Tag: strongman
Why Trump Could Never Be A Putinesque Strongman

Why Trump Could Never Be A Putinesque Strongman

A good title for the entire Trump-Putin saga might be “The Naïve and Sentimental Dictator.” Assuming, that is, that it all plays out as farce—certainly the direction events are trending in the White House.

What did Vladimir Putin think he was getting? Is it possible that he mistook an egotistical buffoon like Donald J. Trump for an apprentice strongman? If so, he badly misunderstands America. It’s not simply Russia with better plumbing. Granted, Trump himself lacks the self-discipline for autocracy. But he also lacks the servile population.

Putin is known to regard western ideals of liberty, freedom and democracy as sentimental illusions. Trump disdains all laws that impede him. But if Congress accomplished nothing else by imposing new sanctions against Russian meddling in our politics, it proved that Putin’s best American friend has become the weakest president in living memory.

Not that Trump can’t still do enormous damage. But sentimental illusion or not, he won’t be able to undo the Constitution.

For all his bluster, Trump’s increasingly becoming a figure of fun—almost as laughable as his comic opera mini-me, The Mooch. His falsehoods expire overnight, often due to his own foolish tweets.

Nobody fears Trump, not really. See, he can’t have me thrown into prison for mocking him. Also unlike Putin, he can’t have Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican, shot dead in the street for denouncing his own party’s “Faustian bargain” with Trump.

“Silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication,” Flake writes in Politico, “and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.”

Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan: he’s talking to you.

OK, so that makes a total of four Republican senators with spines. A few others have also made noises. Ultimately, this country isn’t going to be run like a World Wrestling Entertainment spectacle.

But back to Vladimir Putin. No, we definitely don’t need another Cold War with the Russians. Never did. But it’s the Russian dictator that badly overplayed his hand—possibly why his diplomats are already hinting that mutual accommodation might still be possible.

Meanwhile, Trump might like to undo the sanctions, but he hasn’t got the power. He’d also like to rid himself of Robert Mueller, the investigator systematically probing exactly what Putin’s got on him. However, Trump can’t make that happen.

Another Republican Senator with at least a vestigial backbone: South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham: “Any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump Presidency unless Mueller did something wrong.”

One theory is that Putin never really imagined that his efforts would bring about a Trump presidency—that his real motive was sowing confusion and Russian-style cynicism about democracy itself. Certainly, Russian operatives’ approach to the amateurish schemers in Trump Tower last June was like something out of a Donald Westlake comic crime caper.

(My favorite Westlake novel is Bank Shot, in which crooks haul off a temporary bank housed in a mobile home, realizing too late that cops have blockaded every bridge off Long Island. Oh, it’s an island? Who knew?)

Writing in the New York Times, former CIA chief of station Daniel Hoffmann argues that what looks like incompetent Russian tradecraft indicates a baited mousetrap Donald Trump, Jr. clumsily jumped into. An email from an intermediary vowing Russian government support for the Trump candidacy and promising to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton?

An email? Permanent, ineradicable evidence?

So naturally Trump, Jr. copied and forwarded the incriminating message with the helpful subject line “Russian—Clinton—private and confidential.”

An email?

Not the sharpest tool in the shed, Junior.

Has anybody ever not read a message so marked? Except we’re expected to believe that boy genius son-in-law Jared Kushner never did, although he attended the meeting with those Russian operatives anyway. A big bust, he claims, a real nothing-burger.

Although two days later, candidate Trump promised a blockbuster speech detailing Hillary Clinton’s many crimes—a speech he never did deliver.

So now the Washington Postreports that the president himself drafted a deceptive statement after word of the suspect meeting first materialized in the press. The meeting was about Russian orphans, see, not Clinton dirt.

Followed, as day follows night, by the appearance of the aforementioned “private and confidential” emails.

So which is more incompetent, Team Vladimir or Team Trump?

The CIA’s Hoffman thinks he knows: “to me, the clearest evidence that this was a Russian influence operation is the trail of bread crumbs the Kremlin seemed to have deliberately left leading from Trump Tower to the Kremlin. This operation was meant to be discovered.”

But why? The commonest use of kompromat, as the Russians call incriminating evidence, is blackmail.

Too late now. Russians commonly say that Putin’s a cunning plotter, but a strategic dope. If he wanted Trump in his pocket, looks like he’s got him.

But the end result is chaos.

Header image: Wikimedia Commons.

Donald Trump’s Strongman Fantasy Is Deeply Un-American

Donald Trump’s Strongman Fantasy Is Deeply Un-American

If there were any doubt left that Donald Trump is a narcissistic, demonizing spinner of half-truths and outright lies, the case has been rested.

Closing arguments came in stunning performance by the 2016 GOP presidential candidate himself, live and televised. The Republican Party’s choice for the next occupant of the White House intends to seize upon people’s fears and transform the nation into an isolationist country, inwardly focused and always on the lookout for scapegoats. Trump fancies himself as some sort of dictatorial leader at the helm.

“I am your voice,” he declared, addressing the “forgotten men and women” of America. Then he proceeded to tell them who they can blame for their woes: immigrants, foreign countries and, of course, Hillary Clinton.

Thursday night’s address to the Republican National Convention was the most scripted, controlled, practiced and vetted speech from Trump so far. And it dug deeply into a philosophy that is antagonistic to the values our nation was founded upon. Trump showed a disturbing lack of insight and respect for the ideals that are carved in stone at the nation’s landmarks and ingrained into our laws and constitution.

The creepiest part of Trump’s speech was watching him seemingly struggle to read his own children’s names off of the teleprompter. It wasn’t that he doesn’t love his family, or is forgetful. Rather, Trump was on lockdown.

He didn’t dare stray too far from the prepared remarks, which were leaked ahead of time to media. Trump rogue wasn’t going to be allowed at the convention closing. No matter. What he delivered was the truth of how he sees America and how he believes himself to be the superhero that will rectify the nation’s woes.

Zap! Flash! Bam! After his coronation on January 20, 2017, violent neighborhoods will suddenly begin to be safe, millions will be employed and prosperous, crime will plummet, gangs will be no more and terrorism will be obliterated. Oh, and those awful undocumented immigrants, they will be sent packing, and Trump will slam the door in the face of anyone he deems to endorse violence, hatred or oppression.

Sometimes, the more a person talks about an issue, the more apparent it becomes how little he understands it — or, in this case, how little he understands the people he claims to care about. For example, Trump listed some statistics on black and Latino unemployment and then blamed illegal immigration for the disproportions.

He mentioned the shooting deaths of 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, vowing to protect the LGBTQ community from terrorism and violence. But he made no mention of the problem they face daily — namely, the type of discrimination that so many Republicans show when fighting same-sex marriage and other civil rights protections.

For Trump, unity is a matter of finding a scapegoat, some person or group we can all hate together. That makes it so much easier to avoid the messy complexities and moral ambiguities that inform actual policy making.

Yet leadership is about good policy. Any candidate can condemn the recent murders of police. It’s something we all concur with. But what are you going to do about police training and oversight? How are you going to rebuild broken trust with communities? What are you going to do about entrenched poverty, addiction, child abuse, domestic violence and the myriad other factors that feed crime and despair? How are you going to reassure African-Americans and Latinos and poorer people of all races that they will be treated with the same consideration and justice as white people?

Trump doesn’t say — a good indication he doesn’t care.

To him, our nation’s problems don’t need collective solutions. Unity, solidarity and common burden aren’t necessary. All we need is a strong leader. We’re going to be so dazzled by the way he humiliates and punishes our enemies, he seems to tell us, that we don’t need to worry about the details. “Believe me!”

Now it’s onto the Democratic convention in Philadelphia and Hillary Clinton’s moment to formally accept her party’s nomination.

Clinton, for sure, has her own problems with authenticity and appeal. But she’s never been possessed with a penchant to cast herself as a savior. And she’s not standing atop a party platform that seeks to sort the nation into those who are inherently more worthy and those who are not. Maybe voters will decide that that makes Clinton too much of the same-old, same-old.

But that is also the point. America’s problems are possible to tackle. Democracy is set up to function that way. If we want a better future, Americans must commit to honesty and diligence and common cause — not to the strongman fantasy Trump is selling.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

(c) 2016, THE KANSAS CITY STAR. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC

Photo: Donald Trump stands in the Trump family box with his daughter Ivanka awaiting the arrival onstage of his son Eric at the conclusion of former rival candidate Senator Ted Cruz’s address, during the third night at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, July 20, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein