Everyone Is Smart, Except Trump
It really is quite simple. Everyone is smart except Donald J. Trump.
That’s why they all are billionaires and all got elected President.
Only Trump does not know what he is doing Only Trump does not know
how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. Anderson Cooper knows how to
stand up to Putin. The whole crowd at MSNBC does. All the
journalists do.
They could not stand up to Matt Lauer at NBC. They could not stand up
to Charlie Rose at CBS. They could not stand up to Mark Halperin at
NBC Nor up to Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic, nor Jann Wenner at
Rolling Stone, nor Michael Oreskes at NPR, at the New York Times, or
at the Associated Press. But — oh, wow! — can they ever stand up to
Putin! Only Trump is incapable of negotiating with the Russian
tyrant.
Remember the four years when Anderson Cooper was President of the
United States? And before that — when the entire Washington Post
editorial staff jointly were elected to be President? Remember?
Neither do I
The Seedier Media never have negotiated life and death, not corporate
life and death, and not human life and death. They think they know
how to negotiate, but they do not know how. They go to a college, are
told by peers that they are smart, get some good grades, proceed to a
graduate degree in journalism, and get hired as analysts. Now they
are experts, ready to take on Putin and the Iranian Ayatollahs at age
30.
That is not the road to expertise in tough dealing. The alternate
road is that, along the way, maybe you get forced into some street
fights. Sometimes the other guy wins, and sometimes you beat the
intestines out of him. Then you deal with grown-ups as you mature,
and you learn that people can be nasty, often after they smile and
speak softly. You get cheated a few times, played. And you learn.
Maybe you become an attorney litigating multi-million-dollar case
matters. Say what you will about attorneys, but those years — not the
years in law school, not the years drafting legal memoranda, but the
years of meeting face-to-face and confronting opposing counsel — those
years can teach a great deal. They can teach how to transition from
sweet, gentle, diplomatic negotiating to tough negotiating. At some
point, with enough tough-nosed experience, you figure out Trump’s “The
Art of the Deal” yourself.
Trump’s voters get him because not only is he we, but we are he. We
were not snowflaked-for-life by effete professors who themselves never
had negotiated tough life-or-death serious deals. Instead we live in
the real world, and we know how that works. Not based on social
science theories, not based on “conceptual negotiating models.” But
based on the people we have met over life and always will hate. That
worst boss we ever had. The coworker who tried to sabotage us. We
know the sons of bums whom we survived, the dastardly types who are
out there, and we learned from those experiences how to deal with
them. We won’t have John Kerry soothe us by having James Taylor sing
“You’ve Got a Friend” carols.
The Bushes got us into all kinds of messes. The first one killed the
economic miracle that Reagan had fashioned. The second one screwed up
the Middle East, where Iraq and Iran beautifully were engaged in
killing each other for years, and he got us mired into the middle of
the muddle. Clinton was too busy with Monica Lewinsky to protect us
from Osama bin Laden when we had him in our sights. Hillary gave us
Benghazi and more. And Obama and Kerry gave us the Iran Deal, ISIS
run amok, America in retreat. All to the daily praise of a media who
now attack Trump every minute of every day.
So let us understand a few things:
Negotiating with NATO
NATO is our friend. They also rip off America. They have been
ripping us off forever. We saved their butts — before there even was
a NATO — in World War I. They messed up, and 116,456 Americans had to
die to save their butts.
Then they messed up again for the next two decades because West
Europeans are effete and so obsessed with their class manners and
their rules of savoir faire and their socialist welfare states and
their early retirements that they did not have the character to stand
up to Hitler in the 1930s. Peace in our time. So they messed up, and
we had to save their butts again. And another 405,399 Americans died
for them during World War II. And then we had to rebuild them! And
we had to station our boys in Germany and all over their blood-stained
continent. So, hey, we love those guys. We love NATO.
And yet they still rip us off. We pay 4% of our gigantic gross
domestic product to protect them, and they will not pay a lousy 2% of
their GDP towards their own defense. Is there a culture more
penny-pinching-cheap-and-stingy than the fine constituents of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization? These cheap baseborn prigs will
not pay their fare. They are too cheap. They expect America to send
boys to die for them in one world war, then another — hundreds of
thousands — and then to pay for their NATO defense even a century
later. And then they have the temerity to cheat us further in trade
Long before Trump, they set up tariffs against us for so many things
If the average American knew how badly Europe has been ripping us off
for decades with their tariffs, no one in this country would buy
anything European again. We would say, as a matter of self-respect
and personal pride, “I no longer will buy anything but American, no
matter what it costs.”
