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If it sounds as if, after his mass murders, incipient dementia and sheer incompetence, I regard Donald Trump as wholly bad I do not, at all.
He is also a visionary and there were very good reasons why he won the presidency twice. He is the necessary man.
As Kissinger said he is a figure that was necessary to show that one historical era is at an end and a new one begins.
He is bringing peace to Ukraine, dismantling Nato and the Anglo-American alliance and moving the Overton window on immigration- all these are very good things.
His National Security Strategy and Vice-President Vance's speech at Munich were wonderful and long overdue recognitions of reality.
So Trump has done important and courageous things as well as unforgivable ones.
John Mearsheimer thinks that were there another Nuremberg Tribunal Trump and Netanyahu would suffer the fate of the German leaders back in 1945.
He is a Democrat and omits to include Biden, but Biden would get off on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Trump in that unlikely hypothetical situation might try the same defence. It would be worth a shot.
Trump has neither courage nor vision. What he has is an insatiable appetite for validation and a salesman's instinct for what will sell. The result of this anchorless existence is that he can, and must, float freely on the currents of history. The inevitable collapse of the post-WW2 settlement, along with the 'rules-based' international community, the rise of nationalism and the need for scapegoats for America's inevitable decline, all these form the wave he surfs quite dextrously, and to some eyes appears to steer. They have always been one dimension of statesmanship, but for him they are the only one.
ReplyDeleteA glance at his administration reinforces the story. The competent few among them have either sold out after their previous denunciations of him (Rubio, Vance) or have some craven need to belong (Bondi) that has seduced them. The rest are shiftless figureheads who will do whatever he orders. Perhaps some are playing a longer game, like the members of his first administration who thought they could steer/nudge his brownian oscillations towards some other goal: their aspirations and fate, when revealed, will be an interesting footnote to the Trump phenomenon.