On Donald Trump
Trump is fundamentally a student of his father’s, with advanced lessons from Roy Cohn. He’s learned the New York way of schmoozing, exaggerating, telling people what he thinks they want to hear, being very slippery and blatantly lying seemingly about even things there’s no reason to lie about, in order to show disrespect to people he wants to hurt. From Cohn, a strategy mix of intimidation, implicit blackmail, clandestine forbidden sex, hard partying, international intrigue, seduction, and hard-nosed threats.
And that’s worked remarkably, even unbelievably well for Trump.
Until now. The Presidency is not a real estate empire or a mafia family. The nomenklatura, or institutional bureaucracy or what Erdogan and Trump like to call “The Deep State” are notoriously entranched and hard to control. A far more proficient sociopathic President, Richard Nixon, found this out to his dismay, as did Bill Clinton to a degree. Though the latter, by his Elmer Gantry/Huey Long talents, survived.
Bill Clinton and LBJ were extroverted people persons and were great at gladhandling/manhandling people to get what they wanted from Congress and the bureaucracy. Obama, an introvert, was less successful.
But Trump as President of the USA is disastrous. He is not unintelligent within certain parameters, but his judgment seems to be impaired much of the time, he seems to have limited medium term recall which he covers for by lying and his credibility with the apparatus is less than zero. Calling them out by name to insult them doesn’t help either. And backstabbing the NRA live on TV? That was in a way delightful but at the same time I have to go whaaat is thaaat? I can’t think of a worse thing he could have done politically to undermine his base and get a lot of heavily armed people very nervous and defensive than by publicly suggesting that arms should be seized from US citizens by law enforcement. “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” I mean he actually said those words quote unquote. Is this a will to self-destruction like Hitler in his bunker? The entire world hopes not! Is it all a theatre of the absurd he simply does. not. care? Is he an agent provocateur dancing to the tune of Putin’s “chef?”
I don’t know.
But we are all going to find out.
Interesting times.
Copyright © 2018 Henry Edward Hardy
Trump, Year 2
We all know the pain of being separated from one beloved person.
Multiply that times 800,000 and you have the inevitable outcome of Trump’s plan to exile the Dreamers.
Pain and sadness, criminalization and forcible expulsion from the country for people who were brought here as children and grew up here.
In many cases, this is the only home, the only language, the only culture and nation they have ever known.
I just can’t get my brain around how anyone in the political class is even considering talking about this.
A hateful, horrible, hideous idea.
The eight thousand expelled Cherokees of the Trail of Tears times one hundred.
This is an expression of a genocidal hatred that goes beyond mere dumbass racism into the realm of intentional evil on a massive scale for fun and profit.
Trump, Year 2
Copyright © 2017 Henry Edward Hardy
Trump is like Elmer Gantry, only not smart, cool, or clever
Donald Trump reminds me a good deal of the fictional character Elmer Gantry from the eponymous 1927 novel by Sinclair Lewis and 1960 movie by director and screenwriter Richard Brooks. Gantry is a ne’er-do-well small time swindler and hustler with a sordid past who becomes involved with a charismatic evangelist and barnstormer who in the film is modeled after Aimee Semple McPherson.
Like Gantry, Trump is a liar, a womanizer, a cheat, and a scoundrel. Like Trump, Gantry is a manipulative psychopath who happily leaves a trail of ruined lives in his wake.
But unlike Trump, Gantry is cool, he is smart, and he isn’t blinded by malignant narcissism. Although Gantry doesn’t have any evident sense of conscience, he does seem to grasp that doing good feels good, that exposing the hypocritical and wicked feels better and best of all, he knows when the jig is up and it’s time to get out of town ahead of the posse.
Copyright © 2017 Henry Edward Hardy
Never Again
400,000 Americans and 20 million Allies died violently fighting Fascism in World War II. Another 35 million were tortured, gassed, burned, died of disease and privation, slaughtered, bombed, starved, shot, and beaten to death.
Yes Mr. Trump, I expect that “some of them were good people.”
And God bless them all for saving the world. And damn us all if we let it happen again.
Never. Again.
Copyright © 2017 Henry Edward Hardy
Liberals are unconsciously mirroring and enabling Trumps arbitrary skepticism of the media
I’m seeing a lot of my friends who think they are critical thinking intellectuals and think they oppose Trump, falling victim to imitating his tropes and memes.
Let’s take, “You can’t trust the mainstream media.”
I’ve been a thorn in the side of the New York Times and Guardian for decades now. I guess my high point as a loyal opposition came when the then-current editor of the NY Times, Bill Keller, called me on the phone because Art Sulzberger told him to and I got to tell him for three hours what I thought was wrong with the Times and how to restore it to its former greatness of the 1970’s.
It is fine and good to criticize wrong facts. To criticize the framing of a story. False equivalence. Errors in logic. Lack of historical perspective. Acting as stenographers for State and Defense. Paid content. Trivial articles pandering to the rich and privileged. Ridiculous reasons offered for anonymizing sources. Crappy clickbaitish “reviews” of video games which would never pass muster for books, movies or even TV reviews. Lots to talk about and speak to them about.
But what I am seeing now from a fair number of very smart friends who think they are critical thinking intellectuals and think they are opposing Trump is quite concerning.
“You can’t trust the mass media,” which is Trump’s trope, is spreading far and wide. This is the opposite of critical thinking. It is ad hominem argument.
Having so to speak thrown out the baby with the bath water, and arbitrarily rejecting information from the most trusted and reliable news sources, I see many of these folks posting memes and factoids because they agree with them. Many of these are either obviously false on their face from my perspective or have obvious errors in logic or framing and attribution, or lack thereof.
Okay so far not so bad, we all get fooled by trollish disinformation from time to time. Confirmation bias is rife. When I post false/wrong information and I learn otherwise, I acknowledge my error and correct it. If it is egregious, I remove it.
The problem I am seeing is folks who, when given evidence that their post is false, refuse to correct or remove it.
“I didn’t write it.”
“I never said it was true”
“People will be able to tell it is false.”
“I don’t care I like the meme.”
“I think it’s funny.”
No, no, no, no, and no.
This is the opposite of critical thinking. It is “I say it once, I say it twice, what I say three times is true.” It is Trump’s rhetorical answer to facts and logic. Blocking rational thought with solipsism and arbitrary skepticism without a reasonable critique of the facts presented in refutation, ignoring logic and reason because the other fellow is bad. Ad hominem argument. Or they challenge you to disprove their belief. Another fallacy, argumentum ad ignoratiam.
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
–Karl Rove, Republican operative
Is that what its come to? The Nazi Big Lie technique normalized and contextualized for all Americans now
1984 knocking at your door.
Copyright © 2017 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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