By Steven Jonas
Back in September I began my first column on Trump
and his 'Art of the Con' thusly:
"A variety of words have been used to
describe Donald Trump and Trump's White House/Presidency. They are being used
with increasing frequency as various 'inside the White House' books, like those
of Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff, and also 'pretty close to Trump' books, have
come out. Among
them are: 'deranged,' 'unhinged,' 'chaotic,' 'crazy,' 'bordering on
senile,' and 'mad.' Trump is often described as 'uncontrolled and
uncontrollable.' Now it may be true that he is really off-the-wall doing a
combination of meandering through and charging through his Presidency without
much direction other than 'responding to his base.' Certainly, from
time-to-time I have thought so. But the more I have watched what this man has
actually accomplished, the less I think that he is just lurching through it
all, and the more I think that he knows exactly what he is doing (at least most
of the time). That is, my answer now to the question I raised in the title of
this column, that is, "Is There a Method to His Madness?" is 'yes.'
And here's why.
"Trump has a particular way of acting, very well known to
everyone, that all started in the way he was brought up, particularly by his
father (and I am not about to say here anything that any objective observer
doesn't already know). He is a bully. He is poorly educated and doesn't care
that he is. He is highly opinionated, without too much dependence on fact for
his opinions. He is a racist from his youth. He is a faker/liar from the
beginning. And so on and so forth."
One
thing that I didn't point out in that column is that, using his highly-mastered
Art of the Con, Trump always managed to win whatever was the current battle in
which he was engaged. Or at least he
managed to convince himself that he had won.
Then he was able to project whatever "winning" was at the time onto both
his public- and self-image. This was
because his losses never seemed to really cost him, or at least cost him
much. With the Atlantic
City Casino bankruptcies apparently he actually made money,
personally. When U.S. banks stopped lending
him money in the 1990s, he was apparently able to turn to Deutsche Bank, and
then, if one of his sons is to be believed, "the Russians." Various other business failures, like the
Trump Plaza hotel in New York City or Trump Airlines, he was able to just wave
off. And often, he was somehow or other
able to present them to that part of the public that was interested in such
things as "wins." The Art of the Con,
absolutely mastered by Trump, always seemed to work. As I said in that earlier column, "completely
unqualified in any conventional sense for the job, he conned his way into the
most powerful position on Earth."
Then,
once in the Presidency, in policy matters that really counted, at least to his
backers in the Republican Party and their massive funders, and the Christian Right,
he also won: tax cuts for the rich and the large corporations; far right-wing
judges emplaced at all levels of the Federal bench; massive deregulation at the
Federal level; and the accompanying Bannonite "Deconstruction of the [Federal] Administrative
State." Further, when Trump found that
he could do something without involving the Congress, Repub. as it was, he did
it: e.g., tariffs, trade wars, dumping the Iran Deal and the Paris Climate
Change Agreements, immigration policy (and its accompanying florid
racism). From the perspective of Trump
and the Trumpites in the government and in his base, there were "wins," whether
real or not, whether in the long-term interests of the nation (at least of its
ruling class), or not. Just like he has
always done.
Click here for the full article.
Source: OpEdNews.com
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