Donald Trump knows one thing
By: Hugo Gurdon
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The United States under President Donald Trump is liked less by the rest of the world than it was during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but it is furtively much more admired.
It is also more respected in the way that matters most, which is that other nations know they cannot ignore or flout us with impunity. The nation is more powerful.
The transformation is due to the leadership of a president unwilling to buy the fool's gold of feigned foreign friendship at the price of American national security and the future of the West.
Trump's detractors see his narcissism and avarice and make the mistake of thinking those are all that motivate him. They don't believe that making America great again is a real goal or that he could approach it rationally even if he cared about it.
Their hatred blinds them, so they appraise him poorly and couldn't bring themselves to give him credit even if the red miasma of their loathing did not prevent them from seeing he deserves it.
It's true that Trump has no ideology or coherent set of principles. He clings to a jumble of mutually exclusive opinions, and they clash all the time in his startlingly contradictory pronouncements. But like the hedgehog that knows one big thing, Trump has a single irreducible aim, which is revealed by the MAGA slogan — it really is to restore this nation's strength and global preeminence.
He never loses sight of it, and it guides him even when he makes sharp changes of course. It is there when he rhapsodizes about the beauty of tariffs and switches to the efficacy of trade deals. It is not lost when he is musing about doing a deal with Iran's mullahs, nor when he is smashing them with bunker busters in Operation Midnight Hammer.
As an opportunist, he is always weighing disparate choices and recalibrating their relative merits. But that does not mean he wavers in what he is trying to achieve.
Which leaves America where, six months after Trump was sworn into office for the second time?
Here: The U.S. again dominates the Middle East with its ally, Israel; Russia has scuttled away, abandoning its Axis ally; China has been put on notice that America is not afraid to project power on the other side of the world; Iran, the sinister enemy of the past two generations, is a cowed paper tiger; Arab governments are delighted and moving toward normalizing relations with Jerusalem; NATO has agreed to rearm (although the promise to spend 5% of GDP will be fudged); trade deals are being struck; antagonistic foreign taxes are being withdrawn, the economy is humming along and stock prices stand at record highs; the southern border is secure and illegal immigrants are being sent home; billions of dollars stolen by Medicaid cheats are likely to be saved; and the 2017 tax cuts look like they will be made permanent, putting dollars back into the pockets of the Americans who earned them.
Not all of these gains will be secured. Some will be compromised, and others may go awry. But they all make the nation stronger. It's what America voted for. That doesn't happen by accident.
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And surely China must be shaking in its boots.
Right now I'm sure it's probably more of a girdling of the loins, the shaking will come later.
Wishful thinking on your part. Expect China to react no differently than it did to 145% tariffs.
And even that is a bit of a stretch.
The world does not admire him, factions of right wing extremists in other countries admire him.
No one in our own country should admire him.
He should have been removed from the Republican ticket the first time when he openly mocked a handicapped reporter.
Is that a Republican value? Should that open hate and disdain for a handicapped man doing a job be valued? How did that make America great? Is this the video you want to show your children if how to behave?
That is one example among hundreds of examples of terrible behavior coming from one entitled wealthy man who cares for no one but still was elected.
There is no 3D Chess going on, just a power grab, naked ambition, disdain for anyone he deems beneath him.
That tax and spend bill he just signed was his ultimate revenge against his voting base who he feels failed him by not handing him two landslides.
And in typical hateful revenge fashion he bullied Republicans into passing it even though they knew what a hot mess it is for their own constituents.
Because most of the cuts won't hit until the midterms Republicans are primed to blame that hot mess on Democrats even though it got zero votes from Democrats.
That two faced behavior is what's being embraced as making America great but it's just shameful.
Republicans keep lying and Trump keeps lying because that is what Republicans choose as their behavior.
The world has good people in it, not just right-wing extremists, and the world does not admire us any longer.
Admiration is for good, not lies.
The world has moved on almost overnight and it is moving on without America as a guiding light.
Well, I don't see that all. Could you elucidate?
No one our own country should admire him
Why would a Canadian claim Trump is from Canada?
Trump doesn't give hand outs like Obama and Biden did. Trump shut off the cash flow. So they don't like him.