By James Lewis
When
George Will and other leading intellectuals started to rip holes in their warm
comfort couches in despair at Donald Trump's long series of victories,
culminating in his election to the presidency, a lot of us were scratching our
heads. What was it about winning that drove George Will, Jonah Goldberg,
and Bill Kristol to despair?
It
made no sense.
Their Conservative Cringe makes even less sense today, when Trump is carrying
out a series of actions that we have long clamored for.
Well,
Mr. Will has finally identified his complaint in a WaPo opinion piece
dramatically called "Trump
Has a Dangerous Disability."
Donald
Trump is suffering from a mental disorder, says Mr. Will, which doesn't
actually appear in the psychiatric manual, but it still makes him mad as a
hatter.
What
kind of madness affects Trump?
Apparently
it's his evasion of grammatical sentences. It's syntactophobia, maybe, or
dyslexia of the intellect. Or something.
Now,
I happen to think that Trump's political jargon is a shrewd way to dodge the
murderous hatred of our fair-minded media, the people Mr. Will spends his life
with. We know they examine every syllable emerging from Trump's mouth,
ready to draw blood as soon as they can distort and lie about something he says
that is perfectly innocent.
Trump
has developed an effective way to reach you and me. We understand his
private code, which leaves liberals foaming at the mouth. They really
don't get what he says – because, for one thing, they never listen to
conservative talk radio. About half of American voters have listened to
Limbaugh and all the others over decades, on and off, enough to get the basic
language. Trump has to say only half a sentence, and we know how to fill
in the rest.
Conservative
radio happens to reflect the ideas of the American Founders more than any other
line of political discourse today, especially the cult language of snowflakes
and space cadets in our universities. If you can't even tell who is sane
and who is not, of course you won't get Trump, either.
That's
the enemy-mined battle space for American politics today, and Trump has adapted
to it more successfully than any conservative since Ronald Reagan.
But
if you live, as George Will does, in the airy-fairy cocktail circuit of
Washington sophisticates, where you actually get to finish a sentence before
howling leftists jump down your throat, you might not know that.
Donald
Trump has shrewdly and deliberately navigated the anti-conservative minefield.
His actions (as opposed to his words) are finely calibrated to achieve
intelligent ends.
Trump
is on his third fabulous career. First, the international hotel business,
where competition is extremely hot. Second, his showbiz career, where
things are even more competitive, if anything. And third, his run for the
presidency, where the New York Times wants to kill you, bad, and will resort to
Pravda and Goebbels methods to destroy your credibility.
Having
built three fabulous careers is not an accident. Trump is a man who has
achieved major career goals when he set his mind to it. The normal
standard of rational behavior is effective functioning in the real world.
When the world is mad, you have to figure out how to cope, and our
national politics is both irrational and self-destructive.
Among
our presidents, there have been some who talked in complete sentences, like
Obama with his two teleprompters, one to the left and one to the right, so he
could fake sincerity in both directions. Obama had his personal fiction
writer to support his grandiose fantasy life in complete sentences. Like
his inaugural promise to lower the level of the seas.
Big
deal.
BHO
talked well and acted like a jihadist. One of his first appointments, one
Elibiary, has just
told us that Coptic Christians who were murdered in their church in
Cairo "had it coming to them."
I
would rather have a stutterer for a president than someone who supports the
massacre of innocents. Wouldn't you?
We've
had less articulate presidents, like Eisenhower, Truman, and Bush 41 and 43.
History will judge their actions, but I happen to believe they were
genuine patriots. They cared about the right things and did their best,
while being sabotaged by the Demagogue Party.
When
a president does his utmost to achieve the best results for his country and the
world, I could not care less about his syntax.
After
thinking about George and Jonah and Bill, who unanimously headed for the hills
when Trump started to win, I've finally concluded that they despised Trump
because he sounded low-class. It's a class thing.
Well,
the D.C. establishment also despised Abe Lincoln as a low-class hick from the
backwoods who spoke with a country accent. But they adored Woodrow
Wilson, a dreadful president, because he spoke in whole sentences. He
might have been horribly wrong about the League of Nations (now the
über-corrupt U.N.), but hey, he had a Ph.D.
I'm
sorry to see our guys destroy their reputations among ordinary conservatives
over such a trivial matter. But it means they can't tell the difference
between reality and syntax. That lack of common sense disqualifies them
in my mind.
By
George Will standards, Barack Hussein was the greatest president in history,
while Harry Truman was a syntactically impaired goofball.
I
happen to disagree.
Don't
you?
3 comments:
Could not agree more
It's Trump's lies, not his syntax that matter. FWIW, quoting a 2017 tweet from an Obama appointee who was let go in 2014 by the Obama admin doesn't really help this case at all. On the whole this post is content free and irrelevant.
Excellent indeed!
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