Even if you’re a total bad ass like Dirty Harry.
Donald Trump made a fool out of me, and I admire him for it. His campaign for the nomination was unlike anything seen in the history of American politics. That’s why his opponents, and other people who have spent their lives thinking, studying, and practicing politics, could never figure him out. He was playing a new game, one no one had seen before. We’ll be talking about the Trump phenomena for a long time. Could anybody else have pulled off what he did? I don’t think so.
He started off with the only three things you need to succeed in politics: brains, balls, and bucks. And a lot of them. But that’s not enough to explain his rise. Those are necessary, though insufficient, ingredients of success. What he possesses to an unusual degree is fingerspitzengefuhl, a feel for the scene of battle. This is what comes from his gut, and he’s been honing it for his whole life. The examples from the primary campaign are countless. Just when you thought he was in trouble, he’d come up with an outrageous statement that would set the news cycle in an entirely new direction. He was playing the press, who wanted to be played. Trump was a ratings machine, and this, as much as liberal bias, won him the coverage, and the nomination.
But for Trump the nomination was a poisoned chalice. The tricks he played in the primary won’t work any more. The press won’t be played with any more, and they’re out to stop him. They feel guilty about what they all knowingly did in the primary, or this was their plan all along. It doesn’t matter. Don’t laugh when he says he’d be up by twenty in Pennsylvania if it weren’t for the media. He may not be that far off. They want his scalp, and he ought to know what he’s up against. He’s seen the press destroy people, and knows it can be done.
I redid yesterday’s post and sent it to American Thinker. My angle is that Trump could be like Moses, who led his people to the Promised Land, though he himself was not allowed to enter.
Putin plays chess, and I think he just castled. He’s buddied up to the Israelis, the Turks, and now the Iranians. He’s emerging as the master of the Middle East. Our withdrawal from the area left a void, and nature abhors a vacuum. Geopoliticaly, this is a master stroke. This is becoming a Russian sphere of influence. His military, and his willingness to use it, have made him the balance of power in the region. Ten years ago this would have been a disaster for the U.S., because we needed the oil from that region. But now we don’t, so it’s not important to us strategically. We want stability in the region, and so does Putin. We can work with this man. Russia borders this part of the world, and is threatened by radical Islam as much as we are, except worse. It doesn’t have our oceans.
“My Journey to the Nuclear Brink”, by William Perry, was recently reviewed by Jerry Brown, Gov. Moonbeam. He talks about the disastrous decision to expand the borders of NATO right up to Russia, and to include former Soviet Republics, in 1996. A whole lot of people realized this was crazy, but Clinton saw himself as a deep thinker, and went ahead anyway. It was a foolish and provocative move. It can be dealt with peacefully, through diplomacy. And it won’t take another Kissinger to do it.
The thing is, NATO is based on a lie. It’s a promise by the United States to come to the defense of each and every member, no matter who they’re fighting, or for what. It’s blank check. And the American people will refuse to cash it. Jerry Brown is anti-war. So am I. And so is the vast majority of the American people.
You know how I got on to this subject? Trump made some offhand remark about NATO, and it got me thinking. He was right. The old fingerspitzengefuhl.
reaganproject.com 