I abstained from voting in the 2016 presidential elections.
I could not
vote for the corrupt Hillary Clinton who would have continued with the absurd
and dangerous Iran Deal, nor could I trust the apparently unpredictable Donald
Trump.
Apart from a few, most of my friends would cringe if I
were to recommend them this book by Victor Davis Hanson. But I
am doing precisely that. VDH clearly
explains how Trump won:
“As it turned out, Trump would
win three key swing states once deemed irrevocably blue: Michigan (by a 0.2
percent margin), Pennsylvania (0.7 percent), and Wisconsin (0.8 percent). Or in
other words, Trump won the election because about eighty thousand voters in
just three states swung his way”
And he explains why they supported him:
“Apparently, a third of the
voters saw him as something analogous to chemotherapy, which after all is used
to combat something far worse than itself. Such toxicity was felt to be needed
to kill the cancer (i.e. , the politics
and bureaucracy of the proverbial deep state ), even as the dosage might nearly
kill the patient ( the Trump voter) during the taxing therapy ( the 24/7 media
obsession with all things Trump).”
Victor Davis Hanson’s book is a must for anybody who wants
to understand what has been happening in the US. I believe VDH in this book gives a better insight
into the Trump phenomenon than Never Trumper Bret Stephens has done in his anti-Trump articles . Stephens with all his excellent analyses of Israel related
issues here
and here,
was somewhat blinded by his dislike of Trump. It was not Stephens’s only blind
spot.
For me, the greatest move Trump has so far accomplished is
the US withdrawal from the Iran deal.
As I put it in my
post:
Thank you
President Trump for withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. Finally someone
found the guts to stand up to the spineless Europeans and show that the Iran
deal’s sunset clause was so absurd that it alone justified quitting the deal.
Now the US and Israel have to educate the rest of the world and quote Bernard
Lewis’s warning “For people with this mindset,
Mutually Assured Destruction is not a constraint; it is an inducement...”
The good news is that Trump has now Michael Pompeo as his
Secretary of State and John Bolton as his National Security Advisor.
VDH:
“The addition of both the
hawkish Pompeo and Bolton in early 2018 allowed Trump to switch from his prior “bad
cop” role of threatening fire and fury and scarcely being restrained by his
sober and judicious advisors. Not now.
Trump would talk more like “good cop” who warned foreign leaders that he might
have to reign some of his team like Bolton and Pompeo, who wanted stronger
reactions to perceived foreign acts”.
I found Victor Davis Hanson’s characterization of Trump
as the Tragic Hero fascinating . He
compares Trump to General George S. Patton, General Curtis
LeMay, architect of the low-level B-29 raids over Japan, even to Achilles in Homer’s Illiad and to Clint Eastwood’s Inspector “Dirty”
Harry Callahan.
“What makes such men and women
both tragic and heroic is their knowledge that the natural expression of their
personas can lead only to their own destruction or ostracism from an advancing civilization
that they seek to protect”
“In sum, the Trump paradox
remained as much a mystery to his progressive critics as it always had – and
perhaps always will”.
And not only to progressives. I remain skeptical about Trump’s grasp of the
Middle East. The answer I got from Rudy
Giuliani about Trump’s proclaimed
neutrality in the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a good illustration: “Rudy Giuliani answered (the exact wording I
cannot recall) that he had known Donald Trump for many years and
that Trump had this incredible tendency to say stupid things before he thinks.
Trump had made an unfortunate comment but that he is a friend of Israel.”
We have yet to see what Trump’s peace plan will
look like.
