Trump: "We should stay the hell out of Syria. WHAT WILL WE GET FOR OUR LIFES AND $BILLIONS? ZERO."
Donald Trump understands something politicians and the media do not understand. The Presidency is Show Business.
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| 2013: Do not attack Syria |
He does not have to explain. He has to sell.
Donald Trump just showed us how to sell a war. You stand up and sell it, with confidence and enthusiasm. And you sell what people want to buy.
Donald Trump got elected saying repeatedly that American involvement in the Middle East was a disaster. We should avoid meddling, especially in Syria. We are not the world's policeman, he said. Nothing we could do there would help. We had no business there. Everything we did would turn our wrong.
Donald Trump reversed himself. He did not look back and didn't apologize. "I am flexible and proud of that flexibility."
Here is what Trump did right:
1. He pointed to a specific thing--the chemical attacks on children, even though objectively they are no less horrific that the barrel bombs of metal shards dropped into civilian areas that have killed thousands of times as many people.
2. He made an emotional appeal to saving the "beautiful children" of whom there was video.
3. He blamed his predecessor, Obama. I inherited a mess.
4. He stood up and sold it, stood behind a microphone and said the Americans were doing the good, right, effective thing, associating himself with strong decisive action and "can-do" American military might. He said it was confidence and apparent conviction.
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| Click here: Cable News praise for Trump |
The air strikes have multiple additional benefits for him.
1. It changes the story from White House chaos to "firm decisive president."
2. It reduces the credibility of a tight Trump-Putin conspiracy bond, since Assad is a Russian asset.
3. It demonstrates foreign policy competence in an event that Trump defined as a crisis.
4. It communicated to China, North Korea, and others that Donald Trump is unpredictable in matters of foreign policy.
Skeptics of Trump and readers burned by past experience of American "limited military intervention" will be hesitant to call this anything but a momentary victory. It is the familiar bait which has pulled presidents and America into danger repeatedly in the 20th Century. It is so perfect for Trump that some pundits on the populist right and the cynical middle suspect that it is a false flag setup, too convenient and perfect to have been the usual chaos of public affairs. The chemical weapons might have been ours, they suspect, or Russia's delivered for the benefit of cameras and children, to take attention away from the Trump-Putin story. (It is now Trump's turn to experience dark conspiracy thinking.)
Wars are popular in America--at first. Every cable TV channel lavished time and fawning words at Tomahawk missiles being shot off the deck of an American ship. It was the "terrible swift sword" of righteous power. It is elixir for Presidents. It worked for Trump because he needed the elixir and because strength is his brand.
It was a good week for Trump.
Meanwhile, Thad Guyer sends a warning to Trump skeptics. The Democratic left misunderstood the politics of their own era. There is a pendulum swing away from globalism, away from internationalism, away from free trade. The left praises Thomas Jefferson but forgets to read him. "Governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed." America is a sovereign nation and the government's duty is to its citizens, not to "humanity" and not to "the planet." Free immigration in Europe reawakened nationalist thinking there and in the USA as well. Whose country is it? Ours. Who should the country benefit? Us. Only us.
Automation and free trade stressed worker wages. The people were frustrated and in Jefferson's world the lodestar is not "the system" but the people who live in it. They spoke on November 8, 2016.
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| Guyer |
Thad Guyer's Comment:
The End of the Left’s Suspended Disbelief in Trump World”
That so many left commentators doubted Gorsuch would be confirmed is explained by suspended disbelief in our new political reality. First was the shock of Trump’s election despite compelling political science data from four university predictive models that confidently forecast his win (not to mention all 10 UpClose pre-election podcasts). Then followed denial fueled by fantasies of rogue delegates, Russian conspiracies and quick impeachment. Now we are in the anger stage at Trump’s supposed incompetence. We will now enter the negotiation stage of grief, as Democratic voters come to grips with the profound arrogance and incompetence of our politically blinded establishment, our “we are the world” globalist ideological narcissism in ashes in Washington. We’re in good company as our open borders anti-nationalism invigorates neo-nationalism from Oklahoma City to London, Paris and Rome.
The Republican mind now understands political power in ways we haven’t, just as we understand cultural destiny as they cannot. We will ultimately “win” because government policy is no match for cultural power, just as drug laws and border walls can repress neither drug use nor mass migration. But in this here and now paycheck to retirement world, debits, credits and liberty have been allocated by federal politics. Trump’s new neo-nationalist party is ascendant, and initially reluctant establishment Republicans have pledged their pragmatic allegiance as we forced eight endangered Democratic senators to oppose a mainstream conservative judge. Things are likely to get worse for us in Washington. We undoubtedly will fill our sanctuary cities to the brim, as Republicans hope to watch us suffocate in our unfunded cultural victory, with their Supreme Court articulating why our natural political constituencies have no federal voting or other political rights.
Trump does nothing about the Syrian chemical attack because he is incompetent, feckless and beholden to Putin, MSNBC explained yesterday, just hours before Trump’s cruise missiles humiliated the network once again. Trump’s lies about being surveilled by Obama have stripped him all credibility, we were told, just weeks before the scandal broke about his top intelligence political appointee, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, mulling over the transcripts of Trump officials talking politics with Russian bosses. That Republican investigation will endure like Hillary Clinton and Benghazi.
Trump world is a place where the President gets international acclaim for a cruise missile attack on a war criminal, on the same day his political judge is confirmed to the Supreme Court, and the Democratic defense of filibuster needlessly falls upon a Democratic sword. The skids are now greased for a legislative juggernaut to deconstruct the administrative state erected during the apex of Democratic power. Gorsuch is just the first of Trump’s appointees who wall off culture from law.
But there is no dishonor in rising from the ashes, nor any practical need to rush it. It’s time to start afresh, let Washington recede from our consciousness. Democrats can be the new party of states rights and the new enemies of federal government. State government is where we should focus our efforts, New York and San Francisco our shared capitols, Austin and Denver our inspiration of what the union of culture and politics can be. SXSW, indie culture and now indie politics. Time to end the disbelief, and get to work on allocating political and economic debits, credits and liberty at the state and local level where blue can thrive and lead.
3 comments:
If any Dem praises this action, best to be "hopeful", they are making a mistake. It was and has been a tragic war in the Mideast, but using the military to enforce a moral outrage makes a bad situation worse. I could understand targeting the palace, but tossing bombs into the desert makes no sense. What, are we "warning them" they better start behaving?
Republicans will use the gas attack and missile strike to appeal to their dim witted base, and give Trump cover for what is nothing but a self-aggrandizing gesture. Assad is likely to provoke another.
We are left with questions: Why this and why now? Is Assad simply thumbing his nose at the West? Would he do this attack without consulting his Russian advisors? Would they say no? Is it even a possibility, as some have suggested, that this was a challenge to Trump in order to provoke a response...a test? Such cruelty is unthinkable, but not out of the realm of possibility.
Maybe Assad just thinks this will hasten an end to the conflict. A Hiroshima of sorts on his own people.
Rick Millward's post "Preserving Outrage", is a helpful perspective on where democrats need to go. As to our most disaffected, he writes:
"At present this group is so full of outrage that churns through social media stirring up all sorts of vociferous energy but accomplishing little."
See https://rickmillward.blogspot.com/2017/03/preserving-outrage.html
Thank you Thad, I appreciate the encouragement. My blogging is a nascent effort and the feedback is very helpful as I wonder whether my thoughts reveal any useful insight. I would add that it's evident that we are flirting with the kind of polarization that grew out of the Vietnam era with a generation who have no memory of it, and were not taught much about it, while some us who were there are having a significant deja vu seeing a Vietnam/Watergate parallel.
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