Let’s be clear about one thing. In my opinion