August 31, 2021

By Thom Hartmann

Back in November when it was clear that Trump had lost the election in an historic landslide of 7 million votes, a fascinating CNN piece noted how he and his top officials were working to create absolute chaos during the presidential transition specifically and intentionally to sabotage the incoming Biden Administration.

“Some observers,” the authors noted, “pointing to Trump's rush to pull troops [out of Afghanistan] over unanimous objections from the military's most senior leaders as well as NATO commanders, question whether the President and his officials are trying to salt the earth for Biden.”

Salt the earth?  

Outside of seminary and yeshiva graduates, most Americans would draw a blank at the name Abimelech, but he could easily have been Trump’s role model.  One of the sons of former Israeli King Gideon back in the day, Abimelech became the richest man in the land by ripping off his brothers and other relatives (and killing a few).

He held power through crude threats, bribery and bravado.  He ruled via such often-incoherent and brutal whims, and so disrespected his people, that his own citizens plotted to overthrow him.

And then, the day he died, he did to a town an hour or so north of Jerusalem what Trump tried to do to Biden. 

After seizing the town of Shechem he ordered their fields poisoned with salt, so they’d never again grow crops, trees or even grass. As recorded in Judges 9:45: “Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took the city, and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt.”

Donald Trump tried to salt the earth of President Joe Biden’s incoming administration in a variety of ways.

The result is Trump followers still refusing vaccination so we have over 1000 dead Americans a day; a dysfunctional Justice Department, Post Office, IRS and EPA (among others); and a host of foreign policy crises including an unnecessarily difficult pullout from Afghanistan.

Trump not only ordered a chaotic drawdown of US troops, he set up his military sabotage of incoming President Biden when he fired his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, a week after losing the election and replaced Esper with a loyal toady named Chris Miller.

Esper had suggested that the troop withdrawal needed to be staged and we needed to get people who had worked with us out of the country. It had to be thought through and done right, Esper argued.

But Trump ordered the former Taliban leader released from prison along with 5000 fighters (some of whom are now with ISIS-K, which just killed 13 American soldiers).

He then cut out the official government of Afghanistan and worked out an unconditional American surrender with the very Taliban commander he’d just released, only asked them to stop shooting at Americans, gave them everything they wanted, and ignored it when they didn’t keep their tiny parts of the bargain.

Trump’s plan to salt the earth Biden would inherit in Afghanistan rattled folks at both the State and Defense Departments.

“My concern was that President Trump, by continuing to want to withdraw American forces out of Afghanistan, undermined the agreement,” Esper told CNN recently. “Which is why … I objected and formally wrote a letter to him. A memo based on recommendations from the military chain of command and my senior civilian leadership that we not go further, that we not reduce below 4,500 troops — unless and until conditions were met by the Taliban. Otherwise, we would see a number of things play out, which are unfolding right now in many ways.”

But Trump wanted to give an unconditional surrender to the Taliban because he thought that would let him claim he’d “ended the war” and thus help him win the 2020 election, and Chris Miller was fine going along with that. So Esper was fired and Miller replaced him.

If Miller’s name sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because he authored the infamous memo ordering the DC National Guard to stand down and not help the Capitol Police on January 6th.  

He was also the guy who refused to order any help to the Capitol during the January 6th assault, despite repeated pleas from Congress and Maryland’s Republican governor, until after it was obvious that Trump’s paramilitary stormtroopers had failed in their mission to assassinate Pence and Pelosi and the Electoral College ballots were secure along with the members of Congress.  

Salt the earth: Try to set Biden up for failure here at home as well as in Afghanistan.

Politico noted, as the details came out on Inauguration Day, January 20th: “The Pentagon blocked members of President Joe Biden’s incoming administration from gaining access to critical information about current operations, including the troop drawdown in Afghanistan … and the Covid-19 vaccine distribution program….”

The actions by Miller and other last-minute hand-picked Trump people in senior positions, Politico’s Lara Seligman and Bryan Bender suggested, represented a sabotage that was “unpreceded in modern presidential transitions and will hobble the new administrations on key national security matters…”

Biden’s people were even “denied information on the SolarWinds hack” that got Russian cyber actors inside multiple US Government agencies where some may be even to this day. That blocked Biden or his people — for months — from getting “a clear picture of our force posture around the world and our operations to deter our enemies.”

Trump’s saboteurs even “abruptly cancelled the transition team’s meeting with … the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, which had been scheduled for just before Christmas.” As a result, the reporters noted, “The drawdown in Afghanistan…is one of the most pressing issues Biden’s national security team will have to confront in his young presidency.” 

Trump and crew were dedicated to keeping Biden in the dark as long as humanly possible.

Salt the earth: Try to get Biden to take the blame for half a million Trump Covid deaths.

