Showing posts with label revolutionary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revolutionary. Show all posts

Saturday, November 05, 2016

Heads Up, Gullibillies. Trump Is No Revolutionary, No Messiah, No Saviour.


Trump supporters share one thing - a belief that their guy will bring revolutionary change to the United States, its government and its economy. That's a religious-grade belief of the sort usually reserved for fundamentalists be they Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu even Buddhist.

Trump supporters have their own lexicon of hackneyed phrases including "crooked Hillary," or "lock her up" or the ultimate, "drain the swamp." They believe what they want to believe even if it means entering a fact-free existence.

They see Trump as some Jean d'Arc, ready and willing to take on all comers to restore America's national virginity. Odd that they would see this in a 70-year old blowhard who has never shown the slightest inclination of doing anything of the sort. No one seems to ask where this epiphany happened, or how.

What Trump is promising is nothing short of revolutionary change. Much of what he's promised in the horseshit he's been feeding his loyal Gullibillies is plainly extra-constitutional. He would have to defy the Constitution and flout it, procedurally and substantively, to "drain the swamp." That would trigger push back from the other two branches of government - the legislature and judiciary - and would probably result in impeachment proceedings.

If Trump wins this it won't be by a landslide. More likely a wafer-thin majority. There'll be no broad mandate for seismic change in that sort of win.

History is full of accounts of great revolutionary leaders: Cyrus the Great, king of Persia; Hannibal; Caesar;  Constantine and Charlemagne; Genghis Khan; Luther and Cromwell; the American revolutionaries including Franklin, Washington, Adams (Sam and John), Patrick Henry, Paine and Jefferson; Robespierre; Thoreau; Marx; Gandhi; Zapata, Mandela and Guevara; and more.

If you look at those revolutionaries you will find some powerful common attributes that are almost entirely absent from Donald J. Trump. Courage, humility, a drive to serve the general public (not just the Gullibillies), perseverance and patience, emotional intelligence to generate empathy, self-awareness and self-discipline are among these essential qualities. Trump doesn't have them. He never has and at age 70 he never will.