January 2025. Donald Trump returns to the US presidency. The "What if" becomes reality, and the Japanese media is in uproar over the next president's actions, asking "What will happen to the world and Japan?" If you are only exposed to US, UK, and Anglo-Saxon news on a daily basis, you will be immersed in the anti-Trump propaganda of the US and UK power center (DS) and will not be able to properly understand the world. If you at least occasionally look at the BRICS portal or Russia RT , your brain will be stimulated in a different way. These are also propaganda. However, what is being questioned is the literacy to read the information sent out by China and Russia , which have now become an unstoppable rival force to the US and Europe, as well as the BRICS and the former colony of the Global South. Most of Japan's international news is translated or filtered by the US and US media. For the Japanese, this is also the end result of "opening the country to expel foreigners," that is, the "yoke of defeat in the war against the US," and is the source of the distorted "shared values" with the US and UK. The time has come for Japan to engage in sincere dialogue with the non-Anglo-American world as a step towards breaking free from this yoke. This will provide a clue for reconstructing "modern" Japan since the Meiji era.
■ Are Americans brainwashed by Trump?
American voters have elected Donald Trump, the king of foul language who has been criticized for his "incoherent rants ," as president twice. In November 2024, he won a landslide victory over the Democratic candidate for the second time. After his first term from 2017 to 2021 ended and he failed to run for reelection, the US Department of Justice indicted Trump on a series of criminal charges. The British BBC grandiosely reported that " America is moving into unprecedented, uncharted territory as a man who is a felon for violating 34 state laws and a defendant in multiple criminal trials takes on the highest office in government."
The major US and UK media are trying to scoff at Trump's call to "dismantle the Deep State (DS)" as a "conspiracy theory." They want to say that the majority of US voters have been brainwashed by the guru of the DS conspiracy theory. In fact, a Japanese female freelance journalist who retired from a major Japanese media company and has lived in New York for over 20 years reported the following under the title "The fear of a 'new cult government' supported by completely brainwashed Americans."
"The divide between Americans will only deepen, and America will no longer be a global leader. The perception that the person living in the White House is an intelligent, common-sense, trustworthy leader will disappear. It's possible that even more outrageous people will run for office in the next 10 years or so."
"Whenever I go to a Trump rally, there is always a group of Japanese Trump supporters. Whenever I write an article critical of Trump, I get all sorts of reactions on social media. There are many people in Japanese society who support Trump or similar ignorant populists. To prevent the number of such people from increasing, we should read the correct news and engage in dialogue with people who have different opinions."
The most problematic statement is "Read the right news properly!" The sources of the "right news" she recommends are undoubtedly the newspaper media such as the NY Times, W Post, and WSJ, the three major broadcasting stations, and the three major weekly magazines such as CNN and Newsweek. She is admonishing Trump supporters to avoid the miscellaneous and unsubstantiated information from Fox News and social media that are sympathetic to Trump, the "unintelligent populist," and to consume the "right news" that persistently conveys anti-Trump news every day, and to listen to different opinions. This shows a feeling close to a belief that America must be a global leader , and an extreme indifference and contempt for the non-American and European world.
On the other hand, a retired pilot captain (75, white male of German descent) who lives in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin and worked for a major US airline, countered as follows:
"Former President Eisenhower, who retired in 1961, warned about the deep-rooted nature of America's ills . He was warning against the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the fusion of business and the military in America's wartime state, which posed a threat to democracy. Wall Street's financial capital lends to defense companies. The oil industry, IT industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, which made huge profits from the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccinations, have also joined in, and the rising neoconservatives have been running the US government. Trump has added to this the numerous intelligence agencies and think tanks, with the CIA at its core, as well as Washington's huge bureaucratic organization, and calls them the DS. They can also be considered the center of power ."
" The US military budget for fiscal year 2023 is approaching $1 trillion, accounting for 15% of the federal budget and 40% of global military spending. Support for the Ukraine war has exceeded $70 billion (10 trillion yen) . The country is suffering from unbearable inflation due to the high dollar, and social inequality is only widening due to the poor health and welfare policies. The established media reports in line with the center of power. We supported Trump, believing that he is better than Bush Jr., Obama, and Biden, and entrusted him with breaking through the current situation. The DS is a vested interest group mentioned above that has a major influence on government policy decisions. We are not brainwashed by conspiracy theories."
The Japanese female reporter above, who appears to be in her 40s, is primarily disgusted by Trump. I have no idea why she is based in New York and what she has been doing for the past 10 years, but doesn't her political sensibilities overlap with those of the elite WASPs in the eastern United States? Because they control the massive financial capital of Wall Street, they see Trump's emergence as an unprecedented threat and want to crush him at all costs. She seems to unconsciously sympathize with the so-called "1%" - the wealthiest class in America .
The American captain was born in 1954 and has witnessed conflicts in Vietnam, the Gulf, Yugoslavia, the War on Terror, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, North Africa, Syria and Ukraine, as well as the continuous attempts to overthrow anti-American governments in his "backyard" of Latin America. Since his youth, he has witnessed the interventionism of the warring nation of America and the widening of domestic disparities. Initially, he hoped that Trump's "America First" would mean the abandonment of interventionism.
This is because it was seen as a sign of a return to the United States before President Wilson (1913-1921), who founded the League of Nations and advocated democracy, and believed that the United States' mission was to intervene in domestic and international political systems and pursue change, in other words, the Monroe Doctrine. However, it is difficult to hide the disappointment. "Maybe Trump has relaxed his anti-globalization stance in the wake of the assassination attempt." Elon Musk was strongly opposed , but was also disappointed that Trump nominated Scott Bessent, a Wall Street representative who was George Soros' right-hand man, as Secretary of the Treasury .
The photo on the left shows the incident on January 6, 2021 , when Trump supporters allegedly stormed the Capitol building where Congress was meeting , claiming that there was election fraud in the 2020 presidential election .
According to evidence presented at the trial , many Trump supporters believe that the main culprits in the attack on the U.S. Capitol were not supporters or far-right groups, but federal agents and anti-fascist activists who were trying to undermine Trump's credibility. As evidence of this, they cited the presence of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) personnel in the crowd that day. Without them, they would not have been able to break through the tight security and storm the Capitol, which resulted in deaths.
■ Was the "Russiagate" scandal a hoax?
Why did the overwhelming majority of voters cast their votes for this "terrible presidential candidate" who was indicted on dozens of charges, from obstructing Congressional procedures to confirm the results of the presidential election to concealing an extramarital affair? Trump probably has no supernatural powers that could brainwash voters into believing that "all of these incidents are fabricated." Rather, American voters may have had a vague sense that the judicial and police authorities were persistently fabricating incidents and trying to make Trump disappear. If we don't think like this, it's impossible to understand Trump's victory.
As soon as Trump was elected for his first term in November 2016, efforts to oust him began to take shape.
On December 9, the WP reported that, "According to a secret CIA assessment report," " cyber attacks by Russian government hacker groups were intended to help Trump win." On the 29th, then- President Obama ordered sanctions against 35 Russian diplomats in the United States, including expulsion, on the grounds that the Russian government had launched cyber attacks to interfere in the US presidential election .
On January 20, 2017, the Trump administration was inaugurated, and on February 13, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, a key figure in Trump's foreign policy, was forced to resign, and it seemed as though Trump might be on the verge of being impeached. However, after much fanfare, Special Counsel Mueller closed his investigation two years later , stating, "We were able to confirm Russian cyber attacks, but there was insufficient evidence to apply conspiracy charges against Trump or those associated with him."
The most important point is that "Trump acknowledges the existence of interference and criticizes and imposes sanctions on Russia, but denies that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia ." This argument from the Trump side continues to be ignored.
A Japanese intelligence source in Washington (an expert in international politics) has declared the incident to be fabricated and said:
"The Deep State controls the foundations of American foreign policy, war policy, and economic policy. In particular, when it comes to diplomacy, war, and policing, the FBI, CIA, State Department, and Justice Department are the four DS that hold the power to policing. This has been the case for a long time. Trump's great achievement was to expose the existence of the DS. Since Trump became president, the DS has done everything in its power to bring Trump down, claiming that there was a conspiracy between Trump and Putin (Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidential election, mobilized the staff of the US State Department to write a report), and even hired a former spy from the British intelligence agency MI6 in charge of Russia to fabricate a nonexistent allegation (Russiagate) to bring Trump down. This is ultimately a coup. I was surprised that they would go to such lengths."
"They are trying to bring down a duly elected president by inventing baseless, absurd allegations. This is the extent to which the American judicial power will go. It is the same as how the Japanese prosecutors' office and police invent false allegations to bring down influential politicians. This would not be surprising in Latin America or Central Asia, but they don't do this in France or Germany, but they do it in America. They are creating allegations out of thin air. Thanks to Trump, it has become clear that this is the extent to which the DS will go."
"Is it really that bad that the FBI and the Department of Justice are so bad? Everyone knew that the State Department and the CIA were doing bad things, like interfering with other countries and trying to cause civil war or subvert them, but I didn't think the FBI and the Department of Justice would do it. It's been revealed that the Establishment is up to this kind of thing. At least 40% of the American people understand that now . The other 60% are pretending not to know, though.
Meanwhile, the US government has been eavesdropping on the movements of governments and leaders of other countries. Japan is naturally one of them. In October 2013, "the German government issued a statement that Chancellor Merkel's mobile phone calls may have been intercepted by US intelligence agencies. Chancellor Merkel called President Obama to ask for an explanation." It is still fresh in our memory. Chancellor Merkel of Germany, who is close to the Putin regime of Russia and is considered a potential enemy, has had her private mobile phone targeted for several years. If Russiagate is a fabrication and Merkel's wiretapping is true, the credibility of the Obama administration will be destroyed.
(Continued)