There are several key reasons why Donald Trump won, such as that he achieved a 1,405,004 nationwide popular-vote victory in all states except California, where he lost by an enormous 4,260,978-vote margin to Hillary Clinton (and so Hillary beat him in all 50 states by 2,864,974 votes) — and the Electoral College represents all 50 states, not just one. But not all of the reasons can (like that one) be understood merely by the numbers; and a particularly important reason for his victory has to do with the deepest level of the way that the American people process what they read and see and hear in the nation’s press, and interpret, from the press, what is happening in and to their country. This will be the subject here:

I thus invite you to follow me now down a rabbit-hole of the American ‘news’media, to focus light upon dark areas of the U.S. government. Along the way, you’ll meet various people and their teams who are contending for power, who are essential to know about, in order to understand the next-lower level down through those subterranean passageways, at the bottom of which is evidence that might help to explain why Trump actually became elected President.

At the start — the surface of this hole — is an unusually honest news-report, which comes from the dissident retired CIA agent Philip Giraldi, and which is titled “Bipartisan War: A new study urges more U.S. interventions”. It summarizes a policy-recommending document that was recently published by NATO’s chief propaganda-arm, the Atlantic Council. (On 25 July 2016, Paul Craig Roberts aptly headlined about the organization, “NATO’s Atlantic Council: The Marketing Arm of the Military/Security Complex”, and he linked to what was then their latest “sales pitch to Poland to load up on US weapons,” as being a typical example — which it was.)

The document that Giraldi reports on (but doesn’t link to, nor even mention the title of, but it) is the Atlantic Council’s 1 December 2016 “A Two-Pronged US Strategy for the Middle East”, and it pumps, and in turn links to, the full 66-page NATO-propaganda-document, which is titled “Middle East Strategy Task Force: Final Report of the Co-Chairs”, which two co-chairs are two potent Russia-haters (more commonly labelled “neoconservatives”), the Clinton team’s Madeine K. Albright, and the Bush team’s Stephen J. Hadley. Since both the Clinton and the Bush teams are represented in it, the policy-document is called “bipartisan,” despite the fact that it is rabidly neoconservative and reflects viewpoints which polls show to be very far from mainstream ones among the U.S. public that the U.S. government is supposed to be representing. (Then, on 10 December 2013, a headline was “Pew Poll Has Bad News For Neocons As More in U.S. Oppose Interventions”. Anyone who would assert that neoconservatism represents the American public instead of the American aristocracy, would be either a fool or a liar, because it represents only the aristocracy.) Both of the two co-chairs had devoted their careers to isolating (removing allies of) and weakening both Russia and Iran, and to facilitating the U.S.’s arming Israel and Saudi Arabia, so that the U.S. government has been an agent serving both Israel’s aristocracy and especially the Saud family. Those Sauds are the royal owners of Saudi Arabia and the chief financial backers of Al Qaeda and of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks that became such an enormous boost to America’s weapons-manufacturers — the armaments-firms that serve NATO countries and that thus receive their incomes from taxpayers not only in the United States but in Saudi Arabia, and in the other U.S. ‘allies’, especially NATO member nations, and member-nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council of fundamentalist-Sunni Arab oil kingdoms, the royal families and their retainers, who provided the remainder (the non-Saudi portion) of the funding to Al Qaeda, and to other international jihadist groups, such as ISIS. Furthermore, Israel is allied with, and militarily assists (such as by helping them to overthrow the secular government of Syria), the fundamentalist-Sunni royal families of the Arabic oil kingdoms, which are the Gulf Cooperation Council. The GCC is headed by the Saud family, whose fundamentalist-Sunni faith condemns Shiites, Iran being the leading Shiite nation and referred to both by the royal Sauds and also by Israel’s aristocrats, as constituting ‘an existential threat’ to their continued reign within their respective countries. So, today’s United States government serves the aristocracies of both Israel and Saudi Arabia; and the document that Giraldi is summarizing is a NATO policy-statement (technically an Atlantic Council document) that’s politically bipartisan representing the shared Democratic and Republican U.S. aristocratic view of what America’s anti-Russia military club, NATO, should do in and especially to “the Middle East.”

