Trump Coup Strategy

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon's coup in the making
By Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Updated 11:47 AM ET, Wed February 1, 2017


"Strike at the enemy at a time and place or in a manner for which he is unprepared," reads one US Air Force formulation of the old military doctrine of surprise. Trump has long been an advocate of this tactic and complained various times during the campaign that our armed forces were far too transparent about their planned operations.

Yet Bannon is the mastermind of this takeover strategy as it's been adapted to the domestic realm. Well-versed in military tactics and the history of the radical left and right, Bannon has repeatedly talked about "destroying the state" in the name of securing power for "an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment."

Besieging your targets until nothing makes any sense -- giving them no time to absorb or recover from attacks -- is a time-tested strategy in the history of war and authoritarian takeovers. One might cite what's gone on in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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This strategy requires a two-pronged approach. First, the creation of a small group of loyal insiders, who take orders directly from the leader's inner circle and are tasked with creating chains of authority that bypass those of the existing federal government and party bureaucracies. I was disturbed, but not surprised, when Conway said two days after the inauguration that "it's really time for (Trump) to put in his own security and intelligence community."

Second is the unleashing of the political purges that authoritarians so love. Some purges are punitive (say the firing of acting Attorney General Sally Yates because she defied Trump's immigration order) and some pre-emptive (the expulsion of senior State Department staff) but the effect is to cleanse the government of troublemakers and leave a power vacuum to be filled with loyalists -- or not filled at all, for added disruption of the state bureaucracy.

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http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/opinions/bannon-trump-coup-opinion-ben-ghiat/