This item says it all and conforms to my own thinking. Both of us thought he might pull it off but just as surely had no way to clearly do it. What he did was pure genius and the whole campaign depended completely on the press doing his work for him and they did just that even when they attacked.
His was the only answer to the Obama coronation we witnessed in the past two election were the press stonewalled serious concerns over suitability. How did anyone think that a socialist, Islam sympathizer with zero administrative talent would be able to respond properly to a crisis escapes me and that has been proven in spades. He simply postpones.
The media did not coronate Donald Trump. He used them to anger the American people which caused them to arise to support him. Attacking his inflammatory messages merely repeated the good news for his true audience. The trap for them is that they could not ignore him because he was pulling the audience as well.
So let us recognize real genius and understand that he will be a true American Strong Man able to get his way every which way that advances American interests globally...
Conrad Black: The genius of Donald Trump
Conrad Black | July 22, 2016 11:23 AM ET
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/the-genius-of-trump
Even in the week that he is nominated by the Republican party for the
presidency of the United States, intelligent people fail in droves to
understand what Donald Trump has accomplished. It was disappointing to
read the editorial in this newspaper on Tuesday that “a Trump presidency would be a descent into the uncertainties of anger, bitterness, and division
… a recipe for disaster.” This is a widespread view, but it is bunk. It
reminds me of Tom Wicker’s prediction in The New York Times the Sunday
before the inauguration of Richard Nixon in 1969, that the
president-elect would “blow up the world,” and by Scotty Reston in the
same newspaper about 12 years later that Ronald Reagan would be a
complete failure who would ride back to California like a disillusioned
cowboy after his first term. As the world knows, but may have forgotten,
Nixon ended school segregation and the draft and the endless riots and
the skyjackings and the assassinations, reduced the crime rate, founded
the Environmental Protection Agency, opened relations with China and a
peace process in the Middle East, extracted the U.S. from Vietnam while
retaining a non-communist government in Saigon, and signed the greatest
arms control agreement in world history with the U.S.S.R. while
re-establishing American nuclear superiority, and was re-elected by 18
million votes. The subsequent Watergate nonsense, tawdry though it was,
doesn’t alter the fact that his was one of the most successful
presidential terms in U.S. history. It is probably better remembered
that Reagan produced America’s greatest economic boom of the 20th
century and bloodlessly won the Cold War, and was re-elected by 15
million votes.
I don’t predict the same level of success for Donald Trump, but such a
performance is more likely than the triumph of bigotry, discord and
international conflict that the Post editorial, in the prevailing
conventional wisdom, foresees. These parrots of gloom should be
celebrating the fact that one of the only moderates among the Republican
candidates won. Senator Ted Cruz pitched his campaign to the
Bible-thumping corn-cobbers with M16 rifles in the rear windows of their
pickup trucks and announced that God had told him to run. Trump and
Sanders are the only candidates who favour universal health care, and
Trump, contrary to a great deal of unfounded over-reactive comment about
him, never said anything remotely antagonistic about women, gays,
African-Americans or Latinos who came to the U.S. legally.
What the world has witnessed, but has not recognized it yet, has been
a campaign of genius. No one in history has come from an apolitical
background to take over complete control of one of the great American
political parties. World-historic generals, Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight
D. Eisenhower, were recruited by party grandees. Newspaper publisher
Horace Greeley for the Democrats (1872), and utilities executive and
lawyer Wendell Willkie for the Republicans (1940), were nominated, but
they won narrowly, did not take over the party organization or put the
party elders to flight, and had no chance of winning (against Grant and
Franklin D. Roosevelt). The Trump candidacy was greeted with howls of
derision — the cognoscenti conducted a Bataan Death March retreat. Trump
couldn’t get more than 20, 30, 40 per cent, would be trashed at the
convention, would splinter the party, would be waxed by Mrs. Clinton
(who has had problems enough coming in ahead of a campy Vermont
socialist and avoiding an indictment).
As Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio observed as he left the race, having
been bombed by almost a million votes in his home state by Trump (who,
remember, had no “ground game”), “There was a tsunami coming that no one
except Mr. Trump saw.” These earthshaking lamentations for those
identified in both parties with the failures of the past 20 years are
completely implausible. Trump didn’t give us the immense housing bubble
and terrible financial crisis, over a decade of war in the Middle East
well conducted by the military but leading to colossal strategic and
humanitarian disasters, the doubling in seven years of the $9 trillion
of national debt accumulated in the previous 233 years of American
independence, and an endless sequence of foreign policy humiliations:
disappearing red lines, a nuclear sell-out to Iran, and unprecedented
cheek from the penurious Russian mountebank Putin, allowed to pretend he
has the force of Stalin.
These wailing commentators should be asking why the powers that be of
both parties didn’t lift a finger while 12 million illegals flooded
into the country, and why the authors of these fiascos, after 60 years
of triumph over the Great Depression, Nazism, Japanese imperialism and
international communism, suddenly became an elite of idiots who could
not run a two-car funeral, apart from the expertise and courage of the
armed forces, mis-deployed though they were. Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton can’t utter the phrase “Islamist extremism,” the president
called the Fort Hood shooting by a jihadist “workplace violence,” and
told the joint chiefs of staff that the greatest danger facing America
is climate change. What sclerosis has taken hold that the great
achievements and generally high level of competence of 10
administrations, five of each party, (FDR to Bush senior), suddenly was
warped into this nightmare of serial self-inflicted blunderbuss wounds,
causing great collateral damage in the world?
Donald Trump saw it and none of those who governed and legislated for
a living did (apart from, to a degree and through such rose-tinted
glasses his vision is blurred, Bernie Sanders). The country has tried
changing parties in the White House and the Congress (Tom Foley to Newt
Gingrich, who is not “odious” as the Tuesday NP editorial claimed,
merely flakey, to Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, and now the more promising
Paul Ryan). By any normal criteria, the whole governing elite should be
sent packing, bag and baggage, foot, horse and guns. The commentariat
should be celebrating the fact that Donald did the necessary to round up
the Archie Bunker vote, and it is little wonder that it is now almost
half the people, but is a moderate in all policy areas except illegal or
hostile immigration and unequal trade deals; and that Hillary has
managed to drive off the loopy left. If we were now witnessing a contest
between Sanders and Cruz, there really could be an impending
catastrophe.
Now that Trump is the nominee, having come from the political
wilderness and paid for his own campaign, he will drastically scale back
the stylistic infelicities (which are as disagreeable to me as to most
serious people, but are just part of his shtick). He is not ideological
and will make the system work — he is, as he never tires of telling us, a
deal-maker. In foreign policy, he will be neither trigger-happy like
George W., nor an other-worldly pacifist like Obama. He will spend a
billion dollars of the Republican party’s money reminding the country
that legally and ethically, Hillary is carrying more dead weight cargo
than the Queen Mary. He and Hillary will now both campaign toward the
centre, but whoever wins, this is the last stand of moderation. One more
debacle like the past four or five presidential terms, and the animals
will be released. The paint-ball parks, the shooting ranges, and the
teeming ghettos (scores of millions of Americans unnoticed by Norman
Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Walt Disney) will not be gulled again by a
limousine liberal in a neon pantsuit or a pseudo-blue-collar
billionaire.
The U.S. and the world could do much worse and the media, whom Donald
has rightly taken to the woodshed to the general delight of the public,
should stop wringing its hands and report more perceptively and equably
this performance of great virtuosity in the greatest circus of all,
which has caught them all with unclean hands and their pants down.
Vulgar, corrupt, banal and half-mad though it is, America remains
magnificent in a way, and absorbs the world’s attention; we’re all still
watching.
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