06-30-2022, 04:11 AM
Planets or not, the Trump Presidency has gone from disaster to disgrace. The Congressional hearings have established that he treated the basic decencies that all Presidents have clung to, even if Warren G. Harding, necessary for the survival of our Constitutional system, Democrats have been wise to let Republicans be the star of this show, letting those who got cold feet about a conspiracy about which they got cold feet but dared not expose. We can see Donald Trump as a personally violent man who scared the Hell out of fellow Republicans.
The Skowronek cycle suggests that Donald Trump is the last Presidential cycle as the end of the line for a paradigm that began forty to fifty years earlier with a President who forced major changes of public assumptions. Policies that succeeded at first face diminishing returns over a few decades until they prove ineffectual even with a wise and honorable President (Carter was the end of the line for New Deal politics that began with FDR), let alone someone who exemplifies all that is wrong with a tendency from the outset (Reagan appealed to greed, selfishness, disdain for learning, and contempt for the poor, traits that Reagan could modulate as necessary but Trump took to their predictable conclusion). Carter and Trump were positioned to be 'disjunctive' Presidents who have little clue that they have committed to political failure.
It is easy to attribute everything wrong during the 45th Presidency to the personality of Donald Trump. He is a vindictive, corrupt, cruel, and violent man devoid of erudition, imagination, caution, and scruples. It is easy to see an antithesis in Barack Obama. Surely you have seen my Obama-Eisenhower overlay map which, I think, says much. The political orientation of the states generally stayed much the same between .between 1952 and 2012 or became much the same. The obvious difference is that Obama fared badly in rural areas in which Ike won big. I am satisfied that a conservative with Obama's political virtues if not the same partisan agenda will be a fine President.
1T's are repudiation of 3T fads and 4T fanaticism. Both came to the fore under Trump. The "Screw you!" rhetoric of Howard Jarvis (behind the infamous Proposition 13 in California) became the pervasive theme of Donald Trump. If one did not support him with votes and campaign funds, then one was completely irrelevant in the political debate. Such people are to be hurt and not served.
We can all blame political polarization, but even so a President like Obama could give the Other Side some aid when it needed it. An area that didn't vote for him in the previous election was going to get generous aid after an outbreak of tornadoes because such is the character of Obama. Trump? Just imagine what would happen if The Big One hit California.
We are all in the same leaky boat. We dare not hold people in distress from natural disasters (indeed, how a President responds to natural disasters is one of the most critical tests of his character and ability) in contempt if they happen to be on the wrong side of the Red-Blue divide.
The Skowronek cycle suggests that Donald Trump is the last Presidential cycle as the end of the line for a paradigm that began forty to fifty years earlier with a President who forced major changes of public assumptions. Policies that succeeded at first face diminishing returns over a few decades until they prove ineffectual even with a wise and honorable President (Carter was the end of the line for New Deal politics that began with FDR), let alone someone who exemplifies all that is wrong with a tendency from the outset (Reagan appealed to greed, selfishness, disdain for learning, and contempt for the poor, traits that Reagan could modulate as necessary but Trump took to their predictable conclusion). Carter and Trump were positioned to be 'disjunctive' Presidents who have little clue that they have committed to political failure.
It is easy to attribute everything wrong during the 45th Presidency to the personality of Donald Trump. He is a vindictive, corrupt, cruel, and violent man devoid of erudition, imagination, caution, and scruples. It is easy to see an antithesis in Barack Obama. Surely you have seen my Obama-Eisenhower overlay map which, I think, says much. The political orientation of the states generally stayed much the same between .between 1952 and 2012 or became much the same. The obvious difference is that Obama fared badly in rural areas in which Ike won big. I am satisfied that a conservative with Obama's political virtues if not the same partisan agenda will be a fine President.
1T's are repudiation of 3T fads and 4T fanaticism. Both came to the fore under Trump. The "Screw you!" rhetoric of Howard Jarvis (behind the infamous Proposition 13 in California) became the pervasive theme of Donald Trump. If one did not support him with votes and campaign funds, then one was completely irrelevant in the political debate. Such people are to be hurt and not served.
We can all blame political polarization, but even so a President like Obama could give the Other Side some aid when it needed it. An area that didn't vote for him in the previous election was going to get generous aid after an outbreak of tornadoes because such is the character of Obama. Trump? Just imagine what would happen if The Big One hit California.
We are all in the same leaky boat. We dare not hold people in distress from natural disasters (indeed, how a President responds to natural disasters is one of the most critical tests of his character and ability) in contempt if they happen to be on the wrong side of the Red-Blue divide.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.