You are familiar by now, of course, with the anti-Trump checklist.
Prone to shoot off his mouth. Check.
Prone to exaggerate or misstate facts. Check.
Thin-skinned. Check.Impulsive. Check.
Erratic. Check.Egotistical. Check.
This is the bi-partisan checklist. It commands widespread agreement among Republicans as well as Democrats, conservatives as well as liberals.
Frothing, hard-core leftists, meanwhile, have their own checklist, with redundant or overlapping categories. Fascist. Hitlerian. Authoritarian. Racist. Xenophobic. Misogynistic. Anti-Semitic. Islamophobic. Devious. Untrustworthy. Crooked. Venal. Mean. Cruel. Insane. Evil. Traitorous. Anthropophagic.
Just kidding with that last one (meaning cannibalistic). But as one indication of the stark-raving-mad anti-Trump lunacy of the left, there have been some who have imputed even worse to Trump – for example, incest. Yes, incest!
Here’s just one sample of that anti-Trump straightjacket madness, compliments of author, talk show host and TV producer Reza Aslan:
“Oh, the joy when this conniving scumbag narcissistic sociopathic piece of sxxt president gets what’s coming to him.” (It takes an advanced degree from Harvard, which Aslan possesses, to be so clever and articulate.)
Setting aside the mass psychosis of the left, there does seem to be, however, substantial agreement across a wide swath of the spectrum on at least one other modifier for Trump: ignorant.
It’s beyond dispute, Trump’s no policy wonk, to put it kindly. He can’t tell you – as Barack Obama surely could – the gross national product of Burkina Faso, or even the name of its capital. Nor does he likely give a hoot about either.
Trump has never adopted the persona of supercilious, professorial omniscience, as his predecessor did.
Trump would likely dismiss Burkina Faso as belonging to the geographic category of “sxxthole countries.” And if so, actually he would not be far off the mark about that coup-afflicted, extremist-plagued, hapless place.
Which points to an insight about Trump that his more knowledgeable, more sophisticated, more nuanced critics would do themselves a favor by trying to grasp: Although Trump is never going to be named a fellow at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, he does know a little bit about a thing or two.
Yes, maybe only a little bit, only about a thing or two. But what little he does know gives him a political advantage over the cognoscenti of the left and right.
Being a hustler of real estate deals and branded products, he has a sense of what’s likely to sell and what’s not, about what registers with the hoi polloi – the “masses” – and what doesn’t.
The left never ceases professing its concern for the masses, for “the people.” But it’s Trump who grasps what concerns the people – or at least a substantial segment of them – and what doesn’t.
There are several examples, but two will do. Climate change and free trade. The first is an obsession of the intelligentsia of the left, the second the intelligentsia of the right.
CLIMATE CHANGE. Trump was at least smart enough to know that folks in Flyover Land, lacking as they do degrees from Yale, Stanford and other such phenomenally pricey places – don’t rate climate change high on their worry list.
Clinging bitterly to their guns and bibles out there in the benighted hinterlands, the Cro-MAGA-nons don’t have a spare $80,700 for a Tesla Model X to help fend off the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases. Nor means to purchase “carbon offsets” as Albert Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio do.
They’re also not likely ever to be in line for multimillion-dollar government subsidies for renewable energy enterprises or grants to do academic studies on how anthropogenic climate forces are compromising tetrapod habitats.
Dullards though they may be, they manage to grasp that the elitist, global-warming worrywarts pose a greater danger to their immediate economic well-being than distant, and quite possibly chimerical, climate change does.
FREE TRADE. Establishment conservatives view it in terms of the droit de seigneur – as the privilege of the corporate aristocracy, the big transnational corporations, to do as they damn well please.
The libertarian conservatives, meanwhile, regard free trade more as doctrinal orthodoxy. It’s an unalloyed good, filling the shelves of the big box stores with the blessings of cheap, foreign-made merchandise. Aside from this benefit, the Deplorables get the leftover slim-pickings, crummy jobs driving forklifts and checking out customers.
As for the leftists, they don’t give the subject much thought one way or another. It’s good enough for them that their new benefactors among the top income quintile – the Wall Street hedge-funders and global money-movers, the Tom Steyers and George Soroses, not to mention the new plutocrats of Silicon Valley – all favor free trade. What more do liberals need to know?
The Cro-MAGA-nons, meanwhile, only know what they see with their own eyes: Rusting hulks where factories once stood, deserted downtowns, maybe one of those big box stores here and there the only signs of economic life.
It occurs to the Irredeemables that maybe unless there’s some protectionist countermeasures, some hard-nosed deal-making, a gutted Johnstown, Pa., or a skeletal Camden, N.J., can never compete with a cheap-labor China or an Indonesia, not when China’s per capita GDP is $8,430 and Indonesia’s is $4,255, while America’s is $59,391.
But it’s a question that’s irrelevant to the big transnational corporations. They are America-headquartered but NOT – take note – emphatically NOT – American. They count themselves citizens of the world, not citizens of the United States.
Think that’s an exaggeration? When gadfly Ralph Nader suggested that America’s top corporate colossi open their board meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance, they ignored or begged off the suggestion. In mass numbers. Including the likes of Apple, GM (since bailed-out by U.S. taxpayers), GE, Citigroup, Verizon, ExxonMobil, AT&T, Ford, JP Morgan Chase and others.
The American left now finds itself incongruously aligned with a global corporate capitalism that salutes no flag, although it may wave one to drum up July 4th sales. Both the left and global corporate capitalist duchies shudder at the very mention of the words “America First.”
The left professes that the slogan evokes dreaded images of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung and Mussolini’s Camicie Nere. But “America First” is no less disconcerting in the global CEOs high-tower corporate office suites.
Trump gets it, if only instinctually His sworn enemies – the snotty, sneering nomenklatura of the media, Hollywood, academia and the Swamp – don’t get it. They remain tenaciously clueless.
That’s the advantage he has. But that’s also the threat he represents. That’s the reason stalwarts of the status quo are convinced he must – absolutely must – be driven from office.
And if, as indicated his, sworn enemies also include the Swamp’s FBI-CIA-NSA-DIA Deep State apparatchiki, his days in office may indeed be numbered. Chuck Schumer may or may not have been only kidding when he said you don’t piss off foes like that without serious consequences.
– davidneese@verizon.net