Several Waterfalls Cafe (my morning coffee shop) denizens asked me for my take on Trump’s speech about Afghanistan. I think I’ll call this segment of season one (and hopefully the final) of the Trump presidency “The Stuff With The Generals.”
Once again we are defining presidential normalcy so far down that we’re in an alternate universe where shifting gravitational fields resemble a rabid squirrel caught in traffic. Rapid cycling up, down, sidewise, and weightless states pull us in random direction and no direction at all.
Trump is like a mad monarch sometimes constrained by his sane advisors, or as pundits like to say by the adults in the room.
Not all monarchs and dictators were malignant narcissists like Trump. Some were pure garden variety psychopaths — manifestations of sadistic evil. Others were probably clinically psychotic. America has had none of these.
With Trump we keep having to say that his behavior is not normal. It’s unprecedented in all American history with the exception of the period when Nixon was mentally in free-fall and Alexander Haig and others made sure he wouldn’t start a nuclear war.
Now we have the supposed adults, Tillerson, the multi-medalled generals who I think Trump secretly envies, and Ivanka who in a less than grown-up way is rumored to get daddy to board the sane-train by putting her head on his desk (or perhaps his lap) and sobbing.
I don’t know enough about how to deal with the Afghanistan War to expound on it with any degree of confidence. This being said, it seems to me that if we couldn’t end it when we had more than 100,000 troops there it’s unlikely we’ll have better luck with a few thousand additional troops now.
I agree with what I am hearing on MSNBC and progressive radio, that Trump is in a no-lose position. If the generals manage to eke out enough of a success to allow Trump to declare victory and withdraw, he will take the credit. If we suffer an ignominious defeat Trump will blame the generals, saying he should have trusted his intuition all along.
And the beastly beat goes on… rimshot.