old salt wrote: ↑Wed Oct 23, 2024 9:42 pmIF Trump is elected (& I do not think he will be), I'm confident that our Constitutional guard rails will hold, thanks to Patriots like Gen Kelly who will choose to serve. None of Trump's bluster alarms me as much as the IC leaks, political sabotage, & lawfare that Trump's opponents engaged in to undermine his Presidency.
Guardrails holding...that is a very thin piece of hope at this pivotal moment. The "leaks, sabotage and lawfare" WERE the guardrails holding up, Salty...that's the fatal flaw in your outrage over how Trump "was treated".
He very well MIGHT have:
Fired Patriot missiles at suspected Mexican drug labs,
Shot protesters in the legs,
Used tactical nuclear weapons,
Injected people with bleach,
Withheld disaster relief from Blue States,
Jailed and prosecuted political opponents and journalists,
Forced the 2020 election back to Congress,
...and much, MUCH more.
The guardrails held last time. In 2024, his closest allies have spent years plotting to eliminate guardrails this time.
Read Ezra Klein's entire
NYT opinion piece on this subject, he really nails it. It's long, but really needs a read...however, you DO need a subscription to get the whole thing.
How many times have you felt insulted or wronged by someone and wanted to just unload on them in public? To go all out in annihilating your tormentor in every way you could? How many times in your work or your life have you believed something other people didn’t believe, something they thought was wrong or impolite or outdated or ridiculous, and you bit your tongue. You didn’t want to say it and be laughed at, mocked, dismissed, punished. But we hold ourselves back. Most of us do.
And so when I say this, I mean it: What Donald Trump has done is remarkable. It is historic. It is unique in the entire history of American politics. To run as an outsider to a political party and capture that political party totally. Break its fundamental consensus. Slander its previous standard-bearers. To then become president having never held elective office or served in the military, while saying things and doing things that, until you, everybody believed you could not do or say in politics. To achieve something unique, you must yourself be unique. Donald Trump is unique.
Over the years, I have interviewed I don’t know how many politicians. Talking to them is different from talking to anyone else. It’s why I don’t just fill this show with them. Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.
The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams. You can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn’t say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry. If your words move markets and launch missiles, you choose them carefully.
But there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I can’t be without fear, if I can’t be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was? Protected by somebody who was? Fought for by somebody who was?
It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it off. What makes Trump Trump isn’t his views on immigration, though they are part of it. It’s the manic charisma born of his disinhibition.
It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw.
[snip]
Donald Trump is not cognitively fit to be president. The presidency is a position that requires an occupant able to act strategically and carefully. That Trump is not such a person is obvious if you watch the man. And so, for years, his supporters have said: Don’t watch the man. Don’t listen to what he says. Look at the results. But those results reflected the power and ability of others to check Trump, to inhibit him when he could not inhibit himself. It is not just the man who is now unfit; it is the people and institutions that surround him.
Here is one difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The people who work most closely with Joe Biden, his top staff, have always said he is up to the job of the presidency. Fit cognitively. Fit morally. The people who worked most closely with Donald Trump, many of his cabinet secretaries, many of them now say he is not.
But to admit the obvious is to be excommunicated, to go from one of Trump’s amazing hires — he only brings on the best people — to one of his deranged enemies, a loser, someone he fired. And so he is now surrounded by yes-men and enablers, by opportunists and scam artists, by ideologues and foot soldiers.
What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.
Read the whole thing. It's also presented in a podcast.
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