Trump is the Official Form of the Destroyer for Media/Leftist Smugness

Great article by someone on the left.

The end of the piece describes the author as:

Devin Stewart is senior fellow and director of the Asia program at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a Truman Security Fellow. He has served as an adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University and New York University. The views expressed here are his own.

So he certainly seems to be a member of the smug leftwing establishment.

Here are his thoughts:

Like most Democrats, I reacted to the stunning 2016 election of Donald Trump with a combination of confusion and dread. After all, Hillary Clinton was the favorite and, to Democrats like me, a Trump victory seemed to portend certain economic disaster, nuclear war, and pretty much the end of America as we knew it.

But now nearly two years into his administration, Trump has presided over a "winning streak" that includes a booming economy and stock market, an unemployment level at a nearly 50-year low, two Supreme Court appointments, no new foreign wars or domestic terrorist attacks emanating from abroad, a significant degree of progress on trade relations with Canada and Mexico, a "needed reset" on the China relationship, and the prospect of peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Perhaps it is time that even his opponents reconsider Trump. Does Trump have a strategy that we can describe? Is Trump a return of Richard Nixon, of Ronald Reagan, or of something else entirely? After several months of watching the news without gaining any answers, I finally canceled my cable subscription and sought out other sources. I found some insights in unexpected places.

Trump's presidency marks a return to realpolitik and great power politics. No one knows what goes on in Trump's mind or if even he believes he has a strategy. What matters is what Trump does, so this essay looks at his actions, considers the bias of his critics, and seeks a new way to understand his policies. It considers the possibility that Trump has a method to his madness.

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Perhaps our shift toward a reversion in history also means we are seeing a cultural reversion as well. Smugness has become politically tone deaf.

It's possible that his opponents simply do not get Trump's humor. The famous comment Trump made in 2016 about hoping that Russia would find Hillary Clinton's 30,000 missing emails was delivered amid the Republican candidate's riff about the Jon Lovitz character Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar, from Saturday Night Live. Another source of media consternation was Trump's remark that he preferred soldiers who were not captured, in contrast to John McCain, who was captured in the Vietnam War. Al Franken made the same joke about 20 years ago and Chris Rock delivered it in his 2008 HBO special to huge laughs. Rock's hilarious punchline: "I don't wanna vote for the guy that got captured. I wanna vote for the mother f--er that got away!" But when Trump made the same comment, much of the media portrayed these jokes as evidence that Trump was a treasonous, insensitive monster. Of course, there are different standards of propriety for politicians and for comedians, but one can't help but sense that there is an entirely different standard for Trump.

The same dynamic played out after Trump called the gang MS-13 "animals" (which he later clarified) and also when he said that people disputing the confederate statues in Charlottesville had "very fine people on both sides" of the debate. In these two episodes, the U.S. media twisted the president's statements to make him sound like he was calling all immigrants animals and that he was calling neo-Nazis fine people. But that's not what he said. Slanted media coverage of politicians is nothing new, but fellow Democrats must be aware of it even when it confirms their views.

Of course, Trump, like all presidents, is trying to have it both ways. He is trying to encourage his base, while seeking to avoid alienating the mushy middle. It is a bit unseemly and at times hypocritical, but it is politics, not bean bag. Trump's opponents like to call out his hypocrisy in hyperbolic terms, but in so doing they simply stoke outrage while failing to provide any sort of objective analysis about what he is really accomplishing.

posted by Ace of Spades at 03:50 PM

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