@Drlee
Precisely. He literally did all of the stuff he should not have done. I can't rationalize it at all. Is he so psychologically damaged that he can't think through any problem?
I think his Ideology got the better of him, and in fact it might really have been a case of ''Mission Accomplished'' for him in that sense.
Can he just not accept any bad news at all?
If his role as he sees it is to take advantage of the crisis to weaken the ''Federal Leviathan'', then he could be very accepting of the bad news.
Is Russia calling the shots on him? Is he damaging the US at their behest? (I would think that the downside for Putin would be too great to try but then, who knows?)
No, let's put that conspiracy theory to rest. President Putin has on numerous occasions over decades now insisted to the Russian people that a strong and prosperous America is absolutely necessary for the World Order and thus the national security of Russia herself, that Russia and America working together are a solid guarantee of peace and prosperity in the world. Russians don't want another Hitler or worse invading Russia, never again. Putin had nothing to do with Trump, and Trump has been about as Anti-Russian in his actions as any American leader could possibly be, in reality. I'd see Putin more as hoping America got rid of Trump, actually.
I can't blame this on a lack of intelligence because it would not have taken above average intelligence to make the good decisions. He staggers the imagination that any politician could miss an opportunity to be the next FDR at the least.
There are people out there, wealthy and powerful people, who want to destroy everything FDR did, even planning on overthrowing FDR in 1933, before General Smedley Butler went public and went before Congress to expose the plot.
President Trump is ideological heir to those people.
But you know what is even more staggering? The Republican politicians who let him do it. That is beyond comprehension. Was his cult of personality so great that they could not stand against it? They could have dumped him and had Ms. Pence as president. He would have done whatever they asked. The democrats gave him the best opportunity to do it in the impeachment and, having been impeached, he would also have been effectively silenced. Stunning.
So why didn't it, in your opinion?
I think there are enough of them who are close enough to Trump in ideology that they let him do their dirty work. Now they can get rid of him.
I think we learned a very hard lesson in this last election. We learned three things actually.
The first is that the US is still, at its heart, fighting the civil war. It is a deeply racist country with at the very least half of the population dedicated to that racism/xenophobia.
The Civil War never ended. It just went from a ''Hot War'' phase to a ''Cold War'' phase.
Then second is that we have at least half of the population who is so angry that they are willing to break anything, kill anyone, or suffer any indignity in service to the above. After all. The system DID fail them. They ARE worse off. The DOW does NOT reflect their quality of life. And they don't know what to do about it except follow some tough-talking populist. They see their religion under attack. It sorta' is. They see their real wages falling. They despair for heath care. So they don't go for the people who can actually help with these. They go for the guy who talks about draining the swamp, protecting their guns all the while blaming illegal immigrants for their problems.
And he screwed them over, which is why enough of them skipped out or voted for Biden in 2020 that it resulted in what we see today.
For me this is the $64,000.00 question. How do you deal with people like that? What can be done to stifle the power of our oligarchs and get some balance back into our economics? Ironically this could happen in one of three ways. We could go hard left and pull down the monopolies while passing more wealth to the middle class. We could go classic Republican and embrace a free market globalist economy with worker protections as a preferable way to control excesses. Nixon style if you like. Or we could go hard over to the right and get a strongman to do it. I think that is what people thought Trump might be. He was, of course, not. Not even a little though he tried to sound like it on Twitter.
My answer is true Leftism, somewhat modified. ''Conservatives'' aren't conserving anything, and much to my chagrin aren't truly socially conservative, as I'm genuinely pro-life, pro-traditional family and morality. Liberals would never have to worry about political challenges from the Right ever again had they not jettisoned socially conservative but economically liberal democrat voters.
But you're right, the Oligarchs have to be stopped, and so I'm not going to be too choosy about who my allies are as long as they're still doing the Lord's work, so to speak, despite their flaws.
Now on President Trump's ideology;
Possibly. But seriously Anatar. Do you think he is personally that deep? Looking at his life before the presidency he seems to be the king of bling and not much more.
Oh no, I assure you the guy is as sharp as can be. He has a very well-crafted public persona that has taken him all the way to the Presidency of the United States.
And in his presidency he did not display any consistent ideological underpinning. If he had that would he have made the almost absurd cabinet choices that he did? Would his SCOTUS choices not have been more libertarian and not the hard right ideologues that he chose? There is no way to see Objectivist or Libertarian views in the latest one. She is a hard right religious traditionalist; the very opposite of libertarian in any real sense.
Barrett is on the contrary, a dream pick for the big corporations, and will probably help dismantle the ACA among other things.
Trump is employing a Right-Wing Libertarian version of the ''Cloward-Piven Strategy'', and in light of that, his picks make perfect sense;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E ... e%20systemThat is, bankrupting the system and utterly destroying it by bloating it beyond repair.
Perhaps a lack of ideology destroyed his presidency. My suspicion is that it is pathology that he was unable to overcome that was his undoing. He had a perfect road map to success. He should have won by a landslide. Indeed was very close to doing it. What do you think?
As my answers before might indicate, the man is in reality a total ideologue from day one. I knew this when he deliberately destroyed the Reform Party together with his friend Gov. Ventura, almost 20 years ago.
I'm not sure then that winning a second term was something he's truly struggling for. Sure, it would have been the icing on the cake to further his work, but he's already damaged the political establishment possibly beyond repair.