He’s got a plan
The Wall Street Journal tells us that Trump’s childish blurts on Twitter are actually all part of his cunning plan.
In fact, there seem to be specific objectives behind many of Mr. Trump’s seemingly scattershot missives and comments. Often, say those who know him, he is posturing or positioning in pursuit of broader goals. He doesn’t mind roiling the waters in the process—and, as a consequence, some of what he says isn’t to be taken literally.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who speaks regularly with Mr. Trump and is developing a lecture series and book examining Trumpism, suggests the president-elect is in this regard similar to Franklin Roosevelt, who sometimes seemed to cultivate chaos in preparing the ground for his initiatives. Mr. Gingrich also predicts the style won’t change: “My advice is to relax. It’s going to be this way for eight years.”
In other words…he’s being an asshole on purpose. Well no kidding, but he’s still being an asshole, and there are still a lot of compelling reasons to think that’s not a good thing for him to do.
He’s doing it as part of his deal-making strategy, Gerald Seib goes on. He’s doing it to set the agenda. He’s doing it to distract everyone – oh look, a squirrel.
Certainly there is danger in leaving the world unsure which messages to take literally, and in trying to handle subjects as sensitive as nuclear-weapons strategy on the fly. But it’s also likely Mr. Trump knows exactly what he is doing.
Again: no kidding, and that is not the issue. The issue is that the way he’s carrying on is degrading to the whole fucking country, and the fact that he may be doing it for reasons does nothing to change that. The casual acknowledgement followed by dismissal of the danger of tweeting about nukes is enough to demonstrate that.
One of his ‘goals’ is to terrorize everyone into shutting the fuck up and doing what he wants.
He’s the schoolyard bully who was too rich and too isolated to grow up in a real school yard where someone would have eventually kicked his ass. Now he’s on the top of the world and no one can kick his ass.
But we can noisily hate him and accurately describe him. He doesn’t like that.
Trump might think he knows what he is oh-so-cleverly doing, but unless he’s the best actor of all time, it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t have a fucking clue. Nobody could just pretend to be that shallow, inarticulate and ignorant.
OP, I’m all for that.
A flock of sparrows can drive off a hawk, if there are enough sparrows. A murder of crows can… well, there’s a reason they’re called a ‘murder’.
Problem I see is the lefty liberals are all too busy preening their varied plumage to flock together. The regressive right doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.
Here’s a thought for the future.
Every Office, Every Election, Every vote counts – except for freaking ‘protest’ votes, which are as good as pissing in the wind.
Every Office, Every Election, Every Vote COUNTS, from School Board to the White House. Every election, from special bonds to MID TERMS, COUNTS.
We’re in this mess because too few on the Left care about who makes the decisions on the School Board, so our education system is crumbling. We also didn’t care enough when media moguls were allowed to monopolize our mainstream information outlets. We don’t care enough to research who is making decisions on our local level. We didn’t scream bloody murder when the regressives re-wrote legislative boundaries so the US Congress got stacked with Republicans marching in lock step with a platform that has been chipping away at our hard won gains for decades now.
The Great Pumpkin Head in the Oval Office will shortly become our biggest problem, but he wouldn’t be as big of a problem, if he’d made it that far at all, if we hadn’t let Congress erode away from us, if we hadn’t let the schools deteriorate, if we hadn’t let the Media turn into a big pile of poo.
We are in a post-Truth world, and we’re going to have to fight hard and persistently to get out of it.
Every Office, Every Election, Every Vote Counts.
/end rant
Don’t they always describe these types as having a sort of “low cunning”? His attempts at obfuscation only work because a significant portion of the populace are as dumb as he is.
@#4 cazz:
This is one of the reasons I’m running for office in 2020 and am attending every City Council meeting I can from now on. I’ve voted in every election I could and really don’t understand why anyone would skip out; do civic duties not matter at all? Does patriotism?
Bullshit. Blast a shotgun at a barn door and join some of the dots with crayon. You can find whatever pattern you like. But ask Trump before the trigger is pulled, after it’s pulled or even after the dots are bewilderingly joined into a pattern not supported by reality and he still won’t give a coherent answer. He’ll give a different incoherent answer every time you ask. There’s no plan and the objectives are transparent, self-serving and subject to spinning on a fucking dime depending on flattery.
I understand the urge to look at a shitstorm and pluck out comforting patterns in the moments before it hits you, but that’s exactly what we’ve been training ourselves not to do all these years, isn’t it?
The Nerdwriter has an interesting take on Herr Bäbyführer’s tweeting style, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geEVwslL-YY
latsot @ 7 – *applause*
@#6
Good for you, and more power to you!
IMHO there hasn’t been as big of a threat to these United States in my life time, and we haven’t been in as big of a mess of our own making since McCarthyism.
@#7
I don’t disagree, but which is more dangerous?
Is he just a bully making a lot of noise, or is he a bully with a plan making a lot of noise?
Don’t think it matters much. If it’s the former, his ‘advisers’ will steer the ship in the ‘right’ direction.
If it’s the latter, he will steer it there himself.
I think that attributing cunning to Trump’s tweets is like calling a bratty toddler’s tantrum a clever strategy. On some crude, animalistic level, it is — the toddler has been “rewarded” for past tantrums with attention or treats or whatever it takes to shut him or her up, and so the behavior gets repeated. But that doesn’t mean that the toddler is some precocious schemer who realizes on a conscious level what he’s doing.
Trump has gotten away with, if not been outright rewarded for, all kinds of misbehavior. When you’re a star, they let you do it, you know. It’s not so much that he chooses to behave the way he does, it’s more that he has no reason to reign in his childish urges.
Those who attribute intelligence to Trump’s tweets are likely the same sort of people who pay good money to buy the ‘art’ of chimpanzees or horses that have been given a brush, paint and paper and produced a mess.
@Acolyte:
They’re the sort of people who refuse to inoculate their children. The kind who pick and choose which bits of a terrible book to get cross about. This is fun, I could do it all day.
Absolute bullshit, it is transparently obvious that he has the impulse control of a spoiled child. Remember when this meme circulated about Bush? “Maybe he’s a secret genius playing at being a bumbling idiot!”
It was clutching at straws then, but now it is just wilful self-delusion. I guess it stems from a fearful hope that everything is right with the world and that America hasn’t just shot itself in the foot, but it is delusional all the same.
What’s with the continuous reiteration of “eight years”? The incoming “administration” simply tacitly assumes it will rule for ever. And untrustworthy as they all are, that’s creepy.
I’m starting to see this other places, too. I’ve been reading analysts who use the same phrase – it’s going to be a rough eight years, they say. Have we suddenly gotten so ignorant about our own country that we assume the incoming president is automatically given a second term, just because?
If the Congress gets away with all the things they plan to do, there may not be much left to vote on in the future. Deregulation, seizure of the entire federal judiciary, defunding Planned Parenthood, restricting abortion, transfer of wealth from the bottom to the already obscenely rich – and I have no doubt that they regard Trump as a “useful idiot” – to use a phrase usually attached to the left by these obnoxious gold-grabbers. Yes, while Trump is busy grabbing the pussy of the young female portion of the population, his cohorts are going to be picking their pocket – and everyone else’s.
We’ve gone 24 years without a < two term presidency… it's become normal to expect an administration to last 8 years…
I still find it a bit hard to believe that Dear Leader in particular would last that long; Pence on the otherhand…
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1402567033095087/?type=3&theater