I’m writing this the morning after the first Fox News Republican presidential debates. I’m surprised my head isn’t throbbing. Had Jeb Bush been declared the clear winner, I think I would be ill and crabby by now, even two coffees into the day. Instead, hearing that Donald Trump is still in gives me hope that the man who says what he says will hang in there.
I like a man who says what he says, thinks what he thinks, wears what he wears and so forth.
Trump could be the Putin of America. Maybe he could win the South Pole for us, just by saying it’s ours. We’re winners, winners deserve planetary poles.
My heart skipped a beat when a Washington Post article referred to yesterday’s debates as “the first of the primary debates.” I panicked. Primaries? Already? Are we going to have 50 of these, spread out over 14 months? Save us all.
No, the first primary isn’t until February. Relax, this is just show.
The biggest news to come out of the debate was Trump threatening a third-party run if the Republicans won’t nominate him. So I guess it’s over. They have to nominate him. He has a weapon.
Trump defines himself as a great man because he is successful and he is a winner. People believe him, so he is successful. So he was right all along, so you have to believe him. He became rich by being rich to begin with and then by being a blowhard about it, so people would think he was richer than he was, so he became in fact richer than he was by leveraging his reputation. Why do people let him? You can just say no.
Just say no to the whole philosophy of winners versus losers. Last night Trump said that as president he’d see to it America takes care of her veterans. But he has made it clear that he divides veterans into two classes, the winners, who come back from victorious war unscathed, and the losers, who are captured or who come back with injuries. What is the likelihood that “take care” means anything more than celebrate the so-called winners and push aside the so-called losers? Hint: He uses the same breath to tell us he would repeal the Affordable Care Act.
To divide the world into winners and losers and treat these as permanent classes permits Trump to play his cheating game. It lets him say that because he’s rich he’s a winner, therefore, always a winner; therefore, you have to vote for him, because if you don’t, you support losers. People should turn their backs on that kind of nonsense.
The flip side of the winner game is the loser game, and it’s equivalent to it. If you buy into Trump’s world view, you also have to buy the view that people who aren’t currently successful are losers, that loser-ness defines them just as winner-ness defines the successful. Being a loser sticks to the unsuccessful like peanut butter to the roof of a dog’s mouth.
It just isn’t true. Character and success are not one and the same. Trump himself is a clear counterexample.
Exercises for readers who would choose to excel:
This week Obama’s Justice Department came out and said you can’t tell homeless people they can’t sleep outdoors in public if they have no place else to sleep. Why does Obama hate winners and love losers?
If your country owns one of Earth’s poles and another country owns the other one, and if there are 196 countries in the world, how many loser countries are there? What would your answer be if global warming were real? Does it matter whose pole is better?
If we want all the countries to be winners, doesn’t that mean we’d have to give the other ones both poles back? Try to justify the absurdity of your answer.
You can’t do it.
Go to the back of the class.