Category: Donald Trump Page 2 of 4

I keep seeing people talking about how stupid Trump is.

It is certainly true that Trump is not book-smart. He probably wouldn’t score well on an IQ test.

But by now, it should be clear, except to functional idiots, that Trump is very good at getting what he wants.

This is a man who shits into a gold toilet. Who has slept with a succession of models. Yeah, he’s a sleazy predator, but he gets what he wants.

He won the primary and the election. He won the election spending half as much money as Clinton did. Yes, she won the popular vote total; that’s irrelevant. He won where he needed to win to get the Presidency.

He played the media like a maestro, getting a ton of coverage, got the subjects he wanted covered, when he wanted them covered.

People laugh at him saying he would have won the popular vote too, except for fraud, but that idea is now out there and those who want to believe it have seen it repeated in the press. Even those outlets who said it wasn’t true repeated it, and Trump’s followers don’t trust the press.

Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, ran his paid advertising and also decided where the campaigns efforts should go. He fine-targeted ads, and he went for places Trump could win with the least money and effort.

Trump says he hires “the best.” I dunno, but his daughter married someone scarily competent, and Trump had the sense to trust him, take his advice, and get out of the way and let him do his job.

Trump just convinced Carrier to keep some manufacturing jobs in the US (by bribing them with tax cuts, it seems). That sort of high profile personal intervention will be remembered, and has already said to his followers: “I’m delivering for you.”

Trump is clearly a very flawed individual, with really questionable morals and ethics, but he isn’t incompetent by any useful definition of the word. He may well wind up betraying his followers, certainly many of his cabinet picks are of deeply dubious individuals who favor policies which will hurt the working and middle classes.

But that doesn’t make him incompetent, that makes him a politician and a sleazy, but very good, salesman.

Trump’s opposition will continue getting their asses handed to them if they keep assuming that he’s a boob, or that he can’t take good advice. He’s a very savvy operator, and the people he trusts most, Bannon and Kushner, are extraordinarily competent men who have proved their loyalty.

What Trump doesn’t have is very firm policy opinions, and wonkish centrists and lefties think that makes him stupid, and that that type of stupid is the same thing as incompetent.

Trump stands a decent chance of juicing the economy even as he chops away at is remaining underpinnings through his tax cuts. If he does so, he will be re-elected.

I’d be careful betting against him.

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Okay, you should read this entire article. I’m going to excerpt one piece but it’s all there: the trade, jobs, the rhetorical style, the anti-war message, and so on. Most of you have never heard this, and I haven’t been able to get through to a lot of people.

So read.

Or consider the particularly emotional exchange Trump had with a father from upstate New York. “I lost my son two years ago to a heroin overdose,” says the father from off camera.

“Well, you know they have a tremendous problem in New Hampshire with the heroin,” says Trump. “Unbelievable. It’s always the first question I get, and they have a problem all over. And it comes through the border. We’re going to build a wall. ”

Then, instead of moralizing anger, playing against type, come compassion and respect: “In all fairness to your son, it’s a tough thing. Some very, very strong people have not been able to get off it. So we have to work with people to get off it.”

At this point it becomes clear that the bereaved father has started to cry. Trump shifts to tough-guy reassuring. “You just relax, OK? Yeah, it’s a tough deal. Come on. It’s a tough deal.” And, in a veiled reference to Trump’s own brother’s death from alcoholism, “I know what you went through.” Then, to the audience while pointing at the father: “He’s a great father, I can see it. And your son is proud of you. Your son is proud of you. It’s tough stuff, it’s tough stuff, and it could be stopped.”

Trump did not campaign the way you thought he did. Or, not entirely. You only got half the picture, which is why so many people can only screech: “Racism!”

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There are three themes emerging since Trump won the election:

(1) His embrace of people with rather unpleasant views. That’s being covered plenty by others, so let’s concentrate on the other two.

(2) Loyalty and a disorganized transition. Some folks are beginning to understand how much loyalty matters to Trump. Many of his early appointments and advisors are easy to understand in those terms. Kushner, his son-in-law, was always there for him. Bannon was there during the nastiest of it (i.e., the tape fiasco). He didn’t back down, he didn’t cavil. He doubled down on supporting Trump. Sessions was loyal all the way through. Flynn was loyal all the way through, even when other retired generals suggested he shut it.

Ex-Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney once said, “You dances with them that brought you.” Trump is dancing with people who were loyal through the worst of it.

This is not unreasonable. He’s going to be under constant attack, and he needs people he can trust. I may not like the politics of some of these people, but they did prove they could be trusted to handle the absolute worst and not abandon Trump.

(3) All sorts of wailing about the notion that Trump and Putin talked before Trump talked to State and Defense, or how he met with Japanese PM Abe without going through State.

So?

This sort of stuff shows clearly that the usual suspects don’t get it. Trump ran as an actual outsider, despite his wealth. He said, “These people are fuckups. All the people who run the country are incompetent.”

So, people wailing that the Pentagon thinks Trump cozying up to Russia is wrong are missing the point. Trump ran on the premise that we should be friends with Russia. He proposed that people who think we should be enemies with Russia are wrong.

I agree with him, as it happens, but that’s irrelevant. He ran against the prevailing foreign policy consensus on Russia and he won.

Trump doesn’t think that State or Defense or whoever have been giving the right advice or doing the right thing. He thinks they have group-think, and this group-think’s conclusions are incorrect, and he ran against them.

Trump is doing what he said he would do. He has a mandate for being buddies with Putin. You may not like it (I do), but who gives a damn. He ran on it.

He ran on cutting DC elites out of decision-making, because they’ve run the country into the ground (yes, yes they have).

I make no claims that all of this mess isn’t partially incompetence. The team clearly did not have a good transition plan read (or much of one at all).

But hey, he fired the person who didn’t have a transition plan ready. That was Christie’s job, Christie did not do it. People are focusing on this as Kushner ousting Christie (because Christie prosecuted his father) and that’s part of it, but Kushner wouldn’t have been able to stop Trump giving him the job in the first place: He could only get rid of Christie after Christie completely screwed up the job.

There are a lot of issues about which I don’t agree with Trump, but whether you like it or not (and no, the popular vote count doesn’t change this) he’s actually running his transition in line with his campaign promises, in line with his mandate.

As for Kushner, we better hope he keeps winning his intra-Trump battles, because he’s one of the only powerful figures in the administration who doesn’t want to, say, deport Muslims.

Until people wrap their heads around why so many people (in the right places) voted for Trump, they aren’t going to be able to predict his moves or fight him properly.

Trump had a critique of how the country is run. His critique was essentially correct (I don’t agree with many of his solutions). He won on that critique, and so far he is doing what someone in his position should do: He is acting in accordance with what he said he’d do on the campaign trail.

What people are whining about, so far, are actual signs of integrity on Trump’s part. Integrity for a cause many disagree with, but integrity, nonetheless.

Like all candidates, even the best and most honest, Trump won’t fulfill all his promises. But he is acting in line with his meta-narrative: “DC is broken; those people don’t know how to run the country.”

Whether he can run the country is another matter, but it’s clear that DC elites can’t, because they’ve fucked it up for four decades, which culminated in a Trump presidency.

If Trump wasn’t right that DC elites are fuckups, Trump wouldn’t be President-elect.

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Okay, Trump has appointed Bannon his chief strategist. Bannon is a straight up white supremacist. This is bad.

I am hearing screams of Nazi and fascism. I am hearing a lot of such screams.

Let’s cut to the chase. If Trump is a Nazi he will do very bad things. Let’s get specific.

Will he be as bad as a fairly standard nasty dictator: Pinochet?

• Train dogs to rape women? Rape as a policy (more than it already is in the US, which, umm, it is.)
• Mass graves?
• Death squads striking at night either with government sanction or with government looking aside (this is, actually, the first thing to look for. If you start seeing it, GET OUT. GET OUT NOW.) But it happens in plenty of governments which aren’t Nazi or fascist.

Will he be worse?

• Actual concentration camps (remember, Obama already locks up illegals in camps for long periods without meaningful trial.)

I’ve heard people say things like “false flag attacks,” but those happen under non-fascist regimes.

If you think Trump is a Nazi, I sincerely encourage you to set up markers of Nazi (or fascist)-dom, so you can track the success of your prediction.

And I sincerely suggest you make one of them the red line where you flee the goddamn country. As a friend of mine wrote the other day, his grandmother, when she fled Hitler in the 30s, was mocked by her relatives. Every single one of them died under Hitler.

I don’t think Trump is Hitler, though he’s got some damn unpleasant people in his administration.

But if he is, you’d better know when you’re going to cut and run, or, alternatively, pick up a gun.

I note, also, that if he isn’t, all the people screaming are doing everyone a great disservice, because when the real thing comes, having been falsely warned before, they won’t believe it.

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