Donald Trump likes his daily intelligence briefings to be short and with "killer graphics," This press conference banned visual recording yet used visual aids.

Ultimately it’s never a choice between socialist death and capitalist death. It is about what will be done.

Life and death is easier for some psychopaths. Worse now that even military leaders pay attention to Commander-in-Chief rants made on Twitter

February (2017)

Donald Trump ... defended Vladimir Putin against accusations that he is a killer, telling Fox News: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

The US president appeared to place the US and Russia on the same moral plane in an interview broadcast before the Super Bowl kicked off in Houston, Texas. Asked by the host, Bill O’Reilly, if he respected Putin, Trump replied: “I do respect Putin.

“Will I get along with him? I have no idea. It’s very possible I won’t.”

O’Reilly said: “He’s a killer, though. Putin’s a killer.”

“There are a lot of killers,” Trump replied. “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Trump’s respect for and willingness to work with Putin was a familiar theme during an election that the US intelligence agencies believe their Russian counterparts sought to influence on Trump’s behalf.

Such claims prompted a split between Trump and the intelligence community that has not yet healed.The fact that many of Mr Trump’s picks are plutocrats reflects his preference for pragmatists over pointy-heads, as well as his belief that moneymaking is a transferable skill. That was the underlying logic of his own candidacy. He also likes tough guys, ideally in uniform, hence his selection of three former generals: James Mattis and John Kelly, both former marines, at, respectively, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, and Michael Flynn, his national-security adviser. Mr Trump assured a crowd in Ohio that his cabinet would include the “greatest killers you’ve ever seen”...

Yet the biggest uncertainty surrounding Mr Trump’s cabinet concerns less the calibre of its members than the agenda they will pursue. It is hard to exaggerate how divided his team is on the big policy questions. Some members of the economic team, including Mr Mnuchin, who will be primarily busy with Mr Trump’s promised tax cuts, and Mr Cohn, who will play a co-ordinating and shaping role, are broadly in favour of free trade. Yet the likeliest architects of Mr Trump’s trade policy, Mr Ross, Mr Bannon and Mr Navarro, are economic nationalists.

Trump clearly hasn’t changed — he insisted on ordering Chris Christie to have (his mother’s recipe) meatloaf at Maralago. Not about food, just about control.

It’s clear that Trump internalized his parents’ dynamic, which carried over to his first marriage to Ivana Zelníčková, a Czechoslovakian immigrant. Ivana recounts an incident with Donald’s father Fred at dinner, where Fred insisted on controlling her menu choices: “I told the waiter, ‘I would like to have fish.’ O. K., so I could have the fish. And Fred would say to the waiter: ‘No, Ivana is not going to have a fish. She is going to have a steak.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going to have my fish.’” Donald insisted to Ivana that Fred was acting out of “love.”

"The art of humiliation appears to be a key operating principle for President Donald Trump" https://t.co/m5q77G2B2b

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) July 20, 2017

If Miss Universe was more about exterior beauty, then The Apprentice focused on women’s killer instincts at business. The Apprentice ran for fourteen seasons, with Trump as the judge of over a dozen businesspeople competing for the prize of running one of Trump’s companies. According to Scott McLemee, The Apprentice changes “the normally precarious conditions of employment under neoliberalism into the entertainment of a high-stakes game.” Trump ends each episode in his boardroom, shouting “you’re fired!” at the losing contestant…

Trump himself set the “masculine” tone, and described himself as the “dictator” of the show. It was imperative for women on the show to adopt a calculated mindset and to manipulate others to win. In effect, they needed to internalize Trump’s business style…

Ivanka’s corporate feminism is in no way unique to her. In fact, we see the same neoliberal jargon from other top women in business like Sheryl Sandberg — women who have endorsed Hillary Clinton. Indeed, without the accident of birth, one could imagine Ivanka Trump being a staunch Hillary supporter herself. Her message of female empowerment in a deeply stratified society is at one with Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street–backed feminism…

But such a feminism devoid of class isn’t that far removed from that of her father’s. His vulgarities might be shocking, but in his everyday business practice he defined the dialectic of this feminism as something “sweet on the outside” but ruthless on the inside. One could say that Trumpism and corporate feminism are two sides of the same coin. In corporate feminism, patriarchy celebrates its domination as feminine.

So what are the alternatives, can in the US context be a 2018 and 2020 set of elections that reverse what has always been a misogynist tendency, and will there be public policies or a theory of change that resist the current attempt to drive the left back into the wilderness.

As yet there have been holding actions that could ultimately get the US closer to single-payer healthcare than the incrementalism of ACA and its neoliberal market solutions. Ultimately the move to public ownership of sectors like healthcare must be made, much like national energy production for utilities must be separated from the petrochemical and fossil-fuel sectors. Whether the steps are made at the regional or state level much like the ways in which capital has been transformed in the telecom sector, or even as the contradictions are made more obvious in the conflict over net neutrality. It’s not lanes on a superhighway. It’s about planning or a sort that does not parody Soviet bread lines.

