After two years in office, Donald Trump finds his presidency at a crossroads. His mode of operation as president has been a continuation of his style as candidate. He says a lot of flippant things about the establishment, many of which are true, but the response is mockery or possibly some pearl clutching. Otherwise, from a policy perspective, the Trump era looks like the Jeb Bush era. The donor class got tax cuts and regulatory reform, while the voters have thus far gotten nothing, other than more of the same.
He can continue down the same path he has been on, reacting to the machinations of his enemies, like a hyper-active version of Richard Nixon, but that promises he will be a one-term president. While the political class ignores him on policy, the Mueller investigation operates like an anaconda wrapped around his administration. It is squeezing the life out of his agenda, by filling the media with salacious nonsense stories and reactions to them, while scaring off serious people interested in joining the administration.
A strange result thus far is that Trump is bad at the thing he was elected to do. That is confront the political class. From the beginning, he has allowed them to push him around and bluff him into bad policy. For example, the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy. Was the GOP House really going to start impeachment hearings? Would the media be worse on him for not signing off of this ridiculous idea? At every turn, Trump has taken the advice of his enemies.
The conspiratorially minded think the “deep state” has something on him so he is being forced to go along with their agenda. That’s an entertaining theory, but the so-called deep-state has shown itself to be all thumbs when trying to pull off the simplest of capers. The real reason behind his failure thus far is Trump, at heart, still believes in old America, a system of laws and rules where eventually the truth rises to the surface. Trump’s “assault” on the swamp is actually a defense of that old dead American ideal.
After two years of learning that the rule-based system of politics is a myth and what happens in Washington makes New York City real state look innocent, Trump needs to accept the reality of his situation. He can let the Mueller investigation go on forever, as his opponents so desperately desire, or he can end it. If he chooses the former, he is a one-term president whose name will be forgotten. The victors may even have Trump and his family imprisoned, as a warning to others, who dare challenge the establishment.
The other option is to learn a lesson from Lincoln. When you scrape away the slobbering praise from the eventual victors, Lincoln faced a simple dilemma. He could try to preserve the old order, fail and be remembered as a blood thirsty tyrant, who tried to upend the Constitutional order as created by the Founders. Alternatively, he could be the tyrant and overthrow the system, win the war and create a new order. The reason Lincoln is not remembered as the American Sulla is his side won and wrote all of the history books.
That’s the dilemma Trump now faces. He can keep trying to win within the rules being imposed upon him by the establishment, or he can reject those rules entirely. After all, he is in the White House because he did exactly that in the campaign. His primary run was an example of outsider genius to outflank his opponents. His use of novel metrics to create new votes in the general was mostly due to necessity. It is a great reminder that necessity is the mother of invention – and revolutions.
Trump needs to accept that things have a reached the breaking point. It is no longer possible for him to strike a compromise with the establishment. They must be brought to heel and reform must be imposed upon them. They know this, which is why they are endlessly bluffing on what they are doing. Trump needs to call their bluff and fire Mueller, end his investigation and begin the process of investigating the rampant corruption in the intelligence services. More important, he has to be done with flourish.
Imagine news breaks one Friday that the Secret Service has raided the offices and homes of the Mueller team. Their computers, phones and materials were seized and their access to those materials revoked. All of them fired on the spot. Imagine the media hysteria over that move. Now imagine Trump addressing the nation that night, telling the country he has fired Team Mueller and is instructing his new AG to appoint a new special counsel to get to the bottom of the Mueller cover up of the FBI corruption.
That would turn Washington on its ear. When it is further learned that all of the material in the Mueller probe is under 24-hour armed guard and off-limits to everyone until the second investigation is commenced, the game is on. That means the new prosecutor can and will prosecute leaking information in those files. Bob Mueller goes from being the grand inquisitor to a person of interest. His flunkies suddenly become a liability to him and the rest of the conspirators. The rules of the game are suddenly very different.
Would the House Democrats commence impeachment proceedings? Probably. Even if they went forward, would the GOP senate convict? Maybe. There are plenty duplicitous cowards in the Republican Party. A craven loser like Mitt Romney comes to mind. Regardless of how it goes, Trump suddenly becomes an inflection point in the nation’s history. If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite. The system will be discredited.
