I got my Trump vision last night, in a turbulent sleep, that was actually better than most nights when I don’t drink.
Here is the thing with him: he is slowly winning admirers even among his enemies. People have been trying to lay traps for him literally since he walked in the White House, and he has not only avoided most of them, but laid counter-traps.
And what we call the Deep State has, until now, actually included many actual patriots who simply thought Trump was an idiot. But he is schooling them.
Trump, with his demeanor, his hair, his history: he uses all this to his advantage. He actually is as smart as he says he is, but people look at him and see bluster. He could actually say “I’m going to throw a right hook in 2.5 seconds to your temple” and still be able to do it, because they would think he was bluffing. He can’t be serious, they think.
Trump’s salient characteristic actually is his intelligence. No really. No, REALLY. I didn’t see this either. I liked him because he had the balls to tell the truth that Barack Obama never produced a birth certificate that would have been allowed by any court of law in the country (or for that matter, most other countries with robust records systems). This never implied he was born in Kenya. It simply was a CERTAINTY that he never complied with a most basic aspect of law. He never even proved he was legally eligible to draw a paycheck in the United States. His social security number was from a State he had literally no connection with. Asking that of a President is not asking much. It is farcical that that issue was made to disappear so completely and with such confidence.
But returning to Trump, this is his favorite game: watching people take him for an idiot, then beating them over and over and over, because THEY DON”T LEARN. They don’t ever learn that his successes are not accidents, that it is not dumb luck. It’s like Charlie Brown and the football. All the information is there, but nobody WANTS to see it, nobody WANTS to admit that this blustering serial philanderer with inexplicable hair is smarter than them.
And for his part, he enjoys it thoroughly. One can ask how someone could enjoy several years of being attacked by everyone–the press, his own party, the opposing party, then the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, and most of our government apparatus–and having fun. Most people would find this a nightmare. They would be aging rapidly.
But in a peculiar way, Trump is the BEST QUALIFIED President, for this moment in time, we have elected in a very, very long time. It is not inapt for him to compare himself to George Washington. On the one level, it feeds into people’s views that he is a narcissistic idiot, helping him play his favorite game; but on the other George Washington, too, was the man of the hour. He was the perfect match for America at that moment in time. He would be destroyed completely and forced to drop out in a political race today, but then, what he was best at–staying above partisan frays, wielding power with restraint, preserving a deserved reputation for absolute integrity–was absolutely necessary. If we had had an Aaron Burr in there, or even an Alexander Hamilton, we would have failed.
Someone with Trumps long term practice dealing with countless enemies is exactly who we need right now. Our nation is being slowly destroyed from within. Most of our Federal agencies have been politicized, seemingly for some time. The FBI lies to us and to those it reports to. The CIA is treating governments it doesn’t like as enemy states to be overthrown, in an absolute vitiation of its mission, the law, and common moral decency. The IRS has still faced no real consequences for an organized regimen of law breaking. Europe is under attack by organized nihilists who want to overturn Western civilization itself. The list goes on.
I recall with gratitude how terrified I was that Hillary would win. I literally wanted to leave the country, not in a Hollywood movie star way, but in a securing a job overseas and getting a work visa kind of way. Everything she needed to begin censoring opposing views, using the power of government to harass political opponents, and even to start ruinous wars, was in place. It was put there by Obama, whose job it had been to push this process as far as he could.
Now, the future is up for grabs. There is still a lot to be determined, countless ways things could get fucked up. But at least we have a man who is not only determined to fix things, but who ENJOYS the process, and who is good at it.
After a year of facing one ambush after another, from all sides, it is amazing what Trump has STILL been able to accomplish, and at that with a smile.