As Trump lurches from disaster to disaster (at least that’s how they appear to the outside world), "Trump's Base" for the most part appears to remain immovable in its continuing support of him. A whole variety of episodes/policies would seem to be cause for at least some of that base's members abandoning him.

Introduction: Trump's choice of Poland as the country in which he would make his one speech outside of the recent G-20 meeting was highly symbolic. The content of the speech, especially with its stress on the concept of "The Will," was too. That's what this column is about.

Introduction: Permanent War is built into the fabric of the U.S. economy. This column focuses on bringing back a column about the first post-Cold War enterprise, the BushCheney War on Iraq, designed to perpetuate this state well into the 21st century, with Russia as principal enemy. Trump would not be able to change that situation even if he wanted to. Today, he seems to have fully signed on to Russia-is-the-enemy US ruling class needs.

Is there a more appropriate day on which to consider one of the most all-round takeovers of the U.S. Federal Government by the U.S. ruling class than May 1 (on which date this column was original written)? For that was the date chosen, by a briefly united U.S. labor movement in the 1880s, as the official founding day for its planned major campaign to improve wages, hours and working conditions. The first "May Day" was held on May 1, 1886. And yes, although in the 20th century May Day became associated the Soviet Union and Communist Parties around the world, in the beginning it was a U.S. holiday.

Back in the 1940's, when I first started getting interested in (U.S.) football, there were two common backfield formations in use: the "single-wing " and the "T-formation ." Some teams used both, in different situations, just as in modern football teams will use both the "I," with the quarterback standing directly behind the center, as in the "T" (which passed into football history many years ago) and the "spread ," in recent years called the "shotgun," with the quarterback standing off the line-of-scrimmage and receiving the ball from the center via a short, between-the-legs pass, as in the old single-wing. The change will sometimes come after the play-clock has started running, with the team in one formation until the quarterback calls "shift," when the move to the other formation is made. Easier to watch than to explain, but you could look it up.

As is well known, Donald Trump ran on what Steve Bannon calls "economic nationalism." (That it is really in major part a cover term for the racism/Islamophobia/xenophobia that was central to the Trump campaign from the beginning and so strongly reflected on Bannon's Breitbart, is another story.) Part of that position is that the US shouldn't intervene abroad, shouldn't get involved in "nation building," shouldn't be the "world's policeman," and certainly should try to get along better with Russia, for whatever reasons.

In a previous column, I discussed the appearance of the self-styled "scientific racist" Charles Murray at Middlebury College, VT, the content of his earlier, widely publicized work, The Bell Curve, the student response to his appearance that kept him from speaking, and the issues concerning the matter of "free speech" raised by the whole episode. The bulk of the column was devoted to an abridgment (long enough in its own right!) of Appendix VI to my book The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2002: A Futuristic Novel, which used the extensive academic literature that took apart the Murray hypothesis many years ago.