The defenders of special interests are preparing to engage in a pitched battle against Donald Trump while their queen lies in stasis recovering from her bout with “pneumonia” and efforts are now underway to shift the attention to those who support him. Hillary made waves before she nearly passed out on Sunday with her comments to a select audience of loyalist high-rollers that half of those who support Trump are a “basket of deplorables”, a stunning generalization in that it served to smear millions of hard-working Americans as neo-Nazis and racists. While Mrs. Clinton was forced to back off that statement, her surrogates are doubling down. Guys like provocateur Jamie Kirchick who pushes the envelope by upping the percentage to nearly 100 percent.

In a column for the New York Daily News entitled “How many of Donald Trump’s supporters belong in a basket of deplorables? Almost all of them”, he writes:

Hillary Clinton was way off base Friday night when she claimed that “half” of Donald Trump supporters are “deplorable” racists, sexists and nativists. Unsurprisingly, Trump leapt on the remark, calling it “the worst mistake of the political season,” and Clinton quickly apologized.

She was right to do so. It’s not 50% of Trump supporters who are bigots. It’s closer to 100%.

Let’s first dispense with all of the acknowledged racists, misogynists and anti-Semites who have proudly flocked to the Trump campaign like hooded men to a burning cross. The Republican nominee’s emboldening of the much-discussed “Alt Right,” a euphemism white supremacists have cleverly adopted to mainstream themselves as just another respectable political movement, has given professional racists a prominence in national politics they have not enjoyed since the campaigns of George Wallace.

At some point, when surveying a candidate’s support base, one moves beyond the realm of guilt by association to plain guilt. While it may be true that not every individual Trump supporter is a racist, just about every racist is indeed supporting Donald Trump.

AND

Some say that it’s wrong to write off all Trump supporters as irredeemably “deplorable” and that that doing so is a symptom of crass partisanship. Had Clinton’s words been used to describe the backers of any other major party presidential nominee in the last century, this criticism would be valid. But by any objective measure, Trump is not a usual candidate. He is the most openly bigoted, unqualified and mentally unfit person to run for the presidency in the history of the United States.

No matter how much conservatives may loath Barack Obama, supporting him does not constitute deplorability. The same goes for liberals who despised Bush: He was, like our current President, a fundamentally decent man with whom people could passionately, if reasonably, disagree.

None of this pertains to Trump, for whom support in any way, shape or form, is simply indefensible. If supporting a racist, authoritarian, Vladimir Putin-loving ignoramus is not “deplorable,” what is?

What the New York Daily News fails to disclose however is that Mr. Kirchick is a fellow at the think tank the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) which shills for defense contractors and those industries stand to lose out on billions of dollars if Trump is elected. The Republican nominee has been demonized as a Kremlin puppet simply because he believes that the border of the United States is more important to the national interest than the border of Ukraine. Trump also isn’t itching to instigate a shooting war with the Russians that could easily trigger World War III and a nuclear exchange which must make him a treasonous, Manchurian candidate unfit for office – at least according to propagandists like Mr. Kirchick who also recently wrote a column advocating for a military coup d’etat if Trump was elected.

Interestingly, the Foreign Policy Initiative was launched as a replacement for the infamous Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and is headed up by the exact two prominent neocon ideologues – Robert Kagan and William Kristol – who co-founded PNAC where they are joined by Mitt Romney’s foreign policy guru Dan Senor. Kristol emerged as one of the most prominent leaders of the Never Trump movement but was unable to ever recruit an alternative to Trump outside of former CIA spook and Goldman Sachs moneychanger Evan McMullin, an obscure putz who it is hoped will serve as a spoiler in Utah and other Mormon heavy western states.

Kirchick’s screed is the opening volley in a renewed establishment media push to stigmatize Trump backers as Brownshirts, it has already begun after an altercation at a Trump rally on Monday night. This is a perilous week for the establishment as the ramifications of Hillary’s nose dive at Ground Zero begin to effect her electoral hopes. For the legions of professional agitators like Kirchick it’s time to roll up their sleeves and get to work with sowing the seeds of discontent to keep Trump down.