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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