Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Trump Tells the Truth

In a debate dominated by paranoia and incoherent rage, Trump sailed through easily. After all, who can beat him at xenophobia? So long as the conversation stays on fear of refugees and the need to be tough, he wins without lifting a finger. Not only that, but he really does tell truths that other Republicans won't go near:
What do we have now? We have spent $3 trillion and probably much more. Thousands and thousands of lives, we have nothing. Wounded warriors all over the place, who I love, we have nothing for it. . . .

We have spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges and all of the other problems, our airports and all the other problems we have we would have been a lot better off I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East but to humanity, the people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away and for what? It's not like we had victory. It's a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion.
The escalation from $3 trillion, a number that could be defended with enough compound accounting, to the completely imaginary $5 trillion is typical Trump. But who else is telling the truth about how we got to this place? Certainly none of the other Republicans. The backers of Rubio, Christie and Bush seem to think that because their guys have lots of former assistant secretaries among their advisers and have been to lots of conferences with establishment military gurus, the turn to security should help them. But the voters don't see it, and Trump has put his finger on their sore spot: their crowd really did get us into this mess.

If toughness is what we need, Trump has that in spades. If what we need is a new approach, as everybody in the debate says, then only Trump has anything to offer. And if what we need is something very different from Trump's blustering style, something like experience and subtlety, then none of them can compete with Hillary and everybody knows it.

This is Trump's race to lose.

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

It's a pity Trump isn't running for president of Russia - he seems to have surpassed even Putin in that school of political blustering.