Two men traveling across the state to gather support for President Donald Trump’s international agenda stopped in Port Ewen this afternoon. With signs urging passing motorists to “Defend Trump! Stop here” — “Stop the British Coup!” — “Jail Mueller” they attracted plenty of attention.
“We need good relations with Russia, and this whole Deep State apparatus is trying to make sure that doesn’t happen,” said Chris Sare of Bogota, NJ. Sare and Courtney Jones of Teaneck, NJ, sought signatures and donations through LaRouche PAC, the political action committee of long-time activist and perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche. Sare said he works as an Uber driver three days a week, which frees up time for activism. They’d recently visited Cobleskill and Schoharie.
Their main interest is international relations. Stormy Daniels, xenophobia, sexual assault, white nationalism, tax cuts, abortion, equal pay and the other myriad issues the surround this controversial president don’t enter into it, except as distractions. The case goes something like this: Trump wants peace through improved relations with Russia and China, while the rest of the foreign policy and intelligence establishment wants to maintain the former international order, which leads to a hostile relationship. So it began investigating the Trump campaign and continued that investigation after he took office. “Coup” could mean his impeachment, electoral loss in 2020 or an ineffective presidency due to ongoing investigation.
In this view, Putin (and Trump) represent a response to global free trade that worked for the few at the expense of the many.
“What’s Putin’s crime?” said Sare. “Putin rejected the economic liberalization of Russia which screwed Russia after the [Berlin] Wall came down. Putin said no we’re not going to do that, we’re going to actually protect our manufacturing, we’re going to build infrastructure, we’re going to go back to, we’re going to make Russia great again, in a sense, though he didn’t say it like that.”
On the other side — again, in this view — are self-described “cold warriors” like former Director of National Intelligence and frequent Trump critic James Clapper and the rest of the Deep State, who are either simply living in the past or actively seeking to prop up the existing international order.
One of the signs referred to a “British Coup.” As you might guess, this is a reference to the dossier on Trump’s alleged Russian connections assembled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 campaign. There are also allegations that the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was involved in surveillance of the Trump campaign. A LaRouche Pac flyer takes the British connection further: “The British Empire has always depended on such regional crises, in most cases created by the British in the first place, to force the world powers to line up on opposite sides — Arab vs. Jew, Sunni vs. Shi’a, East vs. West. Were the U.S. to stop playing the enforcer for these British controlled conflicts, and join China and Russia in the spirit of the New Silk Road, all these conflicts could be resolved relatively quickly.” (The British Empire? Perhaps the “cold warriors” aren’t the only ones guilty of viewing current events through old paradigms.)
Port Ewen doesn’t have a lot of pedestrians, so most of the reaction came from passing motorists. Jones elicited feedback with a thumbs up and smile, eliciting enthusiastic honks and drive-by obscenities. Sare talked to those who stopped by on foot, usually approaching from the Stewart’s Shoppe nearby. One of them, who said he was a history teacher, had an extended discussion in which he urged less strident rhetoric (“letting justice take its course” rather than “jailing Mueller,” for example) while agreeing that some critics of the president are also too extreme, seeming to have the goal of taking down a Democratically elected president by any means necessary. He declined suggestions for further reading but gave them a donation for “being out here.”
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