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| Galactic heroes via Target. |
I think it was watching Lawrence O'Donnell on the TV claiming to have discovered that the author of the I AM PART OF THE RESISTANCE letter was old Dan Coats that convinced me I knew who it really was, because all his reasons were wrong, and it obviously wasn't Coats, who may well be pretty distressed over Trump's stupidity and mercuriality but—particularly if he is actively resisting anything—is too smart to express it in such a futile, self-defeating way as this invitation to Trump to become more paranoid and ungovernable than ever.
My theory, fed by narrativium, is that it must have been TV economist Larry Kudlow, who took over the National Economic Council from Gary Cohn in April, after Cohn fled, not in protest against Trump's admiration for the murderous neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan demonstrators in Charlottesville, August 2017 (though we understand Cohn threatened to resign at the time) but in recognition of his inability to persuade Trump to listen to reason on the subject of steel and aluminum tariffs. As we now begin to learn from Bob Woodward's research, Cohn was the heart and soul of the RESISTANCE in his time, or at least convinced Woodward that he was—the guy who stole papers off the sacred presidential desk.
Cohn's a believer in a conventionally conservative kind of economics, who wasn't bothered by the radical Trump overhaul of corporate and pass-through income and other taxes on the very rich, or the push toward radical deregulation in the finance industry and de-fanging of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but is genuinely bewildered and upset by Trump's hatred of international cooperation, especially on trade (and as you know I don't like it either and don't @ me to tell me I'm a neoliberal). That's what he was resisting, in fact: the paper he stole from the Resolution Desk was an order to dissolve the US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement. And Kudlow is the same kind of economist, or has played one on television, and so is I AM PART OF THE RESISTANCE:
