The Trumpery President
Trumpery: showy objects that are in fact worthless, from French tromperie, deceit.
Every day one or more people ask me what Trump is doing or how the war with Iran is going. They would do better to save their breath. Virtually everything I read in the gutter press (Is there anything else?) is fabricated. Fake New is the only news, especially when it comes from the White House.
Let us concentrate on one or two things we do know. First--and I have been saying this since he decided to attack Iran--we know that Trump campaigned twice on a peace platform and has consistently deplored the waste of resources on conflicts in the Middle. When he promised to put a stop to our involvement, he either knew or did not know of the Iranian regime's misdeeds, including the hostage crisis, support for terrorist groups, and attacks on Israel. If he did not know, he had no business running for office, and if he knew, then he is a liar.
We could use the same reasoning on Trump's decision to go to war without securing the support of our NATO allies. If he assumed they would back his play, he was a fool, and if he thought he could score an early knock-out without their support, he is no position to whine. Nation states, if they wish to survive, generally put their own interest above that of their allies. If he wanted loyalty from Britain, France, and Germany, he might have shown them a bit more respect in the past.
Second, many people, many of them Trump voters, are appalled by the President's foolish public behavior--his childish bullying, his strutting, his threatening and boasting. Shortly after his second electoral victory, I pointed out that he had taken Mussolini for his role model, and we could thus expect him to follow the Duce down the road into self-dramatizing escapades and disastrous military adventures.
In earlier pieces, I had pointed to Trump's associations with celebrity entertainers as a warning sign. He just loves Tiger Woods and Kanye West, has gone into the Rassling Ring and made Mrs. Vince McMahon his Secretary of Education. What I failed to point out the he is the first celebrity entertainer to be elected President. In the past, names like Robert Redford and Warren Beatty were tossed around as potential candidates, but here he is, the star of The Apprentice with a signature line as childish as any of Arnold Schwarzenegger's--with a cameo appearance in Home Alone II--and he can now boast of destroying civilization in Iran (with or without nuclear weapons), despite his earlier calls for regime change to save the innocent Iranian people from an evil regime.
Bill Clinton used to be known as "President Elvis," but now we have in reality a President who is as at home as Elvis in Las Vegas. And, here is the strangest part, the people who most resemble Trump--Hollywood stars, celebrity singers, fashion models--hate the man who is one of them, while the people who love Trump profess to hate the celebrities whose unstable character, vulgarity, and immorality he shares. Go figure.
Many people who voted for Trump were endorsing the platform, not the man: restore order in the streets, defend the border, expel illegal immigrants, begin the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean stables of government, and putting an end to wars that profit special interest groups. The platform is still valid, and some progress has been made in one or two areas. But those who put their faith in the vulgar trumpery of a man who is half Vegas and half confidence man should already be chewing the bitter cud of repentance.
There is nothing to disagree with this assessment. The question that arises is whether the status-quo with European nations we’ve been in forever has been in our best interests militarily and economically along with being held hostage by absurd environmental policies as well as medical and health policies promulgated by WHO. We find ourselves in the grip of a potentially catastrophic financial crisis with our debt and the dollar reserve currency status that most of us are likely oblivious to. And not for nothing, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard leadership of that country seems to have proven its intent to cause mayhem to us and others with a seeming attitude that its own destruction would be fine (a take the world down with you policy).
Would we be in a better place with Kamala and Tim in charge instead? Or is that an unfair question in the sense that it doesn’t excuse the behavior Trump is exhibiting? Can a “reasonable” person succeed on the world stage today that is anything but reasonable? I guess you could say yes if what is desired is what we have experienced for more than half a century. But responding that is precisely what has gotten into the mess we’re in now, is not an unreasonable thing to say to that either. Has a single leader of this country in our lifetimes been able to succeed in extricating us from the mess of we got ourselves into? Or is it fair to reply negative to that question? I’m not defending Trump’s persona but can only be dismayed that alternatives aren’t any better.
I don’t believe anything I have written about Trump and his administration could be interpreted to indicate that there was a better alternative. What I left out was that he seems clueless about how to deal with the Iranians. Even as a pretense, his willingness to take their word for anything is a sign of terrifying naivete, which is just what we should expect from a slippery American deal-maker who thinks he can snooker anyone. The old joke about doctors applies to the captains of commerce and industry. If you were seeking advice on investments, to whom would you go–an investment advisor or a doctor? Or on buying a house–a realtor or a doctor? Poetry–a poet or a doctor? Of course you’d go to a doctor, because he knows everything. Anyone who spent as much time courting rich donors as I had to do will understand. One of them even undertook to correct my ignorance of ancient Greece.
