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“The Genius of Donald Trump,” or, the Ricochet Sunday Essay Assignment
Appearing today in the Canadian newspaper the National Post, a column by Conrad Black, the publisher and historian, headlined “The Genius of Donald Trump.” Excerpts:
What the world has witnessed, but has not recognized it yet, has been a campaign of genius. No one in history has come from an apolitical background to take over complete control of one of the great American political parties….
Now that Trump is the nominee, having come from the political wilderness and paid for his own campaign, he will drastically scale back the stylistic infelicities (which are as disagreeable to me as to most serious people, but are just part of his shtick). He is not ideological and will make the system work — he is, as he never tires of telling us, a deal-maker. In foreign policy, he will be neither trigger-happy like George W., nor an other-worldly pacifist like Obama. He will spend a billion dollars of the Republican party’s money reminding the country that legally and ethically, Hillary is carrying more dead weight cargo than the Queen Mary….
The U.S. and the world could do much worse and the media, whom Donald has rightly taken to the woodshed to the general delight of the public, should stop wringing its hands and report more perceptively and equably this performance of great virtuosity in the greatest circus of all, which has caught them all with unclean hands and their pants down. Vulgar, corrupt, banal and half-mad though it is, America remains magnificent in a way, and absorbs the world’s attention; we’re all still watching.
Discuss.
Published in General
I guess those who predict a landslide loss should not be so confident. Trump strikes me as far more feral than genius. He entered the ring with career politicians, a fairly clueless and somewhat selfish group, and beat them up. He knows the game better than the great minds of the GOP when it comes to fighting someone like Hillary and her blatantly evil slithering ways. He’s a mongoose battling a cobra. Get ready for some theater.
There’s a big difference between expressing disdain for a particular politician and forecasting that they will lose in a landslide. I have disdain for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but in the absence of divine intervention I totally expect that one of them will be our next president. And I’m incredibly skeptical about divine intervention.
I don’t think there’s anyone on this site who wouldn’t have cheered an outsider who converted the professional politicians to mute chunks of diced meat with wit, insight, nimble oratory, and passionate conviction. It’s what we yearned to see. Since no one expected such a miraculous apparition, we invested our hopes in this candidate or that one, finding a reflection of our own principles in this one, an aura of electability in that one, an emanation of a penumbra of classical liberalism in this one or that. It’s not the fact that Trump “beat up” the other 16 that bothers some – it’s the fact that he was buoyed up by brays that celebrated his contempt and ignorance. The former was excused because hurrah, he’s not PC. The latter was applauded because he’s not bound to the terms the “elite” use to define the argument. Who cares if he doesn’t know what the nuclear triad is? MAGA.
Is Scott Walker “clueless”? Perhaps when it comes to reality of national politics, and that’s no small thing, but as a conservative who fought for the things we supposedly want to advance, he had clues aplenty. Was Marco Rubio “clueless” about foreign policy and the importance of alliances? Was Cruz “clueless” about religious liberty? Was Fiorina “clueless” about anything?
This was the most clue-endowed field we had – unless you define “clueless” as the inability to understand that no one wanted the smart take. They wanted the guy who said get a load of these fancy talkers. It would be great if we had an outsider who could dismantle the pieties of the established order with incisive, revelatory arguments that scoured the landscape and brought us back to principles. But we got an intellectual nullity we are expected to defend not as a thinker, but a Man of Instinct – even though his gut-fueled perorations indicate that his instincts on so many issues are just a smelly mess.
YES YES OF COURSE HILLARY IS WORSE I get it. I get it.
Just please do not expect me to attach the word “genius” to this man. I have dear friends who will vote for Trump. I understand. I can take just about everything about this miserable election cycle except the notion that I have to admire Donald Trump because he won.
Annnnd I’m not yelling at you, DocJ, just jumping off your post. Push comes to shove, I’m jumping in your trench.
@James Lileks Rubio , who I voted for, was clueless because his biggest enemy was Jeb Bush, his long time friend. He also misread the immigration issue but was walking that back.
Scott Walker got the high price tag GOP campaign team early on and it bankrupted him. He was a bit clueless about the financial realities.
Fiorina and Cruz both suffered from the same cluelessness as we all did ( at least me when I first addressed trump in a post called Send in the Clowns). They were outsiders like Carson and were attempting to capture the outsider vibe. Instead that vibe was read correctly by a street thug who’s ethics mirror those of average NY democrat politicians , essentially poor. Trump tapped in to anger like no other and beat the outsiders, albeit he had help from Kasich who cluelessly hung around. Plus Trump had help from the GOP which cluelessly forced Jeb down our throats to start and then Cluelessly misread the obvious and failed to back Cruz rapidly enough because they don’t like him.
Some were in it to run chase vehicles for Jeb( Graham). Others for their own Glory ( Christie) so selfish.
I was and am a Rand Paul guy. I think he’d make a great president.
I called Trump feral , not genius, and I did not mean it as a compliment but more in the Darwinian sense as he’s around to spread his DNA to the party of the Bushes now.
You can entertain me with stories as you feed me the machine gun belt. Like Mandrake and Gen Ripper. Wait, who am I shooting at ?
Never once thought you were yelling at me. This is a frustrating situation for almost everyone but the loyal Trump folks from the get go, a few but not many here.
Trump will be clueless about what to do if he wins. He will have killed the head lion, killed his cubs, impregnated the lionesses, and now will sit back and let others hunt. He better have competence instead of yes men surrounding him or we are in for a bad bad 4 years.
PS: I’m available for HHS , surgeon general or a czar spot Donald. I got the stones to tell you when you’re an idiot.
I think it was luck and an accident not genius. He’s not Hillary, and maybe he’ll break a few things while he’s in Washington and that would be good. He will fail domestically and turn to foreign policy posturing. Still we can’t allow the Democrats another 4 years and court appointments. It’s very sad.
Trump is not a genius. The fact that he is largely incapable of taking advice from campaign professionals is why he won the nomination and may win in the fall. I don’t expect a new maturity or new verbal discipline. His refusal/inability to submit to conventional norms about what and how a candidate may speak is what we will continue to get.
When GOP campaign experts speak of ideology they think about poll-tested expressions of generalities that generate a positive response in mostly Republican demographics plus independents. American voters have allowed the pros to drain both the substance and flavor of political principles and instead urge us to rally behind our pablum in opposition to theirs. Trump’s political principles (or lack thereof) mean less than the fact that (a) he is openly annoyed by the same things and same people that the pablum-makers forbid us to criticize (b) he does not seem to care that his mode of expression is not approved which signals that there is hope for a time when the pablum-makers will no longer rule.
That GOP political pros use terms like “genius” to describe Trumps’ visceral authenticity is diagnostic of how far they have descended into the stagnant bubble that is the campaign profession. It is almost as if they are still designing campaigns to try to bypass the filter that Peter Jennings and Dan Rather used to have with pruned, middling policies to match the safely pruned rhetoric.
Certainly he could.
The election of Clinton. She’s a proven Useful Idiot.
People are using Grant and Eisenhower as comparison points for this. I think a better model might be Berlusconi in Italy.
This cannot be be overstated. I think Trump will moderate his outbursts as time goes by, but they will never disappear. However, the same impulses that make him so, well, impulsive, also means that he won’t sit still when the media takes up their usual position against the Republican candidate.
McCain tried to play nice with the media, and lost. Romney tried to ignore them, and lost. Trump is (and will) do his best to take the fight to the media.
Will he win? God knows, I don’t.
Trump is a salesman, and salesmen understand that we make buying (and voting) decisions with our emotions first, then we justify those decisions with our intellect.
Is that different and off-putting from how things are usually done in the Republican party these past twenty years? Yes.
It also works.
Over at the New York Post, Kyle Smith lays out just how well Trump has put his finger on the pulse of the nation.
We live in uncertain times, and we are looking for someone to calm our nerves and set things right. Is that desire the right desire to have at this moment? Probably not. Denying that the desire exists, however, is not the path to victory.
Trump is an everyman.
He inspires all men, women and children across the fruited plain to live the American dream: Inheriting a real estate fortune, using that money to stay slightly ahead of inflation, advertising his sexual exploits in tabloid newspapers for several decades, and hosting a reality TV show for over a decade.
Yes, he is the modern embodiment of Norman Rockwell’s town hall dissenter.
But how could this quiet, tenacious worker move from his monastery of American capitalism to the presidency? How could he so quickly rise to prominence?
We may as well ask the same of Washington, Lincoln, or the faithful servants of liberty who have grabbed their muskets to renew our cause throughout history. We just have to look at ourselves. You see, it is because we are a nation as humble as Donald Trump.
He is our son, the son of America, with whom we are most pleased.
I agree except for the Democrat’s nomination of Obama in 2008.
I find him wanting.
https://youtu.be/tdhQWkTl1PQ