That’s where Trump is right now. In a very different context, he is in the same place Lincoln was at when he assumed office. Lincoln could only fail by maintaining the old order, so he had to end the republic. Trump can only fail if he tries to restore the old civic order he fondly remembers from the 1980’s. His choice is to fail or overthrow the current order. The former is a slow death of his administration. They latter does not guarantee success, but it means the end of the old order, for which he will be remembered.
Yeah. Something–some big thing–needs to happen. Nothing to lose now. But you do get the feeling that Trump’s “advisors,” i.e., seemingly now mostly anti-Trump swampers, are trying to insulate him from anything but establishment ideas and routes of action. We need to train a pigeon with Zman’s article wrapped around its leg to fly through a White House window and onto Trump’s shoulder.
I doubt it would help, because we know that Trump already knows. This exact topic was the subject of half his candidate speeches and rallies.
He knows, he just either doesn’t care or is unable to act. Neither would surprise me. From the beginning it was clear that he had a lot of work to do in order to consolidate Official Power. It’s clear now that he failed. He’s surrounded by the wrong people. In theory he could try to mobilize his base, but I suspect that most of them are simply too passive.
There is that option for a war with Iran. That would be something “big”. But I’m not sure that would help us.
HOWEVER right or wrong this piece may be, Zman, I hope and pray that someone sticks it under Trump’s nose when he’s on the can tomorrow morning.
He’s always said if you want to do something you might as well think big, and this would give him pause to think about how he wants to go down in the record books.
I want to see him DETONATE the center of the swamp. Maybe Hillary gets a public perp-walk same day as Mueller’s raid!
In chaos is opportunity. Go, Donny, go!
He should let it all rip. Everything! Disprove the conspiracy theories once and for all. He will be remembered as a one in a million President. He will reset the 240 year clock. Maybe, just maybe the next time we will get it right.
If Trump fails to act, it will be the fault of his children. Family is big for him, and they have an outsized influence. What Trump’s kids don’t understand (IMO) is that the entire extended Trump family is already down the rabbit hole, and there is only one way out that has any reasonably good ending. The kids think they can be the Kennedy family or the Bush family over time, and are selling Dad on that legacy. The “Trump brand” and all. We’ll see, I don’t think that bird can fly any more, under any circumstances. Carl Icahn is… Read more »
Dutch, I agree with most of what you wrote but I take exception to your belief that Icahn is staying away because he thinks being part of a Trump administration will be trouble. I think that Icahn, being that ruthless and savvy dude we all know him to be would rather not hitch his personal business Logo to a political party because , being savvy he realizes that would compromise at least half his potential customers and that ain’t savvy nor ruthless. It’s bad business. It’s like Dick’s being anti gun. Pure stupidity. Just my guess.
I was going to observe the kids, too. They (especially Ivanka) are fully invested in the swamp. She cannot bear being ostracized. Trump has a hard time with it, too.
Dutch, Not sure the kids are the only ones with this idea. There is clearly a “power family / legacy” thing with extremely ambitious types. DC is a swamp of power couple wanna-bees. Z: Lincoln invaded sovereign Virginia because he didnt want HIS legacy to be the man whose election caused the breakup of the US, and he was willing to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans to make sure of it. Had Lincoln merely stood aside while the southern states exercised their sovereignty, the US and the CSA would have relations comparable to that which we have with Canada.… Read more »
This neo-confederate crap on the right has to stop. We get it; the war was unjust, slavery was an ex post facto excuse, etc. But the Confederate south was incompetent, and its combination of free trade and slavery were disrupting all American industry. The “CSA” would have Puerto Rico-tier poverty today were it not for Lincoln’s intervention. Lincoln wasn’t a “traitor” to the south in the same way Putin isn’t a “traitor” to progressives. You can only be a traitor to your OWN side. History is full of wars. The victors get to write the rules and the narrative. That’s… Read more »
I’m not a neo confederate, and I’m not on what you would call the right. I’m one of those horrid small-l old school libertarians. I’ve invested a great deal of time studying American history. You can give Lincoln a public school blowjob if you want. He destroyed federalism, and in so doing rendered the Constitution powerless. You guys love to bitch about “muh consteetooshun”. Lincoln is the one who destroyed it, along with 625,000 Americans. Thats 2% of the population then. Do the math today. Lincoln is the greatest American mass murderer. Do you like death and killing? You agree… Read more »
” Nothing to lose now.”