Sam Francis, in an early essay, applied the Machiavellian insight that political leaders fall generally into two types: lions like Caesar, Napoleon, and Stalin who know what they want and grab it, and foxes, who think–often correctly–that you can always put one over on rivals and enemies. The trouble comes when foxes deal with lions (or, as I would say, even rabid foxes). We have few lions in the American elite. They are all deal-making foxes who do not know how to deal with either Putin or the nutjobs in Iran.
Many Americans agree with RG that NATO was a bad deal for us: We paid them for the privilege of protecting them. From the perspective of Europe, though, what we paid is the price of Empire, You can’t have it both ways. Through NATO we dominated most of the world, and it was through our broader system of alliances that the US could get away with swaggering, bullying, and threatening smaller countries who got in our way. If Donald Trump did not understand this (sorry to keep repeating myself), he had no business running for office.
I agree Tom, you are right on target. (keeping in mind the founders warned of any multi lateral agreements between nations, ex: NATO). The current behavior of President Trump and the trash journalism of the entire press corps is disturbing. We move from bread and circus theatrics to the desperado violent behavior of Genghis Khan; from a commitment to peace and prosperity to war and destruction of a civilization. . Discussion of uni polar global rule is damned yet seemingly supported by a President whose behavior is strange and dysfunctional. We also observe a new testament Christian community supporting an old testament eye for an eye genocidal approach to problem solving. I am no “peacenik” and I thoroughly support the need for the military to defend our country from aggression, but the current current course of action and behavior of President Trump with the shallow and timid support of Congress and behavior of the public and the press is not contributing to a bright future for the United States. I even voted for the guy as the better of two evils. Shame on our electoral system, as it supports the heavy handed two party system
mismanaging our future.
‘Nuff said.
Meanwhile, they’re now openly talking about reinstating the draft for all men ages 18 – 26 by the end of this year. And they even had the foresight to turn Canada into a Marxist hellhole overrun by Muslims and Indians and MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ (not making this up), so there’s nowhere convenient for draft dodgers to flee to. And knowing our government, they’ll probably only draft young, Christian men while garnishing their wages to pay for more work Visa programs so more Indians can staff AI data centers they’re building all over the country next to quiet residential areas.
If Trump does actually start drafting our boys to send to be “boots on the ground” in Iran, then the “but wouldn’t it have been worse if the other guys had won” argument can go pound sand. Trump seems to have gone “all in” with the neo-Cons, and fat-necked toads like Lindsey Graham are surely plotting ways to draft girls to be cannon fodder, too, because he never met an American he didn’t want to send to war.
A plague on both their houses.
All of what Mr. Cornell has written I agree with. Before the election it seemed clear who would support foreign intervention and who would not. What has happened now is nothing short of bizarre for those of us who believed such a difference existed. That Lindsey Graham’s hopes and dreams are all coming true tells me everything I need to know. None of this is remotely good.
I agree with everything Dr Fleming has written here. The broader issue, I suppose, is just why we can’t get anything better than a Trump. That issue has been addressed by Dr Fleming in the past, several times, beginning on a certain other website many of us used to frequent. We simply don’t have an educated and responsible leadership class from which to draw, and there are several reasons for this.
If our educational system is geared for indoctrination, propaganda, brainwashing, gaslighting, and social engineering, then what kind of leaders will it produce? Throw in the effect of corporate advertising and public relations on the mind and on perceptions of “how the world is”, but I repeat myself. We wind up with a population and an elite class that know nothing and do not understand themselves or the world they find themselves in. So in our case, in modern America, we get not just the usual crooked dirty politicians and demagogues you find throughout history, but also the more historically recently appearing ideologues, and on top of it all, because of our system none of them know anything worth knowing or understand anything at all. How can we do anything but fail?
I might be okay with a draft that targeted the people who are gung ho for war from the get-go, plus their children and grandchildren, assuming they are of age. Draft ‘em and get ‘em to the front line ASAP. Draw from a list that not only includes those in the administration, the Congress, and the laptop bombardiers among the ranks of the neocon/neolib axis, but the MAGA yahoos high-fiving each other at Chili’s, over muh president’s ability at 5-D Chess.
I guess that’s unrealistic, though. But is there any reason Barron Trump is not in boot camp right now?
Here I would offer a minor disagreement. It is one thing for DT to send other people’s sons to die in a pointless exercise in building his own self-esteem, but he would be even worse if he were willing to sacrifice his own son. I mean he thinks he is Jesus but he hasn’t yet convinced himself he is God the Father.
Well, maybe Congress could do it for him, since they seem content to do it for the rest of us.
There is the Lincoln Project with the sort of implication that if Honest Abe were here today he would stand up the the uncouth bully. My next mental task for the event of unrelenting insomnia will be to speculate about a hypothetical universe were President Trump goes to Springfield in 1840 to make a deal involving log cabin-shaped bottles of whisky and meets Abraham Lincoln, then speculate about how they would get on.