Trump and the Deep State / The Koch Brothers’ New Brand

 

Just read new and updated forewords to two important book-length studies about power in the US. Both were updated to put their considerable investigations in connection with the new Trump administration.

The first book is by Prof. Peter Dale Scott, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at UC Berkeley. He wrote a new foreword–“Donald J. Trump and The Deep State”[1]–to the recent 2017 paperback version of his The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy (2014)[2]. He is an expert on the concept of ‘Deep State’ and provides an updated history of the concept’s development.

Entry to the next massive study can be best obtained by reading ecological activist Bill McKibben’s review–“The Koch Brothers’ New Brand”[3]–to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.[4] On Amazon you can read most of her new foreword.

What becomes clear in these writings is the fact that Trump and his cabinet are very much integral elements of the American power elite, though are part of a nationalist faction which has always operated at the margins of government.

Originally posted on Facebook, Feb 10, 2017.

[1]. Scott, Peter Dale. “Donald J. Trump and The Deep State“. Who.What.Why. 6 Feb 2017.

[2]. Scott, Peter Dale. The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. 

[3]. McKibben, Bill. “The Koch Brothers’ New Brand”. New York Review of Books. 10 Mar 2016. 

[4]. Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 2016.