Nonsense. The 2020 election is Trump’s to lose, now.
The “print the legend” tendency with Lincoln washes over his essential ruthlessness. My g-g-grandfather saw him speak twice in during 1860 and recounted in his memoirs Lincoln telling the young men in the crowd that “they would soon be in uniform”. Read Grant and Sherman’s memoirs…the utter destruction of the South during Sherman’s campaign was deliberate and calculated (that same gggrandfather fought in the entire campaign). Like Sulla, Lincoln understood that will can only be imposed on an utterly defeated enemy. Trump would do well to learn that lesson. Besides, “proscriptions” on certain of the miscreants in our political system… Read more »
Good luck working on that stutter.
Funny. Did beat ’em like a rented mule in 64-65, though. Irony is we’re on the same side now.
Being the political fool that I am I actually believed the reason I and millions of other Americans voted for Trump was to do exactly that: overthrow the old order. I also somehow came to believe he would “Build That Wall”, eject illegal aliens, end Obamacare and walk across the Potomac just to show Hillary! he could. I was wrong on all counts. But as Zman says, if he doesn’t get his act together the constant 24/7/365 erosion by the media/radical left/Hollywood of his administration will have him and his family doing ten-twenty when president Sparticus takes over. He needs… Read more »
There is a parallel situation happening in the Roman Catholic church; the rule of (Canon) Law is being systematically destroyed by the current Pope, just as the rule of Constitutional Law is being demolished by various judges, agencies, and congress-slime.
Snakes are largely a positive symbol in most world cultures, because the have the power to throw off their skin, and renew life.
And then there is Pope Francis
Before this “inside politics” stuff – timing is everything and I think the Democrats will blow themselves up at the right time. And needs an Attorney General who would go along. Some things he could do is suspend collection of student loans in default and insist the Congress pass a 1 year bankruptcy for any reason. Also not enforce importing drugs or medical devices for a tenth the cost from Canada (or Mexico – the identical stuff). Pardons and commutations (why wait for Congress). You can probably think of more things that will be for the average man. So Trump… Read more »
At this point this is all that matters: “Nobel Prize winning Economist Paul Krugman (MIT, Princeton) opines on the future demographics of America: “The real craziness in America comes from, if you like, rural white Americans who feel their power is going away, that they are losing their ownership of their country, and they’re right; we’re becoming more diverse, more multicultural. Rural whites are not the future. In the end the power they still have will go away. But it’s still very difficult until that happens. The future is Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York, but there is still Ted… Read more »
“The future is Mayor Bill deBlasio of New York, but there is still Ted Cruz out there…”. Does anyone doubt that deBlasio (an invented, fake name, by the way) would eagerly accept any political crumbs offered by an invading force, serving as a Vichy collaborator to any malign but powerful political interest? Cruz might actually push back. The Left welcomes collaborationist toadies, and looks forward to such a state of affairs. They have no shame.
Ummnhhh…..Krugman’s been wrong FAR MORE times than he’s been correct, but in that quote he’s playing to his audience: the last remaining WASP-cum-Commie gang in America: the coasts.
dad29, I have a degree in economics and I’m not an economist just a lowly businessman. Krugman also has a degree in economics and he is also not an economist. He was marginally correct about New Trade Theory and provably incorrect about New Economic Geography for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. And he’s not even a businessman. He’s a phony. I have yet to read one of his predictions that ended up being correct. The man is a charlatan and grifts money off of Keyesian and socialist “players” to pontificate their nonsense and yap about it in the… Read more »
Another element is to sign an executive order or something that would have him ignore federal judges – especially those in remote places like Hawaii ordering something for the entire USA – until the Supreme Court has spoken, at least with something from them staying or affirming the order until they can hear the entire case. Or just say “I’m an equal branch with equal ability to do the Constitution how I want”.
All he has to do is say “fuck you, I don’t recognize the court’s authority in this executive matter take me to court” and he’ll win. Gotta grow some to win.
As Andrew Jackson said: Justice Marshall has made his ruling, now let us see him enforce it.
BINGO! Sandy Hooker, my point exactly.
This week is likely the inflection point of Trump’s tenure. Many think he’s going to unload everything in his possession on the deep state by week’s end. GHBs death will likely not deter him, but it is an unfortunate event, timing wise. Nevertheless it’s now or never for Trump. Put up or forever be shut up. The time for half measures and endless hollow tweets has expired.
Actually, I think Bush the Elder’s death now was fortunate. It sucked all the air out of the anti-Trump media for several days (still ongoing), and if El Presidente times things properly, something he’s good at, we may get a real media shit storm on the document dump sooner rather than later. He has stated that he needs bargaining chips with congress, which also implies he will do nothing until he sees how much harassment he will get from the new Dem leadership.
He’s an old man full of bluster, not the sort that would follow your excellent advice. Few would.
It is painfully obvious he is a stop gap or interregnum for something better to follow, but nothing will. We are not going to vote ourselves out of this and hopefully some type of divine providence in the form of a financial or international crisis will push for something better to happen.
Exactly Z. Trump must flip this table upside down!
I don’t think your scenario would work. I think he would be impeached, or worse.
Read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marino_Faliero
The minute the democrats take office in the House he’ll be under threat of impeachment for the rest of his tenure anyway, teapartydoc. Hell, they’ve been threatening impeachment since before he was inaugurated. Having the Senate do the deed is another thing all together. But if he keeps showing weakness the Senate will not back him. Remember the democrats may be traitors but the Republicans are cuckolds.
If he does nothing more than work within the existing system, then the demonRats will have an FDR type stranglehold on the country. Fight now or surrender. The only question is whether the nation will be better off with the old order of progressive globalism lead by radicals or by the potential new order that may snuff out the progressives for good but lead to economic turmoil in the short term.
“If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite. The system will be discredited.”
Proof that American democracy is a sham to protect a corrupt ruling class has been continuously presented since 9 November 2016. The system has already discredited itself . The question is, will we be able to do anything to fix it?
It was apparent in the fall of 2008 when the assholes baled out the big banks using public tax money. We haven’t forgotten that.
Some of us haven’t forgotten that. The fall of 2006 was just a practice run for the fall of 2008. Remember the stock market crash of mid-September 2006? (rant on) Bush and Congress announced they were going to bail out Wall Street. The US public was furious — members of BOTH PARTIES — and let Congress know they were firmly opposed. The bill was written, put up, and went down to crashing defeat. The next week, the talking heads came on TV agreed that Ya know, really, something, i.e., a bailout, had to be done. Another bill was written. The… Read more »
Trump was elected to rip up the rule-book. Everyone knew this before the election. Yet all he’s done since then is play by the rules. A judge says we can’t. Some Senators are waffling. Firing Mueller would be “obstruction”. The rules are literally designed to prevent him from winning, and Candidate Trump knew that: “you can’t fix a rigged system by relying on the very people who rigged it”. I’ll disagree on one point: President Trump is NOT acting like Candidate Trump. Candidate Trump was on a mission to crack skulls. President Trump desperately wants to be popular. That is… Read more »
I know that cross-country comparisons are waffly at best, but if Trump had really taken forceful action, I reckon that, like Orban or Salvini, his base would have been behind him all the way and that he would have even become more popular, despite (or maybe even because of) media squealing. The all-talk (all-Tweet) Trump is kind of pathetic.
Yes, I think you’re right. Squishy boomer types will hem and haw over this being extreme or that being unnecessary, but ultimately fall in line. Crowder and Hannity are good examples of this type of passive but reliable support.
Left-wing activists understand this very well. They do a Spectrum-of-Allies analysis to estimate the real impact. “Reactionary” conservatives are only 10-15% of the population, but another 40-50% won’t move against them.
…that being said, America’s massive, sprawling, and corrupt-to-the-core “Intelligence Community” may have something to do with Trump’s inaction. Orban and Salvini don’t have to contend with enormously powerful domestic fifth columns; it’s all run by America and although it does reach into Europe, its power is much weaker there.
I think it is too late. Trump came along too far down the road. I was thinking about the death of Bush 41 and what a lost opportunity that was. In 1988 Bush won a huge electoral college win, 426-111 if wikipedia is accurate. It was after 8 years of Reagan and the Cold War was ending and we won. It was a chance to turn our focus back on America and use that political capital to undo the Deep State but instead we elected the ultimate swamp creature and got NAFTA and “kindler, gentler” nonsense. If someone like Trump… Read more »
Yeah, Arthur, Papa Bush needed to tee off on the Deep State, and he could’ve also went to bat for Quayle on single motherhood.