Every American President has complained about the cheating and
imbalance — the NATO penny-pinching-cheapness, the tariff and trade
imbalances. In more recent years, the various Bushes complained about
it. Even Obama complained about it. But they all did it so gently,
so diplomatically. They would deliver the sermon, just as the pastor
predictably tells the church-goers on Sunday morning that he is
against sin, and the Europeans would sit quietly and nod their heads —
nodding from sleeping, not from agreeing — and then they would go back
out and sin some more. Another four years of America being suckered
and snookered. All they had to do was give Obama a Nobel Peace Prize
his ninth month in office and let Kerry ride his bike around Paris.
So Trump did what any effective negotiator would do: he took note of
past approaches to NATO and their failures, and correctly determined
that the only way to get these penny-pinching-cheap baseborn prigs to
pay their freight would be to bulldoze right into their faces, stare
them right in their glazed eyes with cameras rolling, and tell them
point-blank the equivalent of: “You are the cheapest penny-pinching,
miserly, stingy, tightwadded skinflints ever. And it is going to stop
on my watch. Whatever it takes from my end, you selfish, curmudgeonly
cheap prigs, you are going to pay your fair share. I am not being
diplomatic. I am being All-Business: either you start to pay or, wow,
are you in for some surprises! And you know what you read in the Fake
News: I am crazy! I am out of control! So, lemme see. I know: We
will go to trade war! How do you like that? Maybe we even will pull
all our troops out of Europe. Hmmm. Yeah, maybe. Why not? Sounds
good. Well, let’s see.”
So Trump stuffed it into their quiche-and-schnitzel ingesting faces.
And he convinced them — thanks to America’s Seedier Media who are the
real secret to the “Legend That is Trump” — that he just might be
crazy enough to go to trade war and to pull American boys home. They
knew that Clinton and Bush x 2 and Kerry and Hillary and Nobel
Laureate Obama never would do it. But they also know that Trump just
might. And if they think they are going to find comfort and
moderating in his new advisers, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, alongside
him…. Nuh-uh.
So CNN and the Washington Post and all the Seedier Media attacked
Trump for days: He is destroying the alliance! He attacks our
friends!
Baloney. Obama was the one whom the Left Echo Chamber… Chamber…
Chamber never called out for attacking our friends — Israel, Britain,
so many others — while cozying up to Hugo Chavez, bowing to dictators,
and dancing the tango for Raul Castro. Trump is just the opposite: He
knows who the friends are, and he wants to maintain and strengthen
those friendships. It is no different from a parent telling a
35-year-old son: “I have been supporting you for thirty-five years. I
put you through college by signing four years and $100,000 PLUS in
Loans. You graduated college fifteen years ago. For fifteen years I
have been asking you nicely to look for a job and to start
contributing. Instead, you sit home all day playing video games,
texting your friends on a smartphone I pay for, and picking little
fuzz balls out of your navel. So, look, I love you. You are my flesh
and blood. But if you are not employed and earning a paycheck — and
contributing to the cost of this household — in six months, we are
throwing you out of the house.” That boy is NATO. Trump is Dad. And
all of us have been signing for the PLUS Loans.
Negotiating with Putin
Putin is a bad guy A really bad guy. He is better than Lenin.
Better than Stalin, Khrushchev, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Pol Pot, Mao. But
he is a really bad guy.
Here’s the thing: Putin is a dictator. He answers to no one. He does
whatever he wants. If there arises an opponent, that guy dies. Maybe
the opponent gets poked with a poisoned umbrella. Maybe he gets shot
on the street. Maybe the opponent is forced to watch Susan Rice
interviews telling the world that Benghazi happened because of a
YouTube video seen by nine derelicts in Berkeley and that Bowe
Berghdal served with honor and distinction. But, one way or another,
the opponent dies.
