Friday, October 26, 2018

Two things we're puzzled about

The first is:  Why does Trump do and say the things that he does?
The second is:  Why aren't conservatives and MAGA people upset about them?

The second question has to remain unanswered for the moment.  Perhaps they are turned off by careful speech, tact and diplomacy:  "Why can't 'people' just say what they mean?"  ('People' do, but there are many who don't recognize it, and can't quite interpret what they hear.)

As to the first question, there are several possibilities.

(1)  Trump tried, in the early days, to be just a little more reasonable, but pretty soon his advisors (for lack of a better term!  I mean those who piped their reactions back to him, and gave him their best sense of how his fans were receiving his speeches and / or Tweets) perhaps gave him negative feedback, saying that toning down his flamboyant talk wasn't going down well.  Soon afterwards, the Press started ramping up their condemnation of his lies and inaccuracies, and Donald might have thought: what does it matter?  I'm gonna get blasted anyway, so I might as well get back on the rhetoric, regardless of whether it contains true or accurate information.  That approach probably did go down well with the home boys.

(2)  Not being accustomed to having to answer for everything he does, Trump tried his best to think on his feet, but simply kept tripping over himself.  This is probably the most plausible explanation.  There are some attitudes and beliefs that he holds that would make sense only to conservatives, businessmen, and most of all, conservative businessmen.  They are based on the mysticism of business, which boils down to a sheaf of rules of thumb that don't always work.  But businessmen always believe that business has risks, so they've gotta expect a few fails.  They don't see that some of the fails could have been spotted a mile away.  As long as we keep electing MBAs as presidents, (and boy, does the Wharton School have a lot to answer for,) the administration is going to depend on these failed rules of thumbs on which to base their governing of fiscal policy, and foreign policy.

(3)  A view held by many is that Trump is being given bad data by his homies.  Pretty soon, he probably does not believe any data, and thinks that all news is fake news.  It is possible that gaslighting is happening in the white house, but it might not be originating from Trump.  GIGO*, as the computer guys say.

At one time, I thought the entire business community--at least Big Business--was all of one mind with Trump.  But then, on thinking a little further, I began to realize that that was not the way Big Business operates.  Big Business is a mass of suspicious entities, viewing their competition with great hostility.  They may cooperate on a limited basis for a while, but then they relapse into their fighting stance.  They play their cards close to the chest, and they might give Trump some slight gratitude, on a play-by-play basis.  I haven't watched the Godfather movies, but I imagine many of the elements of those movies will feel familiar to those who have watched the Administration pick its way through the last two years.  We might not be seeing Chess, exactly, but it might be something similar, like tic-tac-toe.

Big Business would have to be fools to accept Trump as The Messiah.  A few decades or so ago, no CEO would have been fooled by Trump for a minute.  But who knows; Big Business isn't what it used to be . . .

All I can say with certainly is that this is no way to run a country, not even Saudi Arabia.  I wonder whether there will be a drift of moderate Saudi individuals and families out of that country, which might leave it with only Trump-like goons who shoot from the hip.  This is sad and worrisome, but what can we say?  Some things are best left to trained professionals.  I don't mean surgical implements; I mean diplomacy and policy.

Arch, castling furiously

*Garbage In, Garbage Out.

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