The Link Between JFK’s Death & Trump’s Classified Documents
60 years later, a fundamental question remains unanswered-who controls national security and its information? Elected officials or an unelected Deep State?
This past Wednesday was the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. We’ve reached a point in history where significant majorities of the country don’t believe the official government narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Moreover, the belief that the America’s government—specifically the CIA—orchestrated the murder of their own president, is now widely popular.
What can’t be overlooked is how much the reasons the government would have wanted JFK gone tie directly into the issues that are at stake in the classified documents charges brought against Donald J. Trump.
That issue is this—who runs U.S. policy in general, and U.S. war policy specifically? Is it people elected by the people of the United States? Or are these people just figureheads, meant to be steered into doing the bidding of The Deep State—that Iron Triangle of government agencies, private corporations and media conglomerates that have direct financial interests in specific policy outcomes.
Why JFK and Trump Were (Are) Hated
Consider the correlations between JFK and Trump:
*JFK was resistant to launching the failed Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba in 1961, where a CIA-recruited guerrilla army would attempt to oust Fidel Castro. JFK was eventually persuaded into letting the operation move forward, thanks to misleading information given by CIA head Allan Dulles. But the young president refused to go along with authorizing follow-up military action when the initial landing failed. In doing so, Kennedy enraged the CIA and the military establishment. The feeling was mutual, with JFK vowing to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
*JFK would further resist dangerous efforts to escalate tensions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, opting instead for the saner path of…you know, trying to avoid nuclear war. He would later say that he considered keeping the peace to be the most fundamental responsibility of any American president. The obsession of the CIA with Cuba can be understood by seeing its links to organized crime, and their hopes of opening up Havana. A key storyline of Godfather II might have fictional, but the history behind the story was real.
*The last straw was when JFK began to tell people privately that he had every intention of pulling all U.S. troops out of Vietnam following the 1964 presidential election. This was confirmed in many places, including the autobiography of former House Speaker, and fellow Boston Irishman Tip O’Neill. Although Tip showed his compatibility with the Deep State by playing ball with the bogus Warren Commission conclusion—a Commission that Dulles played a key role on, in spite of having been fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs and his hatred of the president being well-known.
*Trump began his 2016 campaign by wading into the Republican primaries and not only repudiating the GOP’s entire post-Cold War interventionist foreign policy, but directly looking Jeb Bush in the face and all but telling him that his entire family were essentially a bunch of liars.
*Trump would then go into the general election, with his call for an America First policy that would bring an end to foreign wars, marking a clear contrast with Hillary Clinton, whose warmongering was so egregious that Democratic primary voters had denied her the nomination in 2008 (when she would have certainly won the presidency) in favor of Barack Obama, who had been against the Iraq War.
VIDEO DISCUSSION: The Just War Doctrine of the Catholic Church
Both JFK and Trump had to constantly fight their own bureaucracies—
*If you read books like The Devil’s Chessboard or JFK: Why He Died & Why It Matters, you can read of constant efforts by the military brass and their dependent corporations to undermine Kennedy’s peace efforts.
*If you were simply alive from 2016 to the present, you can recall fake charges of Russia collusion designed to ruin Trump’s hopes of forging a more workable relationship with Vladimir Putin. And you can recall Trump’s own Secretary of Defense, Mike Esper, openly writing that he colluded with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to hinder Trump’s efforts to bring troops home from Afghanistan. Trump pushed through the Swamp to get a withdrawal plan in place. Had he been allowed to oversee it, the withdrawal might not have turned into the epic disaster that it did.
JFK and Trump both represented existential threats to interests that make billions upon billions (maybe even trillions) from constant foreign conflicts—the wars and the subsequent rebuilding. JFK was directly taken out. Decades later, Trump is taken out in a more sophisticated way—through constant criminal charges and the use of corporate media to push false storylines.
The Flow of Classified Information
Thus, we come to the charges Trump took classified documents. At its core, the question of what documents Trump did or didn’t take with him, boils down to this—who decides who gets to see possess classified intel? Who controls the flow of sensitive information? In short, who actually owns this information?
It’s easy to answer that last question by saying “the people”, but I don’t think any of us think it would be a good idea if we could all walk in and look at classified information on a tour through the U.S. Capitol. So let’s reframe it to ask who best represents us as owners of this information?
Is it someone who has faced the voters and been elected to the presidency, of whom there are only five such individuals alive? Or is it thousands of agency officials, none of whom have had their name on a ballot and only a small fraction of whose names we even recognize?
Information is power. The Deep State knows it. They don’t want this information controlled by people who don’t “play ball” with them. If you play ball with the Deep State, you’ll get left alone. You’ll be made rich. If you don’t play ball, you’ll end up in court every single day. Or maybe your brains will be splattered on your wife’s dress.
The Real Threats to Democracy
All of what’s above is to say that the legacy of JFK’s death is that for 60 years, our presidential elections have been mostly for show. Not entirely, but mostly. I think it’s become even more egregious in the post-Cold War era. The Deep State either seeks to get its chosen slate of candidates as the only options, or to simply co-opt and bully the people who are elected
For people who are absorbed in partisan politics or entrenched in negative opinions of either the Trumps or the Kennedys, accepting this important link between JFK and DJT will be difficult, but necessary.
Look, I’m not a huge fan of the Kennedys. In fact, I think the family as a whole is incredibly screwed up, and their entire rise (including JFK) is symbolic of everything that has gone wrong in the Catholic Church and the Irish-American world in the postwar era, with its loss of faith and an embrace of a more secularized worldview.
But I also think JFK had some excellent qualities, and his determination to find peace, while maintaining strength, was one of them. So was his commitment to finding “not the Democratic answer or the Republican answer, but the right answer.” I think his nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exemplifies a lot of those qualities, even if he is more liberal than I am on some important issues.
I would ask Democrats—particularly those who grew up on the mythology of Camelot, to start taking a serious look at their hatred of Trump. I’m not really sure what they want. Trump is the only president of the postwar era to have not started a new foreign war. Trump is the Republican who did want every Democrat would have craved in the 2000s, by openly confronting the Bush and Cheney families.
The fact that those Democrats still insist on hating Trump, in favor of the warmongering histories of the Clintons and Biden, has led me to question whether their anti-war convictions were ever really convictions to begin with. Were they simply beliefs of partisan convenience?
Why It Matters
Getting a correct understanding of JFK’s death, and its implications today is about nothing less than this—do we the people decide what kind of war and foreign policy we want through our elected leadership? Or do we not? It’s up to you to decide whether your hatred of people you’ve never met matters more than this.
Sixty years after JFK’s murder, the United States has reached a tipping point. We are well past the 11th hour. I still believe this should be a free country, so by all means do what you want—but for me, this is why it’s Trump or Bust.