Though the Middle East is outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s area, America’s aristocracy clearly wants NATO to extend into the Middle East, NATO’s war (‘cold’ and/or ‘hot’) against its target (its designated ‘enemy’), Russia. This would include war against Russia’s allies in the Middle East: Iran and Syria.

Originally, NATO was the U.S. team, and the Warsaw Pact was the Soviet team, so that NATO was anti-Soviet and anti-communist; but, in 1991, the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact team, all ended, and yet NATO continued on but specifically anti-Russia; and, under Obama, became extremely hostile toward Russia, regarding both Ukraine on Russia’s border, and Syria in the Middle East. This particular policy-document from the Atlantic Council would likely have immediately become U.S. government policy if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 Presidential race; but, of course, that didn’t happen; so, there now is a huge conflict within the U.S. aristocracy, as to whether or not it will become the U.S. government’s policy in the Middle East.

This NATO (Atlantic Council) policy-document is accurately summarized by Giraldi as being “thin gruel indeed to use as justification for going to war against Syria and possibly Russia.” (Syria is an ally of both Russia and Iran; so, the U.S. aristocracy wants to invade it — but, Hillary was not elected, and so this policy-document is now in limbo.)

Giraldi makes clear that the report had been written before the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election became known, at a time when the expectation was that Hillary Clinton would be elected:

Hillary Clinton’s proposed policies for the Middle East were, in fact, identical to those that are stated in this neoconservative document, and which was well-summarized here by Giraldi.

Giraldi failed, however, to note that the Atlantic Council is the main propaganda-arm of NATO, and that the Council’s publications are 100% neoconservative: rabidly hostile against Russia, and strongly partisan for the Sauds — and also for Israel’s aristocracy — against Iran. Perhaps he assumed that his readers already knew all about that. But unless it’s pointed out, one cannot dig down deeper into this rabbit-hole, as will be done here.

The extreme partisanship and mutual hostility that now exists between the Clinton-Bush-Obama team and the Trump team is intimately connected to Clinton’s having been NATO’s candidate, and Trump’s having challenged NATO’s relevancy to America’s real national-security interests and having suggested that instead America’s #1 national-security threat is “radical Islamic terrorism” — his vague phrase, which in many Americans’ decades-long-CIA-indoctrinated minds refers to Russia’s allies including Shiite Iran, but which in the real world refers solely to the fundamentalist-Sunni Sauds and America’s other Islamic ‘allies’ (all of them being only Sunni fundamentalists, not any Shiite fundamentalists).

Trump was running against NATO’s candidate, the CIA’s candidate, the Atlantic Council’s candidate: Hillary Clinton.

For example: Hillary Clinton has consistently been a strong proponent of a no-fly zone being established in Syria by the U.S. government (and its ‘allies’), which would mean that the United States, which is an invader of Syria (unlike Russia’s military involvement there, which was invited in by the legitimate and internationally recognized government of Syria and thus purely defensive of the existing government instead of an imperialistic invasion to overthrow and replace it, such as America’s involvement there is). The U.S. would then be shooting down both Syrian planes and Russian planes there — a no-fly zone would mean conventional war between the U.S. and Russia, over Syrian territory. That’s what Hillary Clinton’s Presidency would entail and what she has consistently been committed to. The loser of that conventional war between Russia and the United States would then face a choice between accepting the defeat, or else initiating a nuclear all-out blitz invasion of the other, which would be the only way available to avoid that defeat. Hillary, along with Joe Biden, had been in the lead within President Obama’s counsels urging that he establish a no-fly zone over Libya, which conquered that country though neither the U.S. nor any other invader succeeded in controlling any of Libya, other than parts of Tripoli. The difference between Libya and Syria would be that Libya wasn’t being defended by Russia, but Syria already is. That’s why the result there would probably be World War III, whereas the Libyan invasion was ‘safe’ (though hellish for Libyans, which Americans evidently don’t care about and isn’t reported).

Their ‘humanitarian safe zones’ are a euphemism for the parts of Syria that are controlled by the fundamentalist-Sunni jihadists whom the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, had armed and infiltrated into Syria as what Obama called ‘moderate rebels’, to overthrow and replace the secular, non-sectarian, Ba’athist Party government of Syria, which is headed by Bashar al-Assad and supported by both Iran and Russia. What Albright and Hadley are saying there is that the U.S. military should be shooting down Russian planes that are bombing those jihadists. When civilians get injured and killed in those Russian bombings, the U.S. regime says that it’s ‘barbarism’ by Russia against civilians, and that the U.S. intends to ‘protect’ ‘civilians’ (or act as ‘policeman to the world’), when all that the U.S. regime is actually doing is war to conquer other countries and to impose U.S. stooge-leaders there (like we’re still trying to do to Libya).

The New York Times reporter Ben Hubbard reported on 13 April 2013 (breaking remarkably and thus shockingly away from his and the American major newsmedia’s normal custom of hiding things that are inconsistent with the U.S. government’s propaganda-line — things such as this report from Hubbard exposed, instead of hid) that:

So: even a journalist who trumpets the White House’s propaganda, such as that Assad is “an illegitimate leader” who “deployed chemical weapons, crossing a ‘red line’,” knew (but would never say) that the U.S. President was lying through his teeth.

On 4 April 2014, Seymour Hersh reported in the London Review of Books (because he couldn’t find an American publisher for it), that the Obama Administration — including Hillary Clinton — were sending Muammar Gaddafi’s weapons, from Libya, through the Benghazi U.S. Consulate, to Turkey, into Syria, for the ‘rebels’ there, who were trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s government.

Next level down the rabbit-hole: Giraldi doesn’t link to the document, but he does link to the Atlantic Council’s puff-piece for it: http://mest.atlanticcouncil.org/.

Notice there the corporate sponsors: Politico, CBS This Morning, and RealClear World. By donating to NATO (the Atlantic Council), they are pitching themselves to the owners of firms that benefit from increased U.S. ‘Defense’ spending. This is advertising to advertisers. It’s an inside-operation, directed at increasing business with other insiders.

Next: the team-video, to fool young people into wanting to join this heroic team-effort to protect ‘Syrians’ against (at 1:19) “First they bombed us with chemicals and now with barrel-bombs!”: http://mest.atlanticcouncil.org/goal-syria-mestvideo-contest/.

Obama’s accusation that the 21 August 2013 chemical attack on Ghouta Syria was by Assad’s government, instead of by the U.S.-supplied ‘rebels’ (Al Qaeda in Syria, called “Al Nusra”) — the famous sarin gas attack in Syria that allegedly crossed Obama’s ‘Red Line’ and ‘justified’ an American invasion — all of that was a blatant lie, which was not followed-through by a U.S. invasion, because Britain’s own MI6 intelligence service reported to Parliament that Assad had nothing to do with it, and so Parliament blocked Prime Minister David Cameron’s bid to serve as Obama’s lap-dog on a Syria-invasion, like Prime Minister Tony Blair had been George W. Bush’s lap-dog on an Iraq-invasion — it would have been Obama alone (with Turkey’s Erdogan, King Saud, and Qatar’s Emir Thani — 100% Sunni allies), a PR no-go for Obama.

Or, as Christof Lehmann reported on 7 October 2013:

In conclusion; the primary, foreign-backed “opposition forces” in Syria since July 2013, are U.S.-Saudi-backed al-Qaeda brigades. Most prominent among them are Jabhat al-Nusrah and Liwa-al-Islam, while the FSA [U.S.-alliance-created Free Syrian Army] still receives some support, which is primarily granted for the purpose of giving the White House the possibility to maintain a narrative about supporting “moderate forces”. Another aspect is, that the FSA is the last representative of Qatar’s, Turkey’s and Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian theater.

Even before that, on 29 August 2013, Mint Press News had headlined, “EXCLUSIVE: Syrians In Ghouta Claim Saudi-Supplied Rebels Behind Chemical Attack” and Yahya Ababneh and Dale Gavlak reported:

Nor was this the first time that Obama’s team were behind the use of Sarin nerve gas in Syria. Back on 6 May 2013, the Washington Times — the only newspaper to have reported in 2002 that George W. Bush was lying to assert that the IAEA had found that Saddam Hussein was only six months from having a nuclear bomb — headlined “Syrian rebels used Sarin nerve gas, not Assad’s regime: U.N. official” and reported that, “Testimony from victims strongly suggests it was the rebels, not the Syrian government, that used Sarin nerve gas during a recent incident in the revolution-wracked nation, a senior U.N. diplomat said Monday.”

The U.S. regime simply craved to overthrow Assad, and the “boots on the ground” to do that were Al Nusra and the other imported jihadist groups that were led by Al Nusra and armed and infiltrated into Syria by the U.S. regime and its allies: Saud, Qatar, and Turkey. It was a ‘Western’ operation against an ally of Russia and Iran: Assad.

Next: To click onto the RealClear World link there, and to the Forbes link, brings the reader to advertisements promoting entrepreneurs in the U.S.-allied Arab monarchies. Those are advertisements by Arab royals, promoting their subjects’ human capital resources, to America’s aristocrats, as prospective employees or contractors of U.S. international firms.

Next: To click onto the Politico link brings one to a Politico article by the trio of Albright and Hadley plus Nancy Lindborg, the last of whom persons is the head of the Orwellianly named U.S. Institute of Peace, and it’s titled “Yes, a Bipartisan Foreign Policy Is Possible — Even Now”, the message being that “a bipartisan approach to foreign policy is achievable and remains essential for our security at home and stability around the globe,” and “our own recent work suggests that a starting point from which to build renewed bipartisanship is actually one of the world’s thorniest crises: the chaos across the Middle East.” So: NATO is advertising in Politico, with an ‘article’ — a.k.a., propaganda (it’s not called an advertisement). And it come from the “U.S. Institute of Peace.”

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So: here’s a bit of background on those three people:

Stephen J. Hadley took the fall for George W. Bush’s ‘error’ in his 28 January 2003 State of the Union speech, including for his bringing into President Bush’s State of the Union address the famous “16 words”: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Hadley resigned once the ‘error’ became publicized, but Bush rejected his resignation. And the reality was that there was no error at all — it was far worse than an error. As Craig Unger reported headlining in the July 2006 Vanity Fair “The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed”: “‘To me there is no benign interpretation of this,’ says Melvin Goodman, the former C.I.A. and State Department analyst. ‘At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew.’” War-criminals like that go on to co-chairing major propaganda pieces for NATO.

Madeleine K. Albright was born to a strongly anti-Russian and anti-communist Czech diplomat who was the Ambassador to Yugoslavia and in that environment was surrounded by aristocrats who despised Russians. Since Serbs were culturally close to Russians, she was also prejudiced against Serbs. At a book signing event she was presented photos of Serbs bombed by the U.S. in the 1999 Kosovo War and she said “Disgusting Serbs, get out!” Having been the U.S. Secretary of State who argued for and championed the bombing of Serbia in 1999, she also was stoned by Serbs in Slavonia. She and her brother had valuable paintings which were stolen by the Nazis from a Czech Jew, whose descendant found out that the artworks were in her family and tried to get the paintings from them, and said, “There is no doubt that her father stole everything”, but Madeleine’s brother fought the matter in court, and (as often happened in such cases) the descendant did not win. When she was U.S. Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, she pressed for and won the first expansion of NATO after the 1991 so-called ‘end’ of the Cold War, thus bringing U.S. missiles closer to Moscow. She also (along with two other neoconservatives: Sandy Berger and William Cohen) argued in 1998 that President Bill Clinton should commence a bombing campaign against Iraq, which was, under Saddam Hussein, another country that had friendly relations with Russia. The negative public reactions against their proposal caused President Clinton to limit the invasion only to an air-attack, and only four days. Albright has always been a neoconservative, and a champion of bombing, but not until the 9/11 attacks occurred was the U.S. public supportive of an all-out bombing and invasion of Iraq — which had nothing to do with 9/11. On 30 November 2009, Institutional Investor headlined “Soros, Albright, Rothschild In $359M Deal” to “launch Helios Towers Africa” so as to receive income from Africans’ surging mobile-phone traffic.

