Donald Trump has two basic talents. The first is for self-promotion and the second is a strong, feral survival instinct. Those two things were really all it took for him to rise to become the most famous man in the world with the most important job on the planet. (That should tell you something about American culture but it's too depressing to contemplate.)
The talent for self-promotion has snowed everyone from sophisticated investment bankers, who kept loaning him money year after year despite repeated business failures, to small-town business owners who thought that he was a great real estate developer and later a great president just because he told them so. They all believed his lies.
The survival instinct is probably the more important characteristic because it spared him repercussions for failure after failure. It didn't hurt, of course, that for most of his life he had a rich father he could tap whenever things got rough. Nonetheless, for someone who isn't very smart, charming or interesting, Donald Trump has shown amazing resilience. His survival instinct got him to the White House and it sustained him through four years in a very difficult job for which he was uniquely unfit. Any one of the dozen scandals that have engulfed him since he started running for the presidency in 2015 would have finished off any other politician. But Trump survived all of them, just moving like a shark through the water from one self-induced crisis to another.
Read more at:
Donald Trump won't survive this American carnage of his own making | Salon.com
Showing posts with label Limited. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Limited. Show all posts
10/18/21
EU: Three lessons for Europe from the fall of Afghanistan - by Jean-Marie Guéhenno
Europeans were never serious about Afghanistan. This is probably because, deep down, they knew that the buck did not stop with them. It now seems likely that the Taliban’s takeover of the country will make Europeans even more inward-looking and fearful of a world they do not understand. And the rapidly emerging consensus that state-building is impossible may heighten their anxiety about foreign engagements.
That mindset is an acid that destroys the bonds that should tie Europeans together, leading to the kinds of xenophobic attitudes that were in evidence during the migration crisis created by the Syrian war. As refugees fled the violence in Syria, Europeans were confronted with an unpalatable choice between building ever higher walls, cutting unsavoury deals with so-called buffer countries, or losing control of migration flows. Yet there is only a small distance between accepting that some people cannot be helped and thinking that they are not worth helping. The self-confidence of Europe – which is essential if it is to actively shape its own future – has been damaged by not just its weak operational capacities but, even more so, the ethical crisis of a continent that claims to be universalist but reserves that universalism for its privileged tribes.
Read more at: Three lessons for Europe from the fall of Afghanistan – European Council on Foreign Relations
That mindset is an acid that destroys the bonds that should tie Europeans together, leading to the kinds of xenophobic attitudes that were in evidence during the migration crisis created by the Syrian war. As refugees fled the violence in Syria, Europeans were confronted with an unpalatable choice between building ever higher walls, cutting unsavoury deals with so-called buffer countries, or losing control of migration flows. Yet there is only a small distance between accepting that some people cannot be helped and thinking that they are not worth helping. The self-confidence of Europe – which is essential if it is to actively shape its own future – has been damaged by not just its weak operational capacities but, even more so, the ethical crisis of a continent that claims to be universalist but reserves that universalism for its privileged tribes.
Read more at: Three lessons for Europe from the fall of Afghanistan – European Council on Foreign Relations
10/18/17
Britain thinks Germans care about Brexit — they don’t
Brexit is not a political issue in Germany. No election will
be won or lost because of it. Angela Merkel’s position — to walk in
lock-step with France and the Commission — is not controversial, it is
consensus across the political landscape.
For Berlin, Brexit is less of a negotiation than a punchline. Germans officials like to joke that Brits are quickly becoming the largest refugee group in Berlin.
They are bemused at how the British have become more literate in the minutiae of EU rules than at any time during their unlucky four decades as members of the bloc.
Few in Berlin are following the finer points of the U.K. debate, however. Boris Johnson’s recent pronouncements on clearing out “the dead bodies” in Libya and his recitation of Rudyard Kipling in Myanmar got more notice than Theresa May’s Florence speech, for example.
Read more: Britain thinks Germans care about Brexit — they don’t – POLITICO
For Berlin, Brexit is less of a negotiation than a punchline. Germans officials like to joke that Brits are quickly becoming the largest refugee group in Berlin.
They are bemused at how the British have become more literate in the minutiae of EU rules than at any time during their unlucky four decades as members of the bloc.
Few in Berlin are following the finer points of the U.K. debate, however. Boris Johnson’s recent pronouncements on clearing out “the dead bodies” in Libya and his recitation of Rudyard Kipling in Myanmar got more notice than Theresa May’s Florence speech, for example.
Read more: Britain thinks Germans care about Brexit — they don’t – POLITICO
3/21/17
The US in Limbo: President Trump Still Hasn’t Done Very Much - by Michael Grunwald
Monday marks the end of President Donald Trump’s second month
in office. And once again, it was a month dominated by news coverage of
President Donald Trump.
