Jammin’ With Trump
11th February 2017
In the month since Trump was inaugurated, and in the three months since he was elected, two things have become clear.
One is that what he says, and especially what he tweets, is fundamentally just noise. It has no connection with any concrete policy, and only tenuous connection to anything that he will eventually wind up doing.
So why does he do it? We can’t know for sure, but its result is to fully occupy the bandwidth of his enemies (and a number of his putative supporters). One traditional military tactic is to jam the other guy’s radars so he can’t tell what is actually going on, and the equivalent seems to be working on Trump’s opponents’ ‘mindshare’ very effectively. It’s like watching my wife work the cats with a cat dancer — they can’t ignore that flouncing feather or red dot, they have to run after it. She, in the meantime, is laughing uproariously; and I suspect that there is a lot of laughter filling the Oval Office of late.
The other is that the Angry Left is cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Most of the protesters and rioters of late are of two groups: Activist college students and urban minority thugs. They are accustomed to having authority figures, either college administrations or Democrat civil governments, roll over and play dead whenever they raise their voices. That will not work with Trump or with anyone in his administration, and eventually Trump will turn into Nixon and you’ll have dead bodies in Berkeley and Baltimore — and nothing will be done because it will look like a requisite response to nation-wide insurrection. Since these people don’t bother to learn any history they won’t be aware that the response to the Kent State shootings in 1970 was some sad music and Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972. You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.
So what can we expect in the future? Trump is going to keep doing what he’s doing because it’s working. The Left is going to run itself ragged about things that don’t matter a damn, and in the meantime the government is going to be pursuing its program, which is guaranteed to make ‘progressive’ heads explode.
The whole Democrat party is going under suicide watch, because they’re so used to winning that they don’t have the psychological toughness to cope with losing the way they’re going to be losing for the next four years. These violent protests will either fizzle out, when their instigators realize that that they aren’t doing anything other than alienating the people whose support they need, or they will escalate to the point where the administration will feel safe in stomping on them. I remember the Sixties; they fought the law, and the law won.
It will be ‘interesting times’, for sure.