The Explainable Mystery of Donald Trump

Donald Trump plays a lot of golf. That must be where he learned how to win a US election. In golf, it's not important  how many yards your longest stroke is. All that matters is how few of those short little strokes it takes you to sink the putt. 

photo credit: New York Times

     

    Donald Trump's long game in the realm of US politics may leave a lot to be desired. His foreign policy is aimless at best, his response to the Covid19 pandemic decidedly anemic. He cannot articulate constitutional understanding with any decency or paint a portrait of democracy in the broad strokes of moral principle and reasoned debate. Yet he cannot be criticized about his long-term vision for America by a scale not measurable in years but generations, because he doesn't have any. He doesn't need any. In three and a half years in the Whitehouse, America has spoiled Donald J. Trump to say and believe whatever he wants--and to skip validation for any of it. It's not that he thinks small, but America allows him--even expects him--to do so. He has effectively conditioned America to appreciate his lesser  skills at governance by enuring them to lower expectations. It's hard to say if that is a defect or a stroke of genius. But he knows that the prize of golf lies in making your best with the least effort in shooting the smallest of balls into the smallest of holes. He can leave the long game to the big swingers, he'll settle for sinking his putt ahead of all the other players once he gets to the green.  

In campaign terms,  Donald Trump knows that winning in November doesn't call for "going high." It calls for going all the way down low. If America yearns for the prose and poetry of genteel politics, they can listen to Barack Obama. But he is not on the ballot this November. So why should Trump waste any time and effort competing with literary elegance he could never even hope to equal?  He must stick to what he does best--"putting it out there"--whether that "it" is feasible or not.  Liberal America thinks Donald Trump's conscience ought to be weighed down by his unprecedented propensity to lie. In fact, he doesn't care--and worse, he never did.  Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters as people who belonged to the basket of deplorables. Some pundits think this cost her the elections. I don't agree--she won the elections, just not the presidency. What really lost her the presidency was not underestimating the intelligence of the Trump cult, but overestimating the intelligence and political savvy of the liberal demographics. The only thing that Donald Trump said that hasn't proven to be a lie yet was the bit of him shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and never losing one supporter. The truth of that  grimly confident declaration has not changed. American deaths to Covid19 is fast creeping beyond 180,000 and for the most part the people most outraged by this abominable Trump failure are those who have never liked him in the first place. So don't expect Trump to grow an intellectual curiousity overnight--or for the next 60 days 'til election day. Look to him to keep heaping up those short slogans and wild ideas not capable of proof or worthy of credulity but very effective at one thing: keeping fact-checkers vainly busy until they get it. You can't keep following a skunk all day telling him he stinks, especially when it's your provocation that keeps triggering the squirt. 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

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