He plunged into a ferocious battle over Obamacare, delivered his first speech to Congress, released his first budget blueprint and revised his controversial travel ban. He also accused his predecessor of tapping his phones, demanded a congressional investigation of his accusation, and then refused to withdraw it even after the investigation swiftly debunked it.
If that didn’t seem presidential—well, it actually was, because Trump is the president. And he’s been a perpetual presidential motion machine, signing executive orders, announcing new policies, attacking the media and bragging about how much he’s getting done.
But he hasn’t gotten much done.
Trump signed only one substantive piece of legislation since February 20, repealing a minor Obama administration rule that made it harder for the mentally ill to buy guns. Otherwise, in Month Two his impact on the laws of the United States consisted of renaming a veteran’s health clinic in western Pennsylvania and signing two symbolic bills about the importance of encouraging more women in science and technology fields. His push to repeal Obamacare is stumbling on Capitol Hill; his budget seems dead on arrival; his revised travel ban, like the original, has been blocked by a judge. He made big splashes with executive orders purporting to roll back Obama-era environmental rules, but in reality they merely announced his desire to roll back those rules. He did fill four more slots in his Cabinet, but three slots remain empty, and below those headline jobs the vacancy problem in his administration is becoming extreme: Overall, according to the Partnership for Public Service, he has only filled 20 of the 553 key positions that require Senate confirmation—and has not even picked a nominee for 497 of them.
So far, though, the Trump presidency has been strikingly thin on lasting accomplishments, and presidents don’t usually find it easier to get things done as time passes, especially when there’s scandal in the air. Trump did greenlight the Keystone and Dakota pipelines that Obama had held up, while his Department of Homeland Security has already taken a much stricter stance on undocumented immigrants. And he’s certainly signaled a new approach to foreign policy with his relentless hostility to Mexico, his odd chumminess with Russia, and his White House’s groundless and inexplicable claim that the British were also spying on him. But the laws that were in place under Obama are still the law, and almost all the rules that preceded Trump are still the rules, even if Trump’s regulators seem unlikely to enforce some of them. In our review of Trump’s first month, we quoted the sage advice Bill Walton learned from Coach John Wooden: Don’t mistake activity for achievement. The advice remains sage even when the activity gets a lot of clicks and cable news hits.
Read more: President Trump Still Hasn’t Done Very Much - POLITICO Magazine
He plunged into a ferocious battle over Obamacare, delivered his first speech to Congress, released his first budget blueprint and revised his controversial travel ban. He also accused his predecessor of tapping his phones, demanded a congressional investigation of his accusation, and then refused to withdraw it even after the investigation swiftly debunked it.
If that didn’t seem presidential—well, it actually was, because Trump is the president. And he’s been a perpetual presidential motion machine, signing executive orders, announcing new policies, attacking the media and bragging about how much he’s getting done.
But he hasn’t gotten much done.
Trump signed only one substantive piece of legislation since February 20, repealing a minor Obama administration rule that made it harder for the mentally ill to buy guns. Otherwise, in Month Two his impact on the laws of the United States consisted of renaming a veteran’s health clinic in western Pennsylvania and signing two symbolic bills about the importance of encouraging more women in science and technology fields. His push to repeal Obamacare is stumbling on Capitol Hill; his budget seems dead on arrival; his revised travel ban, like the original, has been blocked by a judge. He made big splashes with executive orders purporting to roll back Obama-era environmental rules, but in reality they merely announced his desire to roll back those rules. He did fill four more slots in his Cabinet, but three slots remain empty, and below those headline jobs the vacancy problem in his administration is becoming extreme: Overall, according to the Partnership for Public Service, he has only filled 20 of the 553 key positions that require Senate confirmation—and has not even picked a nominee for 497 of them.
So far, though, the Trump presidency has been strikingly thin on lasting accomplishments, and presidents don’t usually find it easier to get things done as time passes, especially when there’s scandal in the air. Trump did greenlight the Keystone and Dakota pipelines that Obama had held up, while his Department of Homeland Security has already taken a much stricter stance on undocumented immigrants. And he’s certainly signaled a new approach to foreign policy with his relentless hostility to Mexico, his odd chumminess with Russia, and his White House’s groundless and inexplicable claim that the British were also spying on him. But the laws that were in place under Obama are still the law, and almost all the rules that preceded Trump are still the rules, even if Trump’s regulators seem unlikely to enforce some of them. In our review of Trump’s first month, we quoted the sage advice Bill Walton learned from Coach John Wooden: Don’t mistake activity for achievement. The advice remains sage even when the activity gets a lot of clicks and cable news hits.
Read more: President Trump Still Hasn’t Done Very Much - POLITICO Magazine
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