Long article, with a number of good points
If you understand anything about modern American elite culture, call to mind the totality of the persons of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: their respective educations, life experiences, philosophies of the human person and politics, and everything that makes them who they are.
Next, imagine them, alone in that room with Kim Jong-un, trying to negotiate for you.
The result is parodic. What, in their person and experience, would render Obama or Clinton suitable for the role? Such people, along with most establishment Republicans are wholly unequipped. Wholly unequipped. They are wholly unequipped to do anything other than follow a risk-averse script, cobbled together by committees upon committees of bureaucrats.
As one Washington, D.C. bureaucrat who has worked closely with two U.S. cabinet secretaries and the head of a regulatory agency told me, “n anecdotal support of this very correct evaluation . . . the amount of preparation, and scripting, and artificiality that goes into a bilateral meeting with the foreign counterpart of a minor cabinet secretary is embarrassing and absurd.”
An average, celebrated elite American political leader’s meeting with another world leader only makes sense for a few moments in a predetermined photo-op, with a phalanx of fake experts supporting them as they serve as talking heads, with all manner of technocrats carrying them along a long and complicated process before and after the meeting, supported by white papers and myriad bureaucratic procedures meant to deflect all risk and, of course, and even more importantly, accountability.
President Trump, on the other hand, simply needs to be secured firmly in the role and then pointed in the right direction. So long as his self-interest is tied to peace, he seems exponentially better, even granting all manner of bullish and hardened personality flaws.
Why?
First, as I pointed out in “David Brooks and the Lizard People,”Trump’s decades of experience in urban real estate, as opposed to habitual risk aversion in the safe sectors inhabited by our supposed best and brightest, no doubt give him insight into the totalitarians who actually run the world. Brooks is right that “[t]he world is a lot more like the Atlantic City real estate market than the G.R.E.s.” Thus, Trump understands the other guy better, and read and dealt with him personally and politically, without the baggage of the silly and contradictory views of human nature absorbed by our elites at fancy schools and exposed in their hollow rhetoric.
In other words, Trump eschewed both the wooden, faux-toughness of Hillary Clinton and the faux-inclusivity of Barack Obama. Neither of them had the stomach for actual politics dealing with actual people. Whatever his flaws, Trump is a spirited man with plenty of intestinal fortitude who knows viscerally how fear of loss and desire for gain drive human dealings.
Second, because Trump actually considers it his main job to negotiate himself, directly, with their man in charge, and get right to the point. He isn’t “professional” enough to pass the buck to the administrative state. He thinks politically, in an almost pure fashion, and considered it obvious that it is his job to wrest a victory for the American people and the world from the meeting and knows it’s in his own self-interest to do so, because he will now be judged accordingly.
https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/12/thank-god-trump-isnt-a-foreign-policy-expert/
If you understand anything about modern American elite culture, call to mind the totality of the persons of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: their respective educations, life experiences, philosophies of the human person and politics, and everything that makes them who they are.
Next, imagine them, alone in that room with Kim Jong-un, trying to negotiate for you.
The result is parodic. What, in their person and experience, would render Obama or Clinton suitable for the role? Such people, along with most establishment Republicans are wholly unequipped. Wholly unequipped. They are wholly unequipped to do anything other than follow a risk-averse script, cobbled together by committees upon committees of bureaucrats.
As one Washington, D.C. bureaucrat who has worked closely with two U.S. cabinet secretaries and the head of a regulatory agency told me, “n anecdotal support of this very correct evaluation . . . the amount of preparation, and scripting, and artificiality that goes into a bilateral meeting with the foreign counterpart of a minor cabinet secretary is embarrassing and absurd.”
An average, celebrated elite American political leader’s meeting with another world leader only makes sense for a few moments in a predetermined photo-op, with a phalanx of fake experts supporting them as they serve as talking heads, with all manner of technocrats carrying them along a long and complicated process before and after the meeting, supported by white papers and myriad bureaucratic procedures meant to deflect all risk and, of course, and even more importantly, accountability.
President Trump, on the other hand, simply needs to be secured firmly in the role and then pointed in the right direction. So long as his self-interest is tied to peace, he seems exponentially better, even granting all manner of bullish and hardened personality flaws.
Why?
First, as I pointed out in “David Brooks and the Lizard People,”Trump’s decades of experience in urban real estate, as opposed to habitual risk aversion in the safe sectors inhabited by our supposed best and brightest, no doubt give him insight into the totalitarians who actually run the world. Brooks is right that “[t]he world is a lot more like the Atlantic City real estate market than the G.R.E.s.” Thus, Trump understands the other guy better, and read and dealt with him personally and politically, without the baggage of the silly and contradictory views of human nature absorbed by our elites at fancy schools and exposed in their hollow rhetoric.
In other words, Trump eschewed both the wooden, faux-toughness of Hillary Clinton and the faux-inclusivity of Barack Obama. Neither of them had the stomach for actual politics dealing with actual people. Whatever his flaws, Trump is a spirited man with plenty of intestinal fortitude who knows viscerally how fear of loss and desire for gain drive human dealings.
Second, because Trump actually considers it his main job to negotiate himself, directly, with their man in charge, and get right to the point. He isn’t “professional” enough to pass the buck to the administrative state. He thinks politically, in an almost pure fashion, and considered it obvious that it is his job to wrest a victory for the American people and the world from the meeting and knows it’s in his own self-interest to do so, because he will now be judged accordingly.
https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/12/thank-god-trump-isnt-a-foreign-policy-expert/
