Washington Merry-Go-Round

IMMEDIATE RELEASE Dec 8, 2023
WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
Today’s Events in Historical Perspective                                                                     
America’s Longest-Running Column Founded 1932
Their pit bull
By Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift         
 
          WASHINGTON — The lawyer/president analogy is explanatory. People choose an attorney for one reason: to win. They want a pit bull in their corner. If the attorney also happens to be decent, upstanding, and moral, so much the better. If not, the absence of those qualities is not disqualifying. And so it goes for the Donald Trumps of the world.
          Leaders and potential leaders in Argentina, Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Romania come to mind. When people tire of democracy’s grinding pace and its failure to deliver on promises, the electorate starts looking for that pit bull who will deliver – or so they are mesmerized into believing.
          The problem, of course, is that once in office, such leaders rarely leave office or fulfill their promises, and when they do it becomes a zero-sum game in which they alone pick the winners and losers, with the winners becoming an ever-decreasing number of loyalists.
          The rise of the Internet and cable news have provided these anti-democratic, megalomaniacal types an unedited megaphone to spew their lies, their bigotry, their ability to incite, disrupt, stigmatize, and divide – all with near impunity. In our fractured information space, people hear what they want to hear, with public debate coming down to like-minded people engaging in one-sided conversations. Fox News leads the way in this, but there are other outlets to the Right of Fox that repeat and reinforce the pro-Trump perspective.
          However, not all voters pay attention to everything Donald Trump says or does. They are busy living their lives, and they don’t follow all the implications of Trump’s tough guy talk. They like his braggadocio; they think that’s part of politics, and they are not drawing a straight line from his boasts to autocratic government. Voters who back Trump do not care about his personal peccadillos. They ignore his character defects because they believe he is fighting for them. They believe it because he says it is so.
          Would he really be a dictator? Only on the first day, he said.
          His voters like him because he erases their worries and says he will take care of everything. He can end a war in 24 hours.
          His simplicity is both alarming and intoxicating. He tells his voters that he is fighting their government so that they don’t have to.
          Climate change? He says all the data about a warming planet is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
          Taxes? He signed into law a huge tax cut which mostly benefited people who are already well off, but he fooled his acolytes into thinking they had just gotten a gift.
          Immigrants? He blames most of the country’s ills on immigrants, claiming that they are disease-ridden terrorists taking American jobs.
          NATO? He would pull out of NATO, the Western military alliance that has proven to be the most successful peace-keeping force in history. No student of history, he has long bristled at how much the United States contributes to NATO while ignoring the benefits.
          In the end, half of the U.S. voting population voices support for Donald Trump. Why? Because he is a pit bull, their pit bull – until he is not.
 
          Eleanor Clift’s latest book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).
          Twitter:  @douglas_cohn
          © 2023 U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
          Distributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND