(08-31-2022, 01:09 PM)Anthony Wrote:(08-31-2022, 12:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(08-31-2022, 11:08 AM)Anthony Wrote: Someone out there - on One America Network - seems to think that Donald Trump is going to go down in history as the Gray Champion:
“Russia could’ve taken Ukraine inside of three weeks but didn’t. They’re holding back, why? China is too scared to invade Taiwan, why? The reason is because they don’t know what Trump is going to do with them in 2025. Trump remains more powerful than anyone in four generations.”
One America Network? The National Enquirer has similar credibility.
Donald Trump seems more likely to go down as a hyper-villain of American history as someone who appealed to the worst in American life and brought it forth. Putin chose to not embarrass Trump, Putin's favorite American student -- and if you believe Malcolm Nance, a tool of Russian and Soviet intelligence since he was a young man. Supposedly Ivanka Trump was the daughter of someone in the former Czechoslovak secret police, a reliable cat's paw for the Soviet secret police until Czechoslovakia disbanded its Soviet-servile secret police.
Let's put it this way -- having a foreign-born spouse is not good for a career as a military officer or personnel in the CIA... for good reason. If your spouse's extended family includes members of the Italian Communist Party, then you might be suspect when questions of compromised security arise. In Okinawa, American non-com men were not prevented from dating Japanese women; junior officers were strongly discouraged from doing so. There we are talking about two countries with pro-American governments.
Donald Trump has been loyal to only one thing: himself. He brings out the worst in people so that he can get what he wants. A real Gray Champion
like Lincoln, Juarez, FDR, Churchill, Mannerheim, Blum, or Adenauer brings out the best in people. In our time I see the closest in Angela Merkel. Maybe Obama has set a pattern for other Presidents to follow, melding the virtues of conservatism at its best with not-so-conservative optimism in human nature while rejecting a reactionary set of economic assumptions. Obama may not have been the sort that one would expect to have a cozy relationship with the Armed Forces and the Intelligence Services, but that is how things worked out.
If there is anything to say about Donald Trump, it is that he serves as a warning of what not to tolerate in American life. He shows the dangers of pathological narcissism, the inability to bond, pathological lying, cruelty to anyone in a hard position, rejection of expertise, and no institutional loyalty. He confuses patriotism to loyalty to himself. Donald Trump is "Rosemary's Baby" having gone almost completely through his likely lifespan.
You act as if I like Trump or something.
I most emphatically do not - although I actually do not despise him as much as I despise hard-core Social Darwinists like Rick Scott and Ted Cruz.
Germans who despised Hitler for his callowness and vile rhetoric supported him because he told them exactly what they wanted to hear, offered them some economic goodies (like smashing the unions or destroying Jewish competition to what would otherwise be all-powerful tycoons in the economic sphere, making promises of highly-lucrative rearmament, or intensifying the control that the Junkers had over farm laborers). To be sure, a thoroughly-scary depression and the rise of the Communists who wanted to Bolshevize Germany created its own menace to the class privilege to which Hitler sold out the laborer of farm or factory and caused Germans to seek an easy target for virulent hatred. Model minorities are always the easiest targets because they have the reputation for doing well that continues after the economy melts down. Germany had only one model minority, and that was the Jews.
One need not like a Hitler, let alone a Trump, to vote for him when the rhetoric of hatred permeates everything. The difference between Donald Trump and such hard-core Social Darwinists who seek to establish crony capitalism as the way in which all is done is that Ted Cruz and Rick Scott believe in something and Trump believes in nothing more than his ego. If I were forty years younger I would be establishing excuses for emigration in the event that someone like Cruz or Scott establishes some "Union of Christian and Corporate States" that would differ ideologically from Marxism-Leninism only in endorsing what Marxists excoriate about capitalist plutocracy at its worst.
Know well that freedom well merits some sacrifices because without it whatever one gets from the System is itself precarious, and that improvements in personal life unless one is an Insider are unlikely. Some people, given the opportunity to sell out their freedom for some economic gain, self-esteem from putting others down, and vague promises of 'national greatness' that will somehow rub off. Above all, tyrannical regimes put life at great risk from concentration camps, torture chambers, and apocalyptic war. If you thought the Soviet Union a monstrosity, then contemplate America with either crazy or grossly-immoral leadership that makes such demands as "send us five million slaves or we will nuke your cities".
America has spiders in its soul -- mistreatment of First Peoples, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry, McCarthyism, and of course Donald Trump. Most of us know this, but it is an easy thing to forget.
Quote:But I can easily see him throwing Putin under the bus if he does pull a Grover Cleveland and wins the 2024 Presidential election.
I can imagine Donald Trump having won the 2020 election and then throwing European democracy under the bus from the fledgling democracy in Ukraine all the way to Dublin and Lisbon. But it would be easy to stay in a Trump Hotel and Casino (the latter run by the Russian Mafia) in Manchester, Seville, Palermo, or Oslo. Speaking of the Mafia -- Trump might organize a friendly arrangement between the Sicilian and Russian mobs. He could think himself a great statesman on par with Bismarck or Churchill for that!
Putin chose to not invade Ukraine because he had no desire to embarrass his Greatest American Pupil. Putin thinks President Biden fair game.
Quote:And I'm sure you agree that Trump is the kind of madman who could use nuclear weapons in anger and turn the world's lights out - or very close to it.
The Armed Forces and the Intelligence Services would have a few words to say about that if he tried that. That would require dictatorial power, and dictatorships are particularly prone to coups.
Donald Trump is mad, a combination of narcissism always part of his character added to the deterioration that one would expect from senility and perhaps tertiary syphilis or HIV-related dementia. I've seen senility destroy the inhibitions that people needed to keep them on an even keel, and what I saw in my father near the end of his life I see in Trump about ten years earlier in his (bad habits and a lack of people saying NO to him contributing to such in Trump).
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Narcissism is very much a part of American life. Most children go through their earlier years with narcissism before discovering that as they get to age nine or so that they dare not say whatever they feel if they are to not be beaten up. Nobody develops humility for the fun of it; one does so as a survival need, as in doing a job that one hates but dares not quit. If you think that most of the smiles that you see in people doing miserable jobs that pay minimum wage and have no reasonable chance of advancement except to quit and go elsewhere when the opportunity arises are fake -- you are right. Remember to say T.Y.F.S.O.K. (Thank you for shopping at K-Mart!) and show your smile. If you answer inquiries at a phone bank, then make sure to smile because the customer can hear the lack of a smile. Maybe truck-driving, kitchen, assembly-line, or construction work that requires little contact with the public doesn't require that one show consent with one's oppression, and such work can look good to a retail sales clerk or fast-food worker. For most people, narcissism ends when one must make sacrifices on behalf of shareholders, executives, bosses, or well-heeled customers for economic survival at a low level.
On the other side of early adulthood, it is easy to see who will get away with narcissism longer, and perhaps very late into life.
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.