Thursday, July 26, 2018

Is Trump biting off more than he can chew?


From the beginning of his campaign, and even before, Donald J. Trump has been confrontational. As president, he has been continually disruptive, starting feuds all over the landscape, and lashing out at his enemies, real and imagined.

He has insulted the handicapped, women, John McCain, and Gold Star parents, started unnecessary trade wars with China, Canada, and the EU, and issued an ALLCAPS threat to the Iranians in response, not to something they did, but to something they said. He has waged close to all-out war on the media—except of course for his main source of faux (pronounced Fox) news and threatened to reduce the Department of State and our diplomatic corps to less than bit player status in his four-year reality show. He has rolled back environmental and other protective regulations that threaten the environment for decades to come. Except for Putin of Russia and Kim of North Korea, who seem to be his best buds, he’s picked fights with just about every imaginable demographic.

He has, though, picked one fight that might just be his Waterloo. He has frequently and persistently of late undercut and undermined the US intelligence community, expressing a preference for believing Vladimir Putin over them. So far, he has not picked on the military as an institution, because like many draft dodgers of his generation, he is enthralled by men in uniform—as long as they are not him—and, I believe he’s afraid of them. The problem is that none of his love interests, not Putin, not Kim, and not the US military, can aid his hold on power. Putin tried, and even succeeded in helping him gain the Oval Office, but I don’t think there’s much he can do to keep him there or ensure him a second term. Kim can only add more complications to his life, and unless he can somehow install a military dictatorship with himself as figure-head leader while America is sleeping, the military will continue to follow the orders of the commander-in-chief, but they’re not gonna do much for him politically.

The intelligence community, though, and to a lesser extend the federal law enforcement community, can make or break him. He likes to tell us how smart he is, and even if that was true—which it definitely is not—he still needs information in order to effectively use that smartness. By dismissing his intelligence professionals out of hand as he does, and because of his tendency to blab classified information to people like the Russians as he did with the Israeli information, he ensures that they will only give him the bare minimum. The law enforcement community also has information that would be valuable for him to have, but since he’s always attacking them, and never listens anyway, he will continue to NOT have that information.

In the meantime, he keeps wading deeper and deeper into that swamp he swore he’d drain but has instead simply added new creatures. One day, he’ll be so deep he’ll be breathing swamp water, and guess what. He’s not likely to have a hand reaching out to extricate him, because by that time, all the hands that could have helped will have been slapped.

Trump’s behavior for the past eighteen months reminds me of an old saying, ‘Be careful who you step on on you way up the ladder, because you’ll have to pass them on the way back down.’

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