Posted on 01/22/2021 7:27:27 AM PST by MtnClimber
...There will be many postmortems of this era written in the coming months, from people on all sides of the political spectrum, and you will be sick to death of reading them before very long. So I will keep mine brief. In the end, Donald Trump made the classic error of many brash reformers who arrived in a stagnant, corrupt capital promising to take on the system, and who ended up getting chewed up and spit out by it. He forgot that the proper sequence of events is: first you consolidate power, and then you implement your agenda. It seems rather obvious to say that before one takes on powerful, entrenched interests, one should take the time to fill every possible position in one’s administration with smart, loyal subordinates. They say, for example, that by the end of his time as Premier, Leonid Brezhnev had just as much power as Josef Stalin ever had, and that was precisely how he did it – everyone in any position of power in the USSR was a friend of Brezhnev, and thus whatever their friend asked them to do, they did. But Trump’s personnel choices were a chaotic rolling disaster from the beginning. He fired loyalists like Mike Flynn and indispensable men like Steve Bannon who had gotten him where he was, replaced them with mediocrities or traitors, and put up with them long after it became obvious that hiring them was a mistake. He would take to Twitter and publicly complain about people he had hired and had the power to fire for months instead of quietly explaining to them that they wanted to spend more time with their families and showing them the door. There were good reasons for the anti-nepotism laws passed after the presidency of JFK, who had made his younger brother Attorney General. Presidents must often say “no” to advisors, sometimes dress them down and remind them who the boss is, and occasionally even fire them – all of which is much harder to do if they have a close personal attachment to them. Trump kept his bubbleheaded daughter and her shifty, tone-deaf husband on as unofficial advisors with no government salary or on-the-books title, thus circumventing the letter of the law and ignoring the wisdom behind it. This led him into blunder after blunder that a man like Bannon would never have let him fall into.
In addition to this, Trump had the power to purge his enemies from every three-letter Deep State spook agency in Washington, but he didn’t do it, even after Chuck Schumer obligingly played Littlefinger to his Ned Stark by warning him not to trust them and telling him they had “six ways from Sunday” to get at him and remove him from office. Having survived one way from Sunday in the form of the failed impeachment attempt, he seems to have completely discounted the notion that there might be five more left. There is an old saying that “if you shoot an arrow at the king, you’d better not miss”. This is because if you do, the king has to behead you – if he lets traitors go without consequence, if he signals that there is no price to be paid for attempts to betray and overthrow him, then there will be no end of ambitious men who will take the gamble because it has no downside. In our modern age, of course, we do not behead traitors, but any president with a rational personnel policy would have conducted sweeping purges after the failed impeachment. His enemies even expected him to do this, and yet it really never came. Most of the people who challenged him never even lost their jobs,.....
A worthwhile read. Someone should send this to Trump.
BOTH parties colluded to cheat him out of office.
For US to have a chance the GOP must die.
For me it’s actually pretty simple. Just watch and learn, and apply what I’ve learned.
What has happened to President Trump and what WILL happen to him is nothing short of a giant “NO TRESPASSING” sign designed to ward off those not already part of the ruling class.
Aww. Here come the do-nothing scribblers. Their fingers will still be typing while they are being loaded onto the boxcars.
I’m normally not a fan of opinion writers. Typically, I find them useless and promoting their own agenda.
This article is an exception — at least for me. As I think about what happened to Trump, I have come to the same conclusion as the writer. While I 100% agreed with his agenda, he did not finesse the system. He used a frontal assault and did not seem to solve the most basic management problems - loyal employees.
While I fully understand his use of Twitter as a primary form of communication, he overdid it. I’m not sure why. Maybe ego? Anyway, he pissed off as many as he enamored. In the end, there were enough pissed off because of his so called “reckless” behavior AND his assault on the deep state that they just got him they way they knew they could. He dodged most of the big bullets, but not the last and most important bullet. Getting re-elected — even if it was stolen (which, of course, it was).
It could be in the end Trump’s role was to stir the hornet’s nest.
Now hopefully some of the people who were inspired by him will take up the charge.
But there was nobody else who could have accomplished what Trump did.
There’s a lot of truth in this article.
Yes indeed, 2020 election was stolen; however, the corruption of communists, money chasers/bribes, Dominion machines, etc was so deep & widespread, no one could have defeated that treasonous cabal.
Trump DID expose the corruption...and it's up to patriots to destroy it completely...with extreme prejudice.
The criticism of President Trump’s personnel decisions is completely justified. I did state some of the same concerns back when they were happening (or not happening). He was still the best President of my lifetime, and likely ever.
Trump needed Gen Flynn advising on his staff choices, not his children (some are liberal and clueless) or people who were disloyal and trying to undermine him. He was a great president in spite of this, but could have done much more to drain the swamp.
Great article. Very true. Sad to say, but we simply were not playing 4D chess. Otherwise everyone who betrayed the president would have been out of a job, and all those who worked to help him succeed would have had power. Why we fired Flynn and Bannon???
“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told Rachel Maddow .
This article begs the question: Can you consolidate power in Washington when Congress must approve Cabinet picks? (I.e. if McConnell and Graham won’t allow you to put conservatives in position)
“It could be in the end Trump’s role was to stir the hornet’s nest.”
AGREED!
“Trump DID expose the corruption...and it’s up to patriots to destroy it completely...with extreme prejudice.”
Agree. It’s not clear who might step up or if anyone will. That’s the big issue in my mind.
And hopefully awaken the sleeping giant.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.