"The Curious Attraction of Donald Trump"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“The Curious Attraction of Donald Trump”

October 14, 2024

 

“‘But he hasn’t got anything on,’ a little child said.”

                                                                                                                The Emperor’s New Clothes, 1837

                                                                                                                Hans Christian Anderson

                                                                                                                Translated by Jean Hersholt, 1952

 

Despite the fact that he is coarse, rude and humorless, Donald Trump is attractive to millions of Americans. Most are religious and believe in their families and communities; they are patriotic, diligent, and endowed with an uncommon level of common sense. But what accounts for this attraction? While I don’t pretend to have all the reasons, simply addressing the question is instructional. He is despised by those who have made service in government their life’s work. He is despised by those who find vulgar his ravaging of the English language. He is despised by those who cannot stand his orange hair and red ties. On the other hand, he is loved by those who represent what Franklin Roosevelt once referred to as the “Forgotten Man” – America’s working men and women at the middle and lower end of the economic scale. His acolytes are those who do not neatly fit into an elitist identity – meaning they are largely white, working class people from fly-over states, those who Barack Obama once derided as clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” In other words, he is attractive to America’s broad middle class.

 

These people have watched as Democrat-led, Washington’s establishment divided people into identifiable sectors – women, people of color, proponents of LGBTQ, etc. – those seen as victims of white oppressors. His fans, the so-called oppressors regardless of social position or economic status, love that he is nemesis to progressive politicians; to administrative lawyers who feed off government; to university professors and administrators who rely on public grants; to private sector union leaders (but not union members); to school boards who protect predators and approve schools dispensing tampons in boy’s bathrooms; to spoiled college students who want their student loans paid off; to a media enriched by political ads, and to those enthralled with a sense of their own virtue; and to an entertainment industry that lacks any moral sense.

 

Using data from Statista and OpenTheBooks, spending on federal elections (President, Senate and House) compounded annually at roughly 14% between 2000 and 2020, while government spending compounded at about 7.5% over that same time. However, over those same twenty years median household income only compounded at two percent. The consequence is that lower and middle-income families have been left behind, as government bureaucrats, bankers, and media people have grown fat. Has this increased spending helped the middle classes? Last week, The Connecticut Mirror reported that United Way estimates that 40% of Connecticut’s households faced poverty in 2022. Keep in mind, Connecticut ranks eight when states are measured by median household income. Also donors, be they individuals, corporations or unions, expect a return on their investment. Remember Solyndra, the California-based solar panel company that in September 2009 received $535 Million from President Obama’s Energy Department and two years later filed for bankruptcy.

 

But I believe there is more to this. Political Parties are not static entities; they change over time, reflecting changing demographics and their own self-interests. For twenty years – 1932-1952 – the Democrat Party held the White House. Over the next forty years – 1952-1992 – roles were reversed, with Republicans holding the White House twenty-eight years and Democrats twelve. During those sixty years, only one election was close in terms of the popular vote – 1960. The elections of 1948, 1968 and 1992 were affected by third party candidates. But in most contests over those sixty years victors won overwhelmingly. However, in the past thirty-two years – 1992-2024 – Presidential elections, with the exception of 2008, have been close, reflecting a more divided (and less compromising) nation.

 

In the 1960s, Republicans were the Party of East Coast elites, big business and Wall Street. In 1968 they adopted a “Southern Strategy,” a term popularized by political strategist Kevin Phillips. Since 1932, the “Party of Lincoln” had been losing the Black vote to Democrats, so the Southern Strategy involved a plan to go after conservative white southern voters who, since the Civil War, had been Democrats. That, in my opinion, was a mistake – a short term fix to a long term problem. Today, once again the two political parties are undergoing another fundamental change, with Republicans pursuing working people, regardless of race, as Democrats implement a bar-bell approach – wealthy coastal elites, university professionals, media types, etc. on the one hand, offset with immigrants, students, and those who claim victimhood on the other.

 

I do not pretend to be able to predict the outcome of this election. Neither candidate would be my choice, though Mr. Trump’s actual Presidency (2017-2021) was better than his current campaign would suggest – and certainly better than the last four years of Biden-Harris, in terms of the economy, inflation, immigration, and foreign affairs. As for the Democrat alternative, what would we be getting? Ms. Harris’ performance on CBS’s 60 Minutes gave lie to her politics of “joy.” Like the child who viewed the Emperor’s new clothes in the epigraph above, there is little she has provided on which we can judge her. 

 

Donald Trump’s appeal reflects the fact that, even after almost ten years in the political limelight, he remains an outsider. He is an amateur politician in a coliseum of lions. It is as though a high school physics teacher and amateur tennis player stepped onto the courts at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and won the U.S. Open. He is despised by the establishment because he is not one of them. He promised to “drain the swamp,” which he never did, but he is still seen by Washington insiders as a threat to their comfortable lives. He has been attacked relentlessly. The Mueller investigation (begun in May 2017) into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign found, two years and $30 million later, no evidence of coordination or cooperation with Russia during the campaign. That investigation, like the failed impeachment attempts and the more recent Fani Willis and Jack Smith prosecutions, have only increased his support. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is real; its amplification by the media feeds his fans.  