They did the same thing to Biden’s people around the new Covid vaccines, having earlier tossed in some money to develop the Moderna version (Pfizer took no US money) but then, post-election, refusing to share any logistic details with the incoming team about plans for distribution of those very temperature-sensitive medications. 

The Politico reporters noted that “the delay in getting answers about Warp Speed will hamper the Biden administration’s plan to dramatically scale up the nation’s vaccination distribution effort over the next three months.”

Salt the earth: Set up Biden to fail in the Covid vaccination effort so Democrats would take the blame in 2022 and 2024.

Jared Kushner was in charge of the vaccine program, but he was very busy finalizing a billion-dollar loan from Quatar — after the UAE and Saudi Arabia had blockaded our ally Quatar until Kushner got his money — so, it turns out, there were no plans for vaccine distribution.

None. Not a single thing. Nothing. No plans. That President Biden has gotten over 200 million shots in American arms is, frankly, nothing short of a miracle.

But more than anything else, Trump wanted revenge. It’s the air he breathes, the blood he drinks. And he wanted revenge on Joe Biden for beating him in the election so badly.

Screwing up Covid, laying land mines in the economy, giving $2 trillion in tax money to his billionaire friends, setting up a disaster in Afghanistan, and trying to convince Americans that they couldn’t trust their government to handle clean elections or public health were all victories over the incoming Democratic Biden administration, in Trump’s mind.

Ways to salt the earth.

After Kushner got his billion bucks, Trump ignored the advice of his senior military and State Department officials, as well as a general freak-out in NATO, and personally cut a deal to sell $23 billion worth of America’s most advanced fighter jets, the F35, to the UAE. 

If not killed, the deal will alter the balance of power in the region for a generation, and most likely not in a way beneficial to peace or US interests. (Let’s not forget that 9/11 was hatched by a member of the Saudi Bin Laden family and executed by 15 Saudis and 2 guys from the UAE.)

But Kushner will keep the cash and Trump may well get a new hotel in the region.  Or maybe, like Idi Amin, Trump will just move his family to Saudi Arabia and live out his days in a palace surrounded by a private harem.

Affording that may take a lot of money, however, and Trump’s all over that one right now.  I gave $15 to his campaign in 2015 to get on his email list and have been on his begging list ever since (its now metastasized to several different lists).  

Yesterday’s appeal from “President Donald J. Trump” said:

Thomas,

I need you right now.

Joe Biden and the Radical Left are working overtime to try to UNDO everything I accomplished on behalf of the American People. For FOUR YEARS, America was WINNING like never before. NOW, the Democrats are LOSING, just look at what’s happening in Afghanistan, and they’re starting to PANIC.

We have a MAJOR FUNDRAISING DEADLINE coming up and I’m really counting on YOU to step up, Thomas. I want to make sure we absolutely destroy the Democrats and their MEGA HOLLYWOOD DONORS.

I’ve set a HUGE goal of raising another $1.5 MILLION, but I can’t do it without you. Your support is so vital to our success that I’ve activated a QUADRUPLE-IMPACT just for YOU.

Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to CRUSH our End-of-Month fundraising goal and your gift will be INCREASED by 400%.

Trump isn’t running for any office at all right now and 90% of the money raised, according to the disclosure, goes to his PAC that’s structured to pass most of it straight into his own pocket (via a few small legal hoops). 

And he’s raised over $100 million this way in just the first 6 months of this year.

Plus, had I responded to this appeal, he’d take an additional $50 and ding me monthly for the rest of my life. And I’m getting at least ten of these a week, often from “President Trump” but also from his various family members and even one from Newt Gingrich.

Salt the earth: By radicalizing the Republican base, Trump is increasing the probabilities of violence and such a severe disruption of our political process in 2024 that it could end our democratic republican form of government.

Which would be much to the delight of several oligarchic countries around the world with whom Trump and his closest advisers have strong financial relationships.

Trump has so far avoided the final fate of Abimelech, who was taken out by a woman who threw a stone at him from the top of a building he was trying to lay seige against. 

But it’s not like Trump doesn’t have some women to worry about: E. Jean Caroll, Stormy Daniels, Mary L. Trump, Alva Johnson, Jessica Leeds, Jill Harth, Kristen Anderson, Lisa Boyne, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart, Mariah Billado, Karena Virginia, Bridget Sullivan, Tasha Dixon, Melinda Macgillivray, Jennifer Murphy, Rachel Cooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Ninni Laaksonen, Jessica Drake, Samantha Holvey, Cassandra Searles, Karen McDougal, Karen Johnson, Amy Dorris and Summer Zervos.

The website of origin for this commentary is HartmannReport.Com.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution.

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