I think that Donald Trump is a bad man with some good ideas and some bad ideas. He seems prone to stick with the bad ideas (and bad people, like Pete Hogwallop[1]) while rabbiting around on the good ideas. He may well represent a threat to Democracy. Or not. His method, much more this term than in the first, is the bull-rush. Doing “everything, everywhere, all at once.” Testing, even blowing through, established limits of all sorts; moving very fast and keeping it up across time; forcing changes that may or may not endure. He’s a wrecking ball and a disruptor, not a builder.
Trump also is not a “politician.” In contemporary America, a “politician” is a career public employee who gets his/her/their contract renewed every 2, 4, or 6 years by playing it safe within the terms of their own constituency. Most of them rise by following what the Romans used to call the “cursus honorum” (“course of honors/offices”).[2] They’re committed to never doing anything “risky.”[3] Trump thinks that these people are Nithings.[4] He’s pretty much right about most of them.[5]
But what is the alternative to Trump? Leave things the way they were? Keep going along the same lines that produced gigantic deficits and a national debt that seems likely to end in default? A creeping expansion of the Executive Branch and rule through regulation, executive orders, and executive agreements, rather than legislation? A withering of the Legislative Branch through its own indifference to its responsibilities? A well-advanced politicization of the Judicial Branch? That’s going to end in the election of Supreme Court Justices. An economy that prioritizes Finance over everything else, including Manufacturing? A neglect of American military power in an era of rising danger? A materialist, consumerist culture—against which Jimmy Carter warned long ago—that has reduced us to a “Country Made of Ice Cream”? How is any of that going to be reformed in a timely fashion by continuing with “the way we do things around here”?
[1] Start at 4:05. Pa always said never trust a Hogwallop!
[2] Cursus honorum – Wikipedia
[3] The NYT is risk averse in its attitude toward change. New York Times risky – Search
[4] Old English term. See the first meaning given. NITHING definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary
[5] But not all of them. Gina Raimondo for the Democrats and Mike Gallagher for the Republicans offer hope.
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