 

The “progressive” Left is driven by a self-righteous sense of personal virtue. Think of President Obama telling Black men that if they do not vote for Kamala Harris they are misogynist. His sanctimony did not allow that they have minds of their own. In assuming this mantle, Democrats have abandoned the broad middle class of working voters – most of whom are white – those who once comprised their base. President Trump recognized that failure, which provided an opening. That, in my opinion, is at the heart of his attraction to so many Americans. 

Review - "Clear," Carys Davies

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Clear, Carys Davies

October 12, 2024

 

“Each time they rose he glimpsed the rocky shore, the cliffs, the absence of any kind of landing;

Each time they descended, the rocks vanished and were replaced by a liquid wall of gray.”

 

“looking back, there was only one thing that was completely clear to him,

And that was that he had loved the time he had spent with John Ferguson.”

                                                                                                                                                Carys Davies

                                                                                                                                                Clear, 2024

 

At 185 pages this is more of a novella than a novel. It is a story of solitude and human connection. It is a story of tenderness, courage and love. And it was an eye-opener for an American with only a dim knowledge of mid 19^th Century Scotland and two forces that impacted the country at that time: First, the Great Disruption when 450 Presbyterian ministers, rebelling against the patronage that allowed landowners to install their own ministers, broke away from the Church of Scotland; they were left homeless and without churches. Second, the Highland Clearances that forced the evacuation of inhabitants against their will from their homes in the Highlands and on Scotland’s northern islands, so landowners could raise sheep. 

 

John Ferguson was one who broke away from the Church of Scotland, and “became a poor man by throwing in his lot with the Free Church of Scotland.” Newly married and without income, he accepts a job to carry out a survey of a remote island and to evict the one person, Ivar, still resident. There would be no need for anyone to full-time supervise the thousand sheep to be brought there. Shearing and gathering lambs would be done once a year. The boat to take John and Ivar back would return in a month.

 

The story centers around John’s fall from a cliff shortly after arrival, and the care given him by Ivar who speaks only Norn, a form of Norse that even in the 19^th Century had largely disappeared. A strong bond develops between the two men. John’s accident gives purpose to Ivar’s lonely life. And John’s dependency on Ivar makes him question whether he can carry out his mandate. A calotype of Mary, John’s wife, plays a central role. Mary, concerned for her husband, hires a boat to bring him home early.

 

Ms. Davies’ story is atmospheric in terms of time and place. I was drawn to this remote, windswept island, adorned with cliffs that lead to pastures above, and to the two men at the center of the story. In the “Author’s Note” is a glossary of Norn words, a language that dates back to 1468 when the Danish King, Christian I, pawned the islands as dowry for his daughter who wed James III of Scotland. 

 

This is a short but beautifully written book whose images are matched by a sensitive description of a friendship, all of which will stay with you long after the last page has been turned.

"The Light of Battle," Michel Paradis

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Light of Battle, Michel Paradis

September 28, 2024

 

“He had wanted to be a general since he was a little boy…”

 

“He wore ambition lightly.”

 

The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower, 2024

                                                                                                                                Michel Paradis

 

The two quotes appear contradictory, and to an extent they are – the first appears on page 15, and the second in the “Author’s Note” on page 410. But they help explain the boy raised on a Kansas farm, in the last decade of the 19^th Century – a boy who became Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

 

In this deeply-researched book, Mr. Paradis tells the story of the preparation for Overlord, from the Cairo Conference in early December 1943 when President Roosevelt informed Prime Minister Winston Churchill of his decision to name General Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of Allied forces, to June 6, 1944. Eisenhower, not George Marshall, was the perfect choice, in part because of his experience in Washington and North Africa, but mostly because his modesty permitted him to deal with talented prima donnas like Montgomery and Patton, as well as with FDR, Churchill, and even Stalin and de Gaulle. He was allowed to build his own team. In Paradis’ words: “Looking forward to Operation Overlord, Eisenhower’s priority was building the right team because if he had learned anything over the past year, it was that putting the right people in the right positions was the most important decision he made.”

 

But it wasn’t just people who made this job challenging. He had to coordinate the different armed forces – army, navy and air – from two different countries. He had to get the number of ships needed to land 150,000 troops, thousands of vehicles, including tanks and minesweepers, as well as food, water and medical supplies on D-Day. He had to consider civilian casualties and whether to use white phosphorus munitions. Weather was a worry, as were the delays it might cause, as the British had learned at Dieppe. Churchill wanted a simultaneous landing on the south of France, which complicated the movement of LSTs. Keep in mind, at the same time Eisenhower was planning the invasion, German resistance In Italy had intensified. Allied forces, north of Anzio, were bogged down. After advancing the approximately four hundred miles from Sicily to Naples in four months, it took four more months for the Allies to press on the last forty miles from Anzio to Rome, which was finally reached in early June 1944.  

 

As readers, we are guided through this maze of logistic and bureaucratic threats and objections that Eisenhower faced. But we are also offered snippets of his early life, his family, and his personal life, including his relationship with Kay Summersby. In answer to the question of why another book on Eisenhower and D-Day, Mr. Paradis answers by noting that one effect of World War II was that the U.S. displaced the British Empire as the unrivaled leader of the West, and of the consequential role played by General Eisenhower in becoming the first U.S. President to be called “Leader of the Free World.”

 

Thousands of books have been written about Eisenhower and D-Day. This one deserves a spot near the head of the list.