This nation can get there, but the sectarian struggles over candidate personalities has to end, considering how easily they seem to have been affected in the last election. With climate change and apparently trigger-morose leaders, the global threat is greater than investing in coastal sea walls to profit from a correctable global warming. The costs are killer. We do need to do everything, and send everybody.

Socialism’s Return: After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America. By Patrick Iber

For the American left, 2016 proved to be a year with a cruel twist ending. In the first few months, a self- described democratic socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders mounted a surprisingly successful primary challenge to the Democratic Party’s presumed and eventual presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.

By the end of 2016, however, not only had Sanders lost the primary race, but Clinton had been defeated in the general election by a billionaire who dressed his xenophobic and plutocratic ambitions in the garb of class resentment...

But the apparent strength of the left wasn’t entirely an illusion. Even as late as November, the Sanders campaign had racked up a set of important victories. The Cold War had helped to entrench the idea of socialism as antithetical to the American political tradition, and Sanders had gone a long way toward smashing that ideological consensus. By identifying himself explicitly as a democratic socialist from the outset of his campaign, he helped give renewed meaning and salience to it as a political identity firmly rooted in the American tradition...

But the apparent strength of the left wasn’t entirely an illusion. Even as late as November, the Sanders campaign had racked up a set of important victories. The Cold War had helped to entrench the idea of socialism as antithetical to the American political tradition, and Sanders had gone a long way toward smashing that ideological consensus. By identifying himself explicitly as a democratic socialist from the outset of his campaign, he helped give renewed meaning and salience to it as a political identity firmly rooted in the American tradition.

Sanders’s success with young voters reveals a bimodal distribution of socialist enthusiasm. The old guard that came of age in the 1960s, like San­ders, has now been met by a growing influx of organizers from the ranks of those born after 1980, people who have entered the workforce during years marked by varying degrees of capitalist crisis. The ABCs of Socialism, edited by Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara, and The Future We Want, edited by Sunkara and The Nation’s Sarah Leonard, offer us some insights into the ways in which this new generation is attempting to redefine the socialist tradition for the 21st century...

For Sanders, the problem is Wall Street and the billionaire class, which have captured the government and shaped the market to their advantage at the expense of ordinary workers.

For Jacobin’s socialists, the problem is more acute: It is capitalism itself.

In Our Revolution, Sanders defends the idea of capping the size of major banks and briefly discusses having the government support worker-owned businesses.

But as Sunkara, going far beyond Sanders, puts it in his essay for The ABCs, the socialist vision remains “abolishing private ownership of the things we all need and use—factories, banks, offices, natural resources, utilities, communication and transportation infrastructure—and replacing it with social ownership, thereby undercutting the power of elites to hoard wealth and power.”

That doesn’t mean the state will seize your “Kenny Loggins records,” Sunkara puckishly adds: Socialism requires the abolition of private property, not personal property...

But the left cannot sustain itself on defense alone.

Other than doing what it can to stop Trump’s worst abuses, the left must develop a theory of change for a moment when the Democratic Party doesn’t control any branch of government.

For a time, Sanders seemed to have shown us how to pull the Democratic Party to the left.

Yet the vulnerability of his strategy was that it required the party’s more centrist wing to win the presidential election—which, as events have proved, isn’t something we can take for granted. Despite this defeat, the energy to resist—and to build—is there.

If the Democrats are still afraid to speak of class, they will have to be taught. Those who cannot or will not stand up to Trump need to face primary challenges from the left.

And even if the party’s next presidential candidate isn’t a progressive, the left needs to make clear in the intervening years that he or she will have to win over a sizable number of young voters who are.

Trump’s enormous unpopularity means that, assuming the continued existence of small-D democracy, the Democratic Party will win major elections in the future.

The left’s job is to make sure that when it does, it will be a more egalitarian and progressive force. Until then, the broad left should focus on the common ground: civil rights, economic equality, universal services, and real democracy for all.

Whatever Trump succeeds in dismantling, we must have the ideas at hand to rebuild it stronger and better once he’s gone.

In short: What do we need to do next? Everything.

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BOOKS IN REVIEW

• OUTSIDER IN THE WHITE HOUSE By Bernie Sanders, with Huck Gutman
• OUR REVOLUTION: A FUTURE TO BELIEVE IN By Bernie Sanders
• THE ABCS OF SOCIALISM By Bhaskar Sunkara, ed.
• THE FUTURE WE WANT: RADICAL IDEAS FOR A NEW CENTURY, By Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara, eds.