes or otherwise. Maybe by resignation. But one way or another, it’s hard to see how the tops of the US capitalist class can allow Trump to last four years. Very hard.

Then the real turmoil will get under way.

Second Thoughts
After writing and posting this, another thought occurs: His best survival strategy would be to start a war, for instance with North Korea. He’s already raised this possibility. The entire US capitalist class would join together in supporting him in that case. This is the extreme danger we face here.