Be that as it may, what I saw was a man who dedicated his life to showing people a good time, who is at his happiest watching over a landscape of people eating great food, drinking great booze, in a beautiful setting, laughing and having a good time. This is the outcome he loves. He is married to his work, and that is the only marriage he has ever truly recognized. He needs a woman–a beautiful woman–at the end of the day to help him wind down, but he is an extremely driven, extremely passionate man.
For her part–and I have never seen the wife before–I think Melania is often lonely. After his fashion he does love her, but his work is his true love, and if she does stay in New York, it will be because she may as well, for all the time she will spend with him. I think that tape may have hurt her too. He may have already been married to her when that discussion happened. Certainly, she must wonder what has changed.
Trump is obviously no angel. He is a hard driving man, but in his own way he is an archetype of the self made man. This is an American archetype, the tycoon.
In effect, what Trump is trying to do is take this sense that everybody should be happy and having a good time and apply it to practical politics, and apply it nationally. We should all welcome this with open arms. It is good. It is a good passion to have in the White House.
I am trying to lay off politics a bit, but can’t resist a couple more comments.
First, though, on politics: what it occurs to me is that political obsessions are the perfect deflection mechanism. There is ALWAYS something to be mad about, something to be passionate about, something to take your focus away from inner core dynamics and push them to the periphery, and instead focus on something always changing, always evolving, and which can and does continually provoke emotions. Politics in this sense is much like sports. And as far as that goes, our political opinions matter, practically, about as much as our sports opinions, which obviously is to say not at all.
Obamacare: what SHOULD have been done originally is obvious. Rand Paul has sketched out a path to middle class freedom from the tyranny of bad policy. It is all simple. But by design Obamacare also created a complex system of rewards for voting Democrat. Subsides were handed out, Medicaid expanded. It seems to me that the most politically effective way of ending Obamacare without creating a massive rallying cry for the Democrats, is to figure out either a path to migrate the people who did benefit from Obamacare to something at least decent and defensible; or to simply grant this money to the budget and find cuts elsewhere. That process could take some time. It is highly detailed and complex, as all large intrusions of government are. I am perhaps making excuses, but if there is a delay, my HOPE is that this is the reason.
Neil Gorsuch: I read he was privately defending what we might call the Thin Black Line, from Trump’s warranted comments on judicial activism. He is quite right, of course, that the judiciary should not be politicized. But I wonder about his intelligence in apparently not grasping that it IS politicized. As Thomas Sowell apparently said in 2003 “One of these days the 9th Circuit is going to rule the Constitution unConstitutional”, and the specific ruling which proceeded it was no better.
The actual law is very clear. There is no ambiguity. Foreigners are not protected by our Constitution, and Federal law grants the President very broad discretion in deciding who he is going to let in. All forms of discrimination–of discriminating one sort of person from another, of making or perceiving a difference–are allowed. We all must grant that in complex situations sometimes it is necessary to treat people as groups, in the manner the Left does ubiquitously and daily, albeit in their case to uniformly affirm the absolute virtue of anyone who is not one of us, and the uniform and absolute corruption of all white people. Nothing racist there, obviously.
And the Supreme Court, where Gorsuch may land, is blatantly politicized as well, and has been at least since the time of FDR. The Four Horsemen stood their ground for a time, but the tide was too great.
We can applaud the sentiment, but again I wonder about the wisdom of someone protecting a boat which sailed long ago.
As far as Trump, he faces a gale force wind. I was in Wally World yesterday and every single magazine and tabloid at the check out lanes had something in exclamation points, and in general negative about Trump or his daughter and her husband.
I said the fighting would be house to house, room to room, and I hoped I would be wrong. I was not wrong.
But Trump has the passion, the courage, and the habit of determination that should get us all through this period, get much useful work done, and hopefully at some point a grand national party to celebrate.