Instead, the GOP kept emphasizing abortion, and let the Femmies go on their merry way on single motherhood.
So they keep popping out neglected kids, who then get abused by their mommies’ carousels of Hookup partners.
Here lies the road, to generations of traumatized paranoiacs, or some such.
Bush 1 gave us the low-flush toilet. I think of him every time I have to flush twice.
Trump has shown no signs that he will do anything other than feather the nest of his own family. He’s in office solely to negotiate a deal with the global establishment for the benefit of Trumps. That’s it, there is nothing more to it. As Don Henley croons about extraterrestrial aliens, “they aren’t coming! (to our rescue)”
Geez , who pissed in everyone’s Cheerios this morning ?
Ah, hello ? His own party has worked against him. The McClain’s and Bush’s can’t die off fast enough.
A lot of tough talk being thrown around , but we all know what happened to Lincoln. The man is surrounded by pure evil. He’s just trying to get out of this in one piece like anybody else here would.
President Trump needs our prayers and support more than anything else right now.
There are just too many excuses. We’re always a few senators short, or a dozen house members short, or one judge short – funny how we got Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and we’re still, somehow, always one judge short. What President Trump *needs* is to learn that the loyalty of his base is not unconditional. He needs to start getting criticized from the right, not just the left. Right now all he hears is conservatives saying he’s great and liberals saying he’s Literally Hitler. If there were more people like Ann Coulter calling him out on his bullshit and demanding he… Read more »
My theory is that Trump was a bone thrown in the mix to short circuit any possibility of the emergence of a populist-Right political effort. He was only expected to stall any true opposition. He won unexpectedly, but his mission continues: Stall the opposition and run out the clock. For someone with supposed business accumen, he sure seems to have an extraordinarily bad record of picking people to carry out his agenda. I’m supposing this is the role he has been assigned by those that have sponsored him and bailed him out in the past. And who better to play… Read more »
Thrown in by whom? Whoever you’re blaming, you give them far too much credit. There wasn’t anyone else on the playing field for Trump to stall. And the left is opportunistic, not conspiratorial; lack of planning and inability to defer gratification are persistent leftist traits.
There are many valid and important criticisms of Trump’s performance, but a Manchurian candidate is one thing he definitely ain’t.
I was refering to the stalling of an independent/third party effort. There was no danger of the nominee of either of the two major parties being dangerous. I ask you, how could someone that is a supposedly shrewd, successful businessman pick so many people that just happen to thwart his intentions? And of the campaign promises he has kept (US embassy in Jerusalem, withdrawal from Iran nuclear agreement) who has benefitted? I’m prepared to change my mind if Trump actually does something but it sure looks like the Harlem Globetrotters just passing the ball to each other as the clock… Read more »
The last thing the Cloud People wanted was a third party populist, nationalist uprising. Especially one highlighting immigration. That’s their biggest fear.
Yup. That’s precisely why they hijacked the Tea Party.
Even shrewd, successful businessmen can lose when they’re up against superior competitors, and the “deep state” has a whole lot of experience holding onto power. If I were to pinpoint the exact turning point, it would actually be very early on, with the loss of Flynn. Not only was he going to be a key player in reigning in the IC, but Trump firing him for bullshit reasons (“he lied to Pence”) in order to save face gave the establishment an early and significant victory which galvanized the “resistance” meme. That also set the tone for additional own-goals, like Sessions’s… Read more »
From the beginning of recorded time, we love the mythical hero story. The super-hero that is smart, strong, and lives by a code of honor. Most of us are just schlubs that go to work, raise our kids to the best of our abilities, and try to find a little meaning in our lives to make it all worthwhile. We have that ethical where-with-all to keep society churning along. How many of us would commit professional or maybe even literal suicide to expose mans dark corruption? Underneath Trumps blustery energy, he is like us all, just a dude that wants… Read more »
“If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite. The system will be discredited.”
I laughed out loud at that! It’s a rare Z Blog where such hilarity ensues.
The point is nobody cares or, more to the point, they believe they’re profiting from the system. The frogs have been well and truly boiled by now.
That’s a common old guy pose, but it is wrong. No system can survive the loss of legitimacy. What keeps this system going is 40% of the population called CivNats, who think democracy is a real thing that can be made to work.
I agree. Once the veneer of democracy from America is gone, there is no turning back. We came very close to hitting that point in 2018, with most civnats just thinking Broward County, Florida was the problem. If they saw the total extent of the voter fraud that occurred, it might be that event that pushes the civnats over the edge.
How many of the CivNats are privately assuming that the cause is lost, even as they publicly pretend to believe? I can make a case that many are despairing, but they are utterly paralyzed and flummoxed about what to do or how to respond. So they go through the motions in public and Mitt Romney gets some votes out of it.
No Zman, the elites are betting that they do NOT need legitimacy, at least not from White men. Their dream is that of a Chinese style social credit system, a “soft” internet driven totalitarianism that substitutes private corporate discrimination for a massive amount of secret police. China is the model, and they openly espouse this. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are quite open about adopting this model to crush the deplorables and in particular White men. President Xi knew he had both dangerous rivals in the Communist Party all the way down, and not enough men even in China for a… Read more »
Well, do you have a better idea than the Constitution? Pure “belief” is also keeping the USDollar alive. The whole idea of Trump Agonistes (or Samson) is great, but “overthrow” is a bit more than most people want to bite off in one chew.
I was and still am in many ways a yuge and bigly Trump supporter. However I have resigned to the fact that Trump is not going to deliver on much of anything and if he wins a second term, it will be due more to Democratic incompetence than the collective voter’s overall satisfaction with Trump’s track record. This isn’t a blackpill but a realization that Trump is a transition figure and not a transformative figure. We are in the midst of a realignment and I don’t think Trump has the political acumen to see it through. He is still a… Read more »
I’d hate to reply to my own post but in an alternate universe, Trump finally realizes that he’s been duped by his inner circle, sends them packing, issues executive orders that get upheld by the SCOTUS, soundly beats a hapless Democratic party in 2020, bringing a new wave of Trump Republicans who pass his EOs into law, and then hands the baton to someone like a Kris Kobach who gets elected in 2024 and continues to push the Trump agenda. Birthright citizenship ends, E-Verify is the law of the land, and millions of immigrants self deport when the spigot of… Read more »
The problem was not voter fraud in Broward County. It was ineffective voter fraud led by an incompetent elections chief who did not deliver the win. The complaint in Georgia, as well, is that the woman candidate didn’t get what she was promised, a voting machine that would deliver for her. Similarly, Hillary’s voting machine way underestimated the voting hill they needed to climb. In many other parts of the country, the Democrat voter fraud machine is up and running, and well oiled. The old order is gone now, there is no old order to defend. Trump is too comfortable… Read more »
Yes. The new order is ‘vote harvesting.’
There was a reason Trump fired Sessions the day after the election. We’re still waiting to see what that reason was.
I thought it was because Sessions was insufficiently loyal to the president. His recusal from the Mueller debacle was BS but Sessions did some decent work otherwise. Meanwhile, he considers Jared and Ivanka to be sufficiently loyal even though they are utter trainwrecks and do irreparable harm to the #MAGA agenda.
This ties in with what I said about not moving quickly enough. If he’d instructed the acting AG to immediately fire Mueller, he might still have lost the battle in a kangaroo court but Democrats would have had to spend enormous political capital on it. But now, he’s given them weeks to build up a case in the media about how the appointment was illegitimate, etc.
It was either a totally amateurish play to kill Russiagate, or he really just fired Sessions out of spite. I can’t think of another possibility, since he’s had several weeks to show his endgame.
Who remembers the early days of Trump’s presidency? His strategy, which we thought was deliberate, was rapid-fire changes, which kept his enemies off-balance and more importantly, disrupted the 24-hour news cycle. Don’t give the propaganda time to stew.
He not only doesn’t do this now, he does the opposite: telegraph his strategy ahead of time, by threatening a shutdown or planning a whistleblower announcement for Monday. Giving his enemies time to prepare, and the media days or weeks to spin their propaganda.
He could start winning again by simply reverting to the original strategy.
Yeah, I heard it called the “thousand hazy paths” strategy. Trump had some real stinkers for staff in the early days (Reince Preibus being the biggest one) but he had some good staff members who slipped away. At the moment, the only halfway decent staffer on the payroll is Stephen Miller. Despite all of their flaws, a Trump/Miller/Gorka/Bannon setup saw some of the best days of the administration. Now it’s just Ivanka wanting a pony in the form of criminal justice “reform”. Sad!
Trump is pretty much following the trajectory I was more or less expecting when he was elected. I voted for him, but I always saw him as an ignorant and self-absorbed blowhard who happened to have some decent gut instincts which led him to take advantage of a huge open political opportunity that the Republican establishment had been studiously ignoring for many years. Even though Trump was obviously an idiot, millions of Americans — including many who had previously voted Democrat — leaped at to opportunity to vote for someone who at least vaguely resembled a genuine America First conservative.… Read more »
Things I think Trump does understand, are that you do not telegraph your intentions, and that you go all in when you go. I don’t know if he has it in him. The clock is running down, the next few weeks and couple of months are critical. If the Dems were smart, they would lay off the smack talk of impeachment and such, and let him do his thing. Trump appears to be making the basic white guy error of believing that people are basically good and want to work together. The Dems are not that sort of people, they… Read more »
This will never happen because Trump is a fairly dumb man. He beat … Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz. Not exactly great opponents. Hillary! was possibly the worst candidate since Dukakis. So Trump is a fairly dumb dude who got lucky. Most of his success was due to Steve Bannon whom he jettison as soon as Ivanka and Jared could make it happen. Indeed Trump’s advisers are Ivanka and Jared. I suppose they were reasonably able to not completely wreck everything in his TV production company and various real estate holdings with the various work being… Read more »
Since the writing is on the wall, I intend to make the NWO work for me. I will join up and serve them for personal enrichment at expense of the sheeple majority. I have been active on the right for decades and so I know who to name and dox. Given there is no Morpheus let alone Neo, I’m going back to steak dinners and my nightly goblet of fine wine by plugging in.
That would be almost concerning if the right wasn’t already full of glory hounds eager and willing to dox themselves. Naming a few nobodies who like to comment on right-wing blogs isn’t going to earn you many steak dinners.
In your metaphor, it was Morpheus and Neo who caused the offer to be extended in the first place. Were it not for the threat they posed, Cypher probably would have just been killed on the spot.
I keep seeing mention of Trump being “dumb” or “a dumb guy” in this thread. He is obviously a very smart and clever guy. But he lives in a bubble, just as each of us does. Trump may have lost the plot in the last couple of years, and now he can’t see beyond his bubble to recognize the reality of the situation.
“Trump has taken the advice of his enemies” in Washington trump has only enemies. the GOP Establishment/Bush/Rove/tyson food shills have been actively trying to destroy him . I don’t have any answer for this . The deep state has complete control in DC . look at the FBI raid on the whistle blower on the uranium 1 affair. No GOP voices expressing outrage about this . They wouldn’t do that kind of brazen payback so openly if they weren’t sure nobody would complain. I am completely black pilled on him succeeding in any meaningful way.
That FBI raid was the brushback pitch for anyone who has any inclination to bust the deep state. The message is unambiguous. They own the joint, and they intend to own all of us.
“Brushback” is what I thought, too.
At the same time, it’s so damn obvious that …..one thinks of the possibility that there’s something else going on which makes this a “good guy” op instead.
So I think you’re right, but I’ll take a 30% reservation on it.
I think the obviousness of it is an important part of the message. The guys on the street corner who tell the small businessman, “that’s a nice business you have there, it would be a shame if anything happened to it”, use the obviousness of the message, delivered in public in the light of day, as part of the intimidation process.
About half of the country is still composed of productive patriotic citizens with the ability to effectively oppose an incipient tyranny, should the Swamp succeed in overthrowing a duly elected president. However, they would only follow through if they believed they could successfully suppress the ensuing rebellion. They are expecting and planning for a conventional militia-based opposition, but have no answer for alternatives that focus on the inherent weaknesses of government. At its root, government is a parasite and cannot survive if there is no host to feed on.
Libertarian/CivNat nonsense. The half of the country that you think is going to overthrow our 100-year-old bureaucratic government is so passive and docile that it can’t even keep drag queens out of elementary schools.
A good, strong government is the only thing that can reign in the excesses of big tech, big social, big ag, big pharma, big banks, etc. It’s the only thing that can secure a sprawling southern border. You’re confusing “government” as a concept with liberal democratic government and the idiots play-acting at statesmanship. Teddy Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson would have made short work of these losers.
This is spot on. Time to ditch the boomercon bromides and time to wake up to reality.
You’ve hit the nail right on the head, Z-Man…Trump needs to get rid of Mueller and start doing things for his voters, or he’s finished…BTW, speaking as an experience attorney, Trump is a complete idiot when he deals with anything related to the legal system, and he doesn’t seem to realize it…The SDNY is far more corrupt than Nigeria…
Congress, Trump consider postponing shutdown deadline until after Bush services
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/congress-considers-measure-to-postpone-shutdown-deadline-until-after-bush-memorial-services/2018/12/01/096af0dc-f5ca-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.27503cef6002
I think it’s correct to say that the choice before Trump is either to forcefully enact the most assertive form of his agenda—Wall, deportations, extreme restrictions/ moratorium on immigration—or to submit to being a reviled figure in (what’s left of) American history, and likely see himself and his loved ones persecuted and punished. My gut tells me Trump is aware of this, although you can’t blame him if he wishes there were some third way. There was a period in the fall of 2016 when he seemed to be resigned to defeat in the campaign; but someone close must have… Read more »
Hell half the country depends on government to live. Why not military coup to take over. What can the people who survive by the largesse of Uncle Sugar do but go along with it?
The US Republic is dead. (Lincoln knifed it in the back.) Trump needs to organize a Pinochet style military coup d’etat, and put his enemies (including most elected Republicans) into concentration camps. Perhaps Putin will rent out some of the empty Gulag camps. Or perhaps they could disappear over the Atlantic. Whatever. Up the revolution.
Gitmo will due fine. There are also military bases in the Aleutians.
It’s got to be dawning on Trump’s ego, that it’s either go for broke with a bang, or slowly deplete with a whimper. Brash guys hate the slow death thing. Just out of sheer boredom and annoyance, it surely can’t be long before he wakes up. Hopefully his ego is as big as they say it is. He needs to get in touch with his inner self-centered mischievious frat boy quick.
He won’t do squat but he may get the ball rolling for a hot civil war because of his refusal to address the overt violent acts against heritage whites by Democrats. And by the time he does act it will only piss off our side(because that’s who he’ll blame, bet on it, remember how he dumped on the NRA?) TGP has a post about anti-fa showing up at a Seattle protest with AR-15’s and the cops backing them. This is a bad sign. Really bad since we have no means ot putting the kibosh on them any longer. It wouldn’t… Read more »
Don’t forget a blanket invitation to white South Africans and Rhodesians.
Only. With a shout-out to India to do the same.
Looking forward to the “The Pinochet Option” article.
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=9594
>> For example, the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy. To pick a nit, Trump did not appoint Mueller; Rosenstein did. Trump had no authority to block the appointment. Responsibility for this mess falls 100% on Jeff Sessions. Once Sessions resigned the trap was sprung and Trump was caught. Some people blame Trump for appointing Sessions, but that’s bs. Trump had every right to believe that long time Republican and supporter would exhibit at least a modicum of loyalty in the role of the AG. Instead Sessions stabbed Trump in the back days… Read more »
“Once Sessions resigned” should read “Once Sessions recused.”
“…the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy.” Trump didn’t appoint Mueller, Rosenhack did, and there’s no reason to think Rosenhack notified Trump beforehand. Yes, Trump, if he had good advice, could have rescinded the appointment immediately as illegal (see Andy McCarthy on this one point) and fired Rosenhack for doing it, since he is even more conflicted than Sessions was and anyway deserved firing for signing off on that last FISA warrant application. But refusing to make the appointment wasn’t an option. “While the political class ignores him on policy, the Mueller investigation… Read more »
well, historically speaking there are parallels with lincoln. Trump was elected because he wasn’t a politician by cynical people like me who know that they are not represented. trump has the levers of power to do what has to be done. the only question is does he have the balls to do it.
enter the mathis matrix, and the will to pull off the entire cover of the sewer and toss in the nuke handgrenade, taking down the entire military=indurstrial complex that has been entrenched since nov 22, 1963.
I hope he has the balls.