PER GEORGE WILL: TRUMP LIES LESS TO DECEIVE, THAN TO REASSURE HIMSELF

…George F. Will, columnist for the Washington Post and a commentator for MSNBC

Donald J. Trump: “Our shabbiest president, but not our only shabby President.”

I have never been that big of a fan for the columnist George Will.  However, I do respect his overall political knowledge and his writing and vocabulary skills.  Mr. Will did ask a question in a recent column that does today, need to be asked.  Has our nation become so accustomed to daily mortifications (humiliation) that it has lost its capacity for embarrassment?

The point he was trying to make is that if we only look at the country as an “economy”, then the state of the union would be considered pretty good.  (Except for fact that, due to the current Trump administration, the nation faces a $1 trillion deficit, all the while having full employment and brisk growth.) So far that is….

Here are my comments using excerpts from Will's latest column of which I do agree:

If there is the expected, future Great Recession, it will begin with gargantuan deficits, and the current government has no clue as to what to do about that fact.

Just look at the “state of the state” in Washington DC:  The current president’s party’s congressional caucuses have elevated their subservience to the president into what has become their: “political philosophy”.  The Republican-controlled Senate, is today, the world’s most overrated deliberative legislative body.  It will not deliberate about, much less pass, any legislation that our ignorant governing president does not approve.

The theory today is that it would be crime of treason for the US Senate to express any judgements independent of President Trump, or any judgements coming from the Democratic House.

Let’s face the reality that senatorial dignity today is way too fragile to survive the disapproval of a president that has no familiarity with any actual government policies. Oh, the Senate’s Republicans do have their “ears to the ground”.  But they are totally ignorant of Winston Churchill’s brilliant observation, that it is difficult for a nation to look up to anyone in that  position.  Therefore, the current congressional job approval is ~19%, the lowest ever, and that’s for those in both parties.

There is supposed to be in this nation, three, equally powerful houses of government, each is to keep an eye on the other for keeping all the government divisions in line.  But what we have today is a Senate that fails to watch the executive division for keeping them honest. 

Instead, we have a “crybaby conservative Senate” that follows the executive’s claims that we are being victimized by the world’s elites, its markets, by Wall Street and foreigners, or God knows, whatever you want to claim.

Just look at the results of the last 30 years of our nation’s totally futile diplomacy regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. The current, “artist of the deal” spent a few hours in Singapore with the NK dictator, Kim Jong Un, and right afterwards the president stupidly tweeted: “There’s no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”  Huh?  What price will the president end up paying by his easing off on the enemy’s sanctions, while also ending long-time, joint military exercises with our close ally, South Korea?

The president’s most controversial exercise of his executive power has been his abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).  This ignorant move just opened the way for China to fill the void of the US pulling out.  This president’s protectionism was just our government telling all Americans: what they can consume, in what quantities and at what high prices.  This has completed Trump’s extinguishing of the former limited-government pretenses of Trump’s GOP.  A party that today, due to this leader, needs an entirely new political vocabulary and mission statement.

I am now offering you a long quote from George Will that should ring true to everybody, regardless of a party affiliation:

“Dislike of [President Trump] should be tempered by this true consideration: He is an almost inexpressibly sad [presidential] specimen.  It must be misery to awaken to another day of being Donald Trump.  He seems to have as many friends as his perfect self-centeredness allows, and as he has earned in his entire, deal-making life.  His historical ignorance deprives him of the satisfaction of working in a White House where magnificent history has been made.  His childlike ignorance is preserved by a lifetime of single-minded self-promotion that guarantees that whenever he must interact with experienced and accomplished people, he is as bewildered as a kindergartener at a seminar on string theory.

This is why his fountain of self-refuting boasts (“I have a very good brain”) are so many lies.  He lies so much, less to deceive anyone than to reassure himself.  And also as a balm for his base, which remains oblivious to his contempt for them as sheep who can be effortlessly gulled by his preposterous fictions. The tungsten strength of his supporters’ loyalty is as impressive as his indifference to expanding their numbers.

Either the electorate, is bored with a menu of his various servings of boorishness, or the 22nd Amendment will end all of this: our shabbiest, but not our only shabby presidency.

As the writer Mark Twain and fellow novelist William Dean Howells stepped outside together one morning, a downpour began and Howells asked, ‘Do you think it will stop?’ Twain replied, ‘It always has.’ “

One can only hope so, and soon.

Copyright G. Ater 2019