Finneran: Explaining Trump

Friday, December 11, 2015

Tom Finneran, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

We are a cotton-candy nation. Our bodies are soft. Our minds are soft. We want everything coated in sugar and we demand simple solutions to difficult complex problems. As with a television drama, everything must be neatly solved in 48 minutes, with 12 minutes of commercials.

Enter Donald Trump.

But do not make the mistake of blaming Trump for the state of the union. Trump is simply exploiting the circumstances bequeathed to us by “experienced political leaders”. Such leaders, both Democratic and Republican, have shared the stage for the following:

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

Staggering deficits;
Mediocre to utterly horrid schools;
A meddlesome bullying bureaucracy;
Multiple foreign affairs disasters;
A crumbling national infrastructure;
Ungovernable and unlivable cities;
The outsourcing of millions of jobs while simultaneously looking the other way at a flood of several million unskilled undocumented “folks” into the country. (Dare we, the sophisticated, call them “aliens”? Webster’s Dictionary does……dare we, the sophisticated, call them “illegal aliens” which ordinary Americans do).

The list could go on and on and on. And the fact that there are some mild exceptions to every listed failure does not diminish the point. Are we to cheer for the fact that we are not yet Haiti?

Serious leaders should consider the implications of each failure on the future of the nation. The last twenty years have not been good years for America at home or abroad and because of that fact the American people have lost faith in the political class.

Trump-o-phobes need not worry. He will never be elected to the Presidency. He will however wield a disproportionate effect on the election. The irony of course is that President Obama’s nuanced rhetoric, so delightful to the biases of the national media, is also catnip to Trump and his followers, for Trump goes the full 180 degrees away in cringe-inducing barroom language. Consider for example his “ISIS policy”: “We’re going to bomb the ---- out of them”. John Kerry must have swooned. Can you imagine the tut-tutting in the Harvard faculty lounge where the worship of “soft power” is the sole acceptable religion? I would pay to be a fly on the wall, although I’d probably die from the vapors of condescension in such a room.

No honest person can dispute the complexity of these failures of the political class. Similarly, no honest person can dispute that it takes time to address such complexities in a meaningful way. The roots of the complexities can be traced back many years and the solutions are not to be found in 48 minutes, with 12 minutes for commercials. Let’s get real.

At the same time however, let’s get real with our language. The American people sense the timid cotton-candy nature of our language. They see through the euphemistic charades of the political class. They yearn for a Harry Truman saying to the lying Russians “keep your god-damned word”, or a JFK somberly announcing the activation of troops and the naval blockade of Cuba, or Reagan’s challenge to the hideous Soviets to “tear down this wall”.

Trump gets the fact that there is much to be said for such straight talk. And much more to be said against double-talk. The double-talk, the euphemisms, the cotton-candy nonsense of our times speaks to a national timidity about our values, our culture, and our heritage. It’s as if Western civilization feels a need to apologize.

There is no such need, certainly not from America or Americans. Yes we are a contradictory often hypocritical nation and our history is not the history of a special heaven on earth. That said, we remain, for the present at least, the world’s best hope and Trump exploits that fact.

The multi-decade failures of the political class have given rise to Trump, Carson, and Fiorina in this election season, and in some meaningful way even to Senator Obama himself as he gave voice in 2008 to the frustrations of the people with their rulers in Washington.

Stay tuned re Trump. He has benefitted enormously from the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Should there be more attacks on American soil he will benefit further. Such attacks would provide clarity to the otherwise always foggy swamp of the Middle East. Such clarity would also very likely induce Hillary Clinton to publicly break with the President…………but that’s a topic for another time.

Until then, the spectacle goes on.

View Larger +