Don’t underestimate him, count him out or think he is crazy.
NBC’s “Meet the Press” half-hour interview with Donald Trump is interesting. He has passion and a very fast mind, he seems to have integrity in the sense that he cannot be bought for money by others and he doesn’t mind having standpoints that conservative republicans find odd or surprising.
He is clearly eclectic and pragmatic rather than a theoretician, ideology-bent politician – and seems to build a lot on his entrepreneur experience and sense of reading people.
His vision – “making America great again!” – may be frightening and wrong and it is based on strength, on military but even more on economic strength.
The interesting thing is that he is much more realistic about the internal and external weaknesses of today’s U.S. than the rest of the political elites and decision-makers in Washington who seem all to be in denial of the empire’s relative decline.
He says here that he doesn’t bother much whether Ukraine gets into NATO or not. Neither Obama, Clinton or Bush would dare say that. The same goes for his views on China and, in particular, Saudi Arabia. On these themes he has quite a lot of original/wilful views.
He seems to mean that the U.S. should not be in the forefront here and there and everywhere unless it gets something back – which he thinks it doesn’t at the moment. He believes that there is no reason to quarrel with the Russians if the Europeans aren’t willing to do so too.
His judgement of the Iran deal, his statement that Iran will control big parts of the world and that it will get nuclear weapons and that we will see a “Holocaust” sooner or later is superb nonsense. And he must somehow know it because he doesn’t want to tear that deal up either. So, he pleases both the anti-Iran deal extremists and the pro-deal people (by not wanting to tear it up but monitoring it really hard). I mean, thinking there will be a ‘Holocaust’ and not say a word about what to do but monitoring the deal’s implementation…!
He is extremely critical of Saudi Arabia and sees no point why the U.S. should continue to support it and he says that Obama has abandoned Israel – but again not a word, at least in this interview, about what he would do vis-a-vis Israel. His explicit position that he will not tear up the deal can hardly please Netanyahu. Neither will it please him that Trump, contrary to Obama & Co., doesn’t say here that he is ready to bomb Iran.
One thing is what he says today, another what he would do if sitting in the White House. Let’s remember he is a businessman and notice that he says nothing about not dealing with Iran in the future.
My sense is that he will most likey tone down his flamboyant view and Holocaust talk and recognise that it is in the mutual interest of the U.S. and Iran to co-operate. He can still maintain that his monitors this bad deal – which btw he says that Kerry was incompetent in accepting – and do business with Iran.
In conclusion, he embodies a lot of what I would guess many Americans would like to hear. He certainly has originality, he is for sure a personality – irrespective of whether you like that personality and his views or not. He is, what the marketing gurus would call engaging – much much more so than Bush and Clinton.
Should anybody reading this get the idea that I like his policies, would recommend that you vote for him, or some such impression, let me tell you that you are plain wrong.
What I say above is a sad comment on the extent to which U.S. democracy has lost quality and vision. But for a series of reasons, I find him a breath of fresh air in comparison with Bush and Clinton whose worldviews and “connections” are well-known already to be extremely harmful to the rest of the world.
Do I have to remind you of just how bad presidents both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were for the world – that Clinton bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Serbia-Kosovo-Bosnia, upheld the sanctions on Iraq after half a million innocent Iraqis had died there and that it was his policy from 1994 to expand NATO up under the skirts of Russia against the explicit promises made to Gorbachev never to do so that is the root cause of the present Second Cold War centered on Ukraine?
Do I apportion guilt by association here? Yes! I expect nothing different from their dynastic predecessors if either take over the Oval Office. (And it is more than foolish to think that Hillary Clinton will be better because she is a woman!).
To be a stark contrast, as Trump seems to be, to the utter boredom and deja vue of the two corrupt and destructive American political dynasties – Bush and Clinton – is at the very least not uninteresting in and of itself . In my view the rest of the world – superficial media in particular – should stop regarding him as a reality show fool with a strange hairdo. He isn’t.
