The Open Sourced War against Trump Begins

The age of Trump officially began and turned into the war on Trump last week with the Inauguration and its messy aftermath.

The term war must be used because that is what started on January 19, 2017; the anti-Trump coalition declared war on the President and all who stand with him and Donald fired right back. The best description of this conflict was provided by strategy guru John Robb at his Global Guerrillas blog. He labeled it an open-sourced insurgency, an all out People’s War against Trump.

Robb believes that the women’s march against Trump on January 20; which may attracted three times as many people to Washington as the inauguration according to estimates crowd scientists provided to The New York Times, was the beginning of the insurgency. He compared the insurgency to the one that removed corrupt Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak from office in 2011.

The Opened Sourced Insurgency against Trump

Here’s a good description what an open-sourced insurgency is and how it works Robb wrote on November 11, 2016:

“What is an open source insurgency?  An open source insurgency is how a very large and very diverse group of people empowered by modern technology and without any formal organization, can defeat a very powerful opponent.”[1]

That sounds like what happened on America’s streets on January 20, 2017. Large numbers of people, everybody from soccer moms to Anonymous to Black Lives Matter to Madonna to John Kerry showed up. They had no plan, no real ideology or cause; only a goal: get rid of Donald Trump.

Open-sourced warfare often works because it deploys a wide variety of tactics and weapons. This makes it hard for traditional organizations to counter and defend against. U.S. forces in Iraq had a hard time coping with a wide variety of insurgents using a wide variety of tactics.

This strategy can be applied to politics as well as to the battlefield. We saw an excellent example of it last year: Hillary Clinton’s very traditional Presidential campaign; which employed conventional methods, was incapable of dealing with the open-sourced tactics of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Donald J. Trump.

Some Takeaways from the First Week of the War on Trump

It is far too early to make any sort of depth analysis of what is happening but we can make a large number of salient points.

Important takeaways from the first week of the open-sourced war on Trump include:

• The insurgency against Trump is far larger and far more widespread than the media or the political class realize.

 

• The media and the political elite are grossly underestimating the size and depth of the anti-Trump insurgency.

 

• The media; and the professional political class, are also underestimating the intensity and ferocity of the rage against Trump on the streets.

• The media and political leaders are completely out of touch with popular opinion. Note: the same people who did not see the Trump phenomenon developing last year are not seeing the anti-Trump movement coming this year.

 

• Political leaders and the media are incapable of dealing with this situation because they do not understand what is going on.

 

• President Trump and his advisors are in denial about the situation. Donald’s claims that the inauguration crowd was larger than it really was, and claims that five million illegal aliens voted are efforts to deny reality and delegitimize the insurgency.

 

• Trump’s clumsy attacks will only energize and empower the insurgents. They’ll get angrier and more frustrated and ratchet up the intensity of their attacks.

• The next step for the insurgents will be to take over the Democratic Party which will be easier than we might think. Establishment Democrats will be swept away by the insurgent tide, much as Trump’s tidal wave easily overwhelmed establishment Republicans.

 

• The Democratic leaders; with the possible exception of Kerry, are totally clueless. Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) proved this by offering Trump an olive branch; in the form of cooperation on infrastructure, after the Women’s March.

 

• Large segments of the Democratic base; which was at the marches, will turn on Schumer and anybody else who tries to collaborate with Trump. They will adopt the Tea Party tactic of naming people like Schumer traitors and Democrats in Name Only or DINOs.

 

• Moderate Democrats; such as Schumer, are likely to find themselves isolated and powerless in their own party if they cooperate with Trump. Like moderate Republicans; such as U.S. Senator John McCain (Arizona), they will still win reelection and get invited to Sunday morning talk shows but have no sway over the party.

• The Democratic Party establishment will cave into the anti-Trump insurgency and try to coopt it. Much as Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus and the GOP apparatus joined the Trump movement and took it over.

 

• U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) is likely to emerge as the leftwing Priebus; manipulating the insurgents and the party establishment to take control of government. Ellison is waging an aggressive campaign to become Democratic Committee Chairman and he has the backing of Bernie Sanders.

• We now have two competing open-sourced insurgencies in the United States; each claiming to be the true representative of the American people and American values. The last time that occurred was in 1861 and the results were not pretty, they included a little thing called The Civil War.

 

• The insurgents are likely to target any entity seen as pro-Trump. Protestors already chained themselves to the doors of Uber’s San Francisco headquarters because that company’s CEO took an advisory post in the Trump administration.

 

• Likely targets of the insurgents include Tesla Motors (NASDAQ: TSLA) and SpaceX; Elon Musk has been seen at the White House, and media outlets sympathetic to Trump such as CBS. Also likely to be targeted is World Wrestling Entertainment (NYSE: WWE); one of its principal owners Linda McMahon was appointed head of the Small Business Association by Trump. Linda and her family, including wrestling legend HHH, were seen on TV at the inauguration.

• Foreign governments are likely to become involved in the insurgency. There is strong evidence that the Russians manipulated the Trump Insurgency. What happens if the Chinese get behind the anti-Trump insurgency? Trump’s trade policy gives the leaders of the People’s Republic a strong reason to oppose him; it threatens their economy and their jobs.

 

• Big business is likely to join the insurgency. Executives whose companies Trump is trying to bully are likely to side with the insurgents. So are companies that depend on trade with China. This includes Walmart (NYSE: WMT) and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) as well as many manufacturers.

 

• Companies that might profit from Trump’s policies such as oil producers, defense contractors and pipeline operators might rally to the president’s defense.

 

• The media elite will try to delegitimize the anti-Trump insurgency much as they tried to discredit Trump and Sanders. CNN has already revived one vicious tactic used against Sanders last year against the Women’s March. The network has branded the March racist; because most of the marchers were white. Last year various commentators labeled Bernie; an old civil rights activist who marched with Dr. King, racist because most of his supporters – like most of the American population – were white.

• The media’s efforts to discredit the insurgency will fail because nobody will pay attention to them. Both Sanders and Trump emerged as more popular and influential after media attacks on them.

 

• Traditional politics which were based on collaboration and cooperation are dead and they cannot be revived.

 

• We live in a new age where polarization and conflict are the norm.

• Only political figures like Trump, Priebus and Ellison that realize this will succeed in such an environment.

It looks as if 2017, is going to be very interesting year politically. Instead of the age of Trump we are about to get a very destructive open-sourced political war with no end in sight.

[1] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2016/11/open-source-insurgencies-and-the-future-of-the-united-states.html