Nancy Lindborg, prior to heading the so-called U.S. Institute of Peace, had been employed by the notorious USAID, which is one of the main U.S. government agencies that works in conjunction with the CIA to prepare coups.

These, and persons similar to them, are the government officials who were paid by U.S. taxpayers to represent and defend this country but instead chose to serve what President Eisenhower in 1961 called “the military-industrial complex,” to represent the U.S. aristocracy at the expense of the public and especially of the millions of the U.S. aristocracy’s victims abroad who fill grave-sites and refugee centers. Conflicts between the aristocracy and its numerous victims are obscenely unbalanced; for example, whereas Albright proudly helped throw many bombs at Serbs, Serbs could never respond to her with anything more than just a few tomatoes and stones — and, to the extent that such retaliations received coverage in the Western press, it was overwhelmingly hostile against the retaliators, not against the agent of the U.S. aristocracy. It’s a morally upside-down world, where the scum, not the cream, rise to and stay at the top.

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And now we’re getting near the end of this rabbit-hole. It’s where Giraldi’s article says, “Third, when the report was issued, Stephen Hadley told Reuters,” and linked there to

which has, at the very bottom (as of the present writing) “View Reactions (39)” of which a typical one is:

In other words: On even that mainstream website, Yahoo News, the readership were somehow generally aware that the U.S. federal government is the criminal operation that not only controls the Executive branch but that also controls the Legislative branch, which writes and enforces the laws so the government isn’t criminal at all — but it’s still so evil that it shouldn’t be allowed to invade anywhere, at least not in its present embodiment, its being controlled by neoconservatives, which the general public certainly are not. This government doesn’t represent the American public. It represents only the American aristocracy.

That’s the response of readers on a mainstream ‘news’ site. Not on the site such as you’re now reading, but on Yahoo! (It’s a Reuters news-report.)

And so it’s highly relevant — perhaps even crucial — toward answering the question of why Trump became elected.

Maybe the American public understood far more about its government and ‘news’media than than the government and ‘news’media thought was the case. Maybe the Establishment’s lying-operation was far less successful than its influential liars were expecting it to be.

Maybe a widespread and deep distrust of the nation’s ‘news’media had been underestimated by America’s oligarchs and so left them dazed and incredulous, on the morning of 9 November 2016.

As for the American public, they are confused, even more than they are deceived; and the reason why that is so, is that the lying by the press has simply been going on for too long a time. Americans suspect that the past few decades of U.S. ‘history’ — such as about the Kennedy and King assassinations, and 9/11 — are frauds, not history.

Anyone who wants to have the details filled in of America’s recent (after World War I) history, which enable an entirely truthful and soundly-sourced, stunningly authentic, “Untold History of the United States,” can see free online the first two installments of that masterpiece of documentary filmmaking and of historybook-writing, here in the two 50-minute documentaries:

The entire series is too good for the Pulitzers and Oscars that it deserves but never received, and it has been attacked by many ‘experts’ and pontificators, but its specific allegations aren’t being attacked, because the documentation for all of them is too solid for it to be attacked, so instead the people who don’t like these facts condemn the work via such undocumented allegations to the contrary of it, as “The number of lives that would have been lost during an invasion [of Japan in 1945] would most likely have outstripped those lost in the two cities [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] due to the use of atomic bombs” — notwithstanding this book’s solid documentation to the contrary.

There will always be people who prefer the myths. And one thing which nobody accuses Donald Trump of, is that he fails to understand this. But a lot of people (the present writer included) think that he’s probably one of those individuals himself. It’s said that he doesn’t read books; but, at the very least, he ought to see that entire 10-part documentary. It would be the best crash-course for any incoming President who wants to do the job he’s legally oath-bound to carry out to the best of his abilities. If a President is intending that oath to have been a lie, then seeing this series would be irrelevant for him; but, otherwise, it would be essential. It’s real history — and most of it is either ignored or else grossly distorted in the prestigious American ‘history’ books. It’s the de-mythification of American history, from the time of Woodrow Wilson up till 2012. And no decent U.S. President, in our time, will be ignorant of it. Because any who is, will be indecent.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.