THE CHANCE FOR GREATNESS, BUT IT IS SO EASILY LOST
John Chuckman
The chance for greatness is not something offered every
leader.
The opportunity requires both a set of extremely adverse circumstances
and an exceptional person in power who overcomes them.
All too briefly, Obama seemed to have the chance in 2008,
but he very quickly proved himself incapable of rising to the challenge.
So, Obama goes down in history, despite his remarkable
achievement of becoming the first black President, as an extremely mediocre
leader who was bent by the very forces he should have controlled. He almost
melted away before our eyes, proving definitively that there is a great difference
between the talents required for political campaigning and those required for success
in office.
Trump now has an opportunity for greatness, more so than any
politician I can recall. He is faced with huge problems, many of the them the
work of the failed Obama, and they are more than just any set of problems, for
they involve the deaths and misery of millions and the risks of an
international nuclear holocaust.
It is already clear that Trump has the strengths required –
immensely energetic and hard-working, absolutely not intimidated by a powerful
and pervasive establishment, and a surprisingly resourceful mind.
But there are clouds on the horizon. Trump is one of those
people whose mind seems to crackle with ideas and notions, and, just as is the
case with others of this type, including many famous scientists and creative
talents, a fair number of the ideas and notions are not worth pursuing and some
are complete rubbish. I put into this category notions like a national Muslim
registry or the round-up and deportation of millions of Mexican illegals or
crippling the United Nations.
I would certainly add Trump’s words around the utterly
repulsive subject of torture, but here we find an example of Trump being really
clever, showing the kind of skill a statesman must possess. With his words on
torture, Trump got to tell the belly-over-belt segment of his followers that he
will do literally anything for dear old America, but he then played the game of
deferring to the wisdom of one of his most intelligent appointments, General James
Mattis, who opposes torture. Who can argue with a “Marine’s Marine” on such
topics? The Iron Chancellor himself would be proud of the whole performance.
Trump’s wall with Mexico for me is neither here nor there.
Lots of countries build walls, and while I am opposed to them in general, I recognize
the arguments for them, and of course every country has the right to protect
its borders.
But you cannot round up and deport millions, even if they
are illegals, without great adverse consequences. It is a non-starter as an
idea. What we have is a situation created by the ineffectiveness of past
governments over many years. That is a reality you must accept unless you want
to create, to put it mildly, one of the worst public relations fiascos of the
century. Remember, we live in the age of cell phone videos and the Internet, an
entirely different situation than what prevailed the last time America did the
very thing Trump is proposing, roughly ninety years ago.
Not many Americans likely realize that there was a precedent.
Starting in 1929 and for some years after, huge numbers of Mexicans – estimated
to have been between half a million and two million - living in America were
deported summarily. It is not a precedent to copy, smelling as it does of
activities we associate with the fascist governments of that same dark period. It
is something that cannot even be done without many extremely unhappy scenes.
Trump should build his wall and keep strict compliance with
law afterwards, but mass deportations will not go down well anywhere and will
only create big and ugly barriers in many of America’s relationships, and not
just those with Mexico.
Trump needs a filtering mechanism for his bubbling, teeming
thoughts because his better ideas and notions are the ones that promise to mark
him for greatness. I include here the end of America’s interfering and
overthrowing foreign governments, the end of the terrible Bush-Obama Neocon
Wars that have killed a couple of million and created millions of desperate
refugees, and his bold efforts to bring jobs to millions of Americans living in
what can only be called squalor. Those are the goals of a great leader.
And if he can succeed, I believe it is possible for Trump to
build a new coalition for his party. This kind of thing has happened before,
and if he could succeed at it, it would be yet another great achievement. The
Republican Party, before Trump hi-jacked it and gave new purpose, was moribund,
lacking any clear purpose beyond trying to achieve power and divvy up the
spoils of periodic victory.
The interesting thing is that the Democratic Party Trump
defeated has been in a somewhat similar state. Perhaps that fact is part of why
it morphed into the War Party. That party’s de facto leadership since the 1990s
has been the Clintons with their bounteous, mafia-like money connections. But the
Clintons were not only defeated by Trump (literally, both of them), but their
defeat was accompanied by shocking revelations about them and their party’s
inner workings which I do not believe can be easily lived down, and there
remains a substantial probability that one or both of them is going to be
prosecuted, either for the frauds of the Clinton Foundation or for the flagrantly
illegal behavior of Hillary as Secretary of State.