Trump knows this about Putin. And here is what that means:
If you insult Putin in public, like by telling the newsmedia just
before or after meeting with him that he is the Butcher of Crimea, and
he messed with our elections, and is an overall jerk — then you will
get nothing behind closed doors from Putin. Putin will decide “To
heck with you, and to heck with the relationship we just forged.”
Putin will get even, will take intense personal revenge, even if it is
bad for Russia — even if it is bad for Putin Because there are no
institutional reins on him.
But if you go in public and tell everyone that Putin is a nice guy
(y’know, just like Kim Jong Un) and that Putin intensely maintains
that he did not mess with elections — not sweet little Putey Wutey
(even though he obviously did) — then you next can maintain the
momentum established beforehand in the private room. You can proceed
to remind Putin what you told him privately: that this garbage has to
stop —or else. That if he messes in Syria, we will do “X.” If he
messes with our Iran boycott, we will do “Y.” We will generate so
much oil from hydraulic fracturing and from ANWR and from all our
sources that we will glut the market — if not tomorrow, then a year
from now. We will send even more lethal offensive military weapons to
Ukraine. We can restore the promised shield to Eastern Europe that
Obama withdrew. And even if we cannot mess with Russian elections
(because they have no elections), they do have computers — and, so
help us, we will mess with their technology in a way they cannot
imagine. Trump knows from his advisers what we can do. If he
sweet-talks Putin in public — just Putin on the Ritz<— then everything
that Trump has told Putin privately can be reinforced with action, and
he even can wedge concessions because, against that background, Putin
knows that no one will believe that he made any concessions. Everyone
is set to believe that Putin is getting whatever he wants, that Trump
understands nothing. So, in that setting, Putin can make concessions
and still save face.
That is why Trump talks about him that way. And that is the only
possible way to do it when negotiating with a tyrant who has no checks
and balances on him. If you embarrass the tyrant publicly, then the
tyrant never will make concessions because he will fear that people
will say he was intimidated and backed down. And that he never will
do. Meanwhile, Trump has expelled 60 Russians from America, reversed
Obama policy and sent lethal weapons to Ukraine, and is pressing
Germany severely on its pipeline project with Russia.
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day, Donald Trump is over seventy years old. He has
made many mistakes in his life. He still makes some He is human.
But Trump likewise has spent three score and a dozen years learning.
He has seen some of his businesses go bankrupt, and he has learned
from those experiences to be a billionaire and not let it happen
again. No doubt that he has been fooled, outsmarted in years past.
And he has learned from life.
He is a tough and smart negotiator He sizes up his opponent, and he
knows that the approach that works best for one is not the same as for
another. It does not matter what he says publicly about his
negotiating opponent. What matters is what results months later.
In his first eighteen months in Washington, this man has turned around
the American economy, brought us near full employment, reduced the
welfare and food stamp lines, wiped out ISIS in Raqqa, moved America’s
Israel embassy to Jerusalem, successfully has launched massive
deregulation of the economy, has opened oil exploration in ANWR, is
rebuilding the military massively, has walked out of the useless Paris
Climate Accords that were negotiated by America’s amateurs who always
get snookered, canned the disastrous Iran Deal, exited the bogus
United Nations Human Rights Council. He has Canada and Mexico
convinced he will walk out of NAFTA if they do not pony up, and he has
the Europeans convinced he will walk out of NATO if they don’t stop
being the cheap and lazy parasitic penny-pinchers they are. He has
slashed income taxes, expanded legal protections for college students
falsely accused of crimes, has taken real steps to protect religious
freedoms and liberties promised in the First Amendment, boldly has
taken on the lyme-disease-quality of a legislative mess that he
inherited from Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama on immigration, and has
appointed a steady line of remarkably brilliant conservative federal
judges to sit on the district courts, the circuit appellate courts,
and the Supreme Court.
What has Anderson Cooper achieved during that period? Jim Acosta or
the editorial staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post? They
have not even found the courage and strength to stand up to the
coworkers and celebrities within their orbits who abuse sexually or
psychologically or emotionally. They have no accomplishments to
compare to his. Just their effete opinions, all echoing each other,
all echoing, echoing, echoing. They gave us eight years of Nobel
Peace Laureate Obama negotiating with the ISIS JV team, calming the
rise of the oceans, and healing the planet.
We will take Trump negotiating with Putin any day
