This page requires immense updates. President Trump has far exceeded the wildest hope expressed near the bottom of this page. Despite his oddities, he has enacted many great improvements. He labors tirelessly for the benefit of the American people. Thank you, Mr. President.
Donald Trump has a long history of embracing and financially supporting Liberal Democrats and their causes as a liberal, knee-jerk-of-the-moment, bratty bully in a threadbare Republican cloth coat. Being a Republican for a while is standard fare. He frequently contradicts himself, sometimes within a single verbal paragraph. His range-of-the-moment vision has been so shortsighted that he can rarely finish a sentence without rambling down some tangential impulse, nearly always about someone’s opinion (especially his own) rather than some aspect of reality.
We invoke the famous idea often attributed incorrectly to Jefferson: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”
We have our own version about Trump: “A presidential candidate rich enough to ignore all the special interests can and will ignore all of your interests.”
Gautier Van Cleave 2016 March 30
William Shakespeare might as well have been writing of Donald Trump in his The Two Gentlemen of Verona:
“… hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs, and more wealth than faults.”
Donald Trump’s personality appeared in a classic Star Trek episode from 1967 called “The Squire of Gothos”. Captain Kirk and crew interacted with Trelane, played by William Campbell. Trelane/Trump was a tremendously powerful and capable being, but also an impulsive, erratic, bratty, obnoxious jerk prone to thoughtless mistakes. One could easily imagine that it was a Trump tantrum when Trelane fumed at Kirk, “You broke my sword!” adding “I’ll fix you for that! You cheated! You haven’t played the game right! I’ll show you!”
Sound familiar?
Trump is an amoral, crony capitalist with power and immense riches, yet he is surprisingly insecure, perhaps because he has only “The Deal” to guide him instead of moral principles. This forces him to lash out with self-preservation intensity at the tiniest slight. He is rarely controllable by anything or anyone now, and usually takes only his own counsel. We will hope he becomes more inclined toward taking counsel now that he is the president elect. We must hope he takes counsel from the Constitution.
He has been an un-presidential, crude, misogynist bully who lies constantly because he seems not to know lies from truth in a somewhat childlike simplicity, completely different from the malicious bald-face lies of Hillary Clinton. As president, he could be a disaster for the country, but with moderation and attention to the wisdom of a well chosen staff and cabinet, he has the potential to be quite the opposite.
However… He’s a lot better for America than Clinton
Trump, as a noisy buffoon, has all sorts of absurd characteristics and incredible flaws. Just about everything bad his opposition says about him is true. But with his election, there is still the possibility that he could take counsel from his children, his Vice President, and other steadier minds.
He could delegate much of the heavy lifting of running the country to Mike Pence, and to his selected and upcoming nominees who currently include Jeff Sessions (Attorney General), Reince Priebus (Chief of Staff), Gen. Michael Flynn (National Security Adviser). Other capable and respectable cabinet possibilities await his nomination, to free him to continue his 140-character fireside chats on Twitter and make inarticulate self-aggrandizing speeches. Or if he can stick to the teleprompter, he can present the coherent, well conceived speeches he has sometimes made during his campaign.
If he did that, he could accomplish major improvements in the economy, stop the judicial insanity of the circuit and supreme courts, stop regulating everyone to death, stop aiding American enemies, restart cooperating with America’s friends, and make many other improvements for the country.
Trump has the possibility of redemption. Clinton had absolutely none. Delegating to the right associates, Trump could be one of the most successful presidents in recent history. We, the country, and the world have dodged the dreadful bullet of a Clinton presidency. Mixing metaphors for the present, we are in the lifeboat, possibly to re-board the Great Ship of State, instead of looking up at Hillary from the Stygian blackness beneath the crushing iceberg.
We voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton as we would have any day, especially on Election Day.
