You might (or might not) appreciate this viewpoint on the "new" form of political action MAGA has introduced when Trump took office.
LINK: Bill Whittle: Five Hole Diplomacy
This is a 15 min video (The Right Angle Series) on Bill Whittle's website where each episode (up to two or three a week if things allow) involves each participant (Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Stephen Green) the opportunity to choose the subject of discussion, and it is a free-flowing discussion of the issue that I have found both highly entertaining and informative.
In this episode, they discuss Colombia's refusal to accept flights of illegal immigrants, and Trump's unique style of "diplomacy" which Bill Whittle has deliciously coined as "Five Hole Diplomacy".
To contrast this to the traditional government diplomatic response to issues, Stephen Green had featured a post on X by someone titled Cynical Publius which Bill Whittle chose as they lynchpin of his comparison to "traditional" State Department processes to Trump's "Five Hole Diplomacy": To fully understand just how remarkable that exchange back at the end of January was with Colombia was, you need to understand how Washington DC has traditionally worked through these sorts of issues, and the different way it works now under Trump.
I’ll illustrate.
- Traditional Approach:
- Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
- On Monday, the State Department convenes an interagency task force with DoD, NSC, DEA, INS, ICE, Commerce, Treasury and Homeland Security.
- The task force meets for four days and develops a position paper.
- The position paper is rejected by the Secretary of State, who is unhappy that insufficient equity considerations are built into the process.
- The task force reconvenes a week later to redevelop three new, equity-centric courses of action and create a new position paper.
- The process is delayed a week because Washington DC gets three inches of snow.
- SecState approves the new position paper for interagency circulation, and considerable input is received from the heads of other departments so the task force must reconvene.
- The original three proposed responsive courses of action are scrapped in favor of a new, fourth course of action that achieves the worst aspects of the three prior courses of action but satisfies the interagency.
- Someone in State who disagrees leaks to the Washington Post, who writes a story about how ineffective the Presidential administration is. T
- he White House Chief of Staff sets up a session three days later to brief the President, who approves the new fourth course of action.
- Over a month after the issue is first raised, the State Department Public Affairs Officer holds a press conference announcing that Colombia has agreed to try to send fewer criminals into the US and everyone declares victory.
- Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
- Trump Approach:
- Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
- After a par-5 third hole where he goes one under par, Trump uses his iPhone to post on social media as to how the USA will destroy Colombia’s economy if they do not do what the USA demands.
- By the time Trump gets to the par-4 sixth hole, Colombia’s President has agreed to repatriate all the illegal Colombians in his own plane, which he will pay for.
- Trump finishes three under par and goes to the clubhouse for a Diet Coke where he posts a gangsta AI image of himself and the new FAFO Doctrine.
- Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
Winning.
See the difference? It’s called LEADERSHIP. It is briliiantly done, IMO. I hope those of you who take the time to watch the entertaining and informative video enjoy the delivery as much as I did.
I posted this for a reason.
Doing things as they have always been done does not slow our country down from the cliff it has been approaching for nearly nine decades. We have been rushing headlong towards insolvency and ruin. And being $37 Trillion in debt, with a Trillion dollars being added every 100 days and paying nearly $600 Billion each year on servicing the debt ALONE means we don't have any time. It may be too late to save our country. But if we are going to try, we have to do it differently than we have, or we will get the same result, and our country is going to disintegrate.
We need to embrace the process wielding the chainsaw to cut the encrusted barnacles from the hull of our ship and discard the way we have been approaching it for more than 90 years because it doesn't work.