Trump Won’t Back Down? Why Should He?
David Frum, in The Atlantic — Trump Won’t Back Down
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/no-he-wont-back-down/538125/
There’s a problem with this thesis: Trump won’t back down until he sees there’s a real personal cost in it. Then he gives in like the coward & cheap slut he’s always been.
He *always* backs down when it comes time to face any consequences. He’s not stubborn; he’s not tough; he’s just delusional. I am having a lot of trouble understanding why these commentators keep commentating like he’s got normal human thought process going. They’d do better to study abnormal psychology* than political strategy. But they’re stuck in their default response to the political event. It’s the classical instance of the person who was hunting under the streetlamp when they’d lost their keys a block away: “But the light is better here!” They are running over territory that’s familiar to them, but it isn’t where America lost its keys.
(David Frum, who wrote this article, gets some credit for denouncing Trump. But denouncing him isn’t the same as effectively planning to topple his administration. Frum has no particular expertise at anything except speechwriting, defending the invasion of Iraq, and excusing the nomination of Sarah Palin, whom he publicly called manifestly unqualified, as Vice-President of the United States.)
*With the awareness that abnormal psychology is not that abnormal. There’s a lot the media and public haven’t yet begun to learn about demagogues and scoundrels yet. But they also haven’t learned the greater lessons of the last few months:
1. Contemporary political processes in the US are controlled by media consumption, and they aren’t going to be profoundly changed by investigations, amendments, party reforms. The real change will come only by addressing the organs of propaganda — through subversion or direct attack on their capacity to earn profits.
2. Cults are about the promise of power. There’s no use in talking back to racism, fear, hatred, aggression. That’s the reason for their success. No one follows Trump because they have an interest in leadership that is responsible, fair, or even halfway sane; or because they have a vision of a better nation or world. The idea is ludicrous. Why waste your efforts proclaiming that Trump is not nice to people consumed with fantasies of violence, when you could be effectively working to make it impossible for him to sustain his regime?
3. It’s always about the money except when it’s about crazy. Figure out which option is more vulnerable to strategize attack. Americans have already brought some prominent destructive forces low by refusing to support them. But there is as yet no real concerted effort to exert pressure on the Trump regime and the Republican Congress through economic force or through out-thinking the crazy.
(In response to comments:
I’ve kind of had to say a few times that I’m not talking about diagnosing the President as “mentally ill,” and I’m not asking for folks to subscribe to any view of “mental illness.” When I say he’s deranged or crazy, I’m deliberately employing terms that predate the modern model of “mental illness,” mostly by many centuries, and that are meant to state that his thinking is disordered in ways that are dysfunctional and dangerous. [I also don’t think that much is gained by identifying this disordered thinking with “evil” or “Immorality.”] Such people often gain power by running a circle around most people’s usual defenses, rendering them useless — in a word, by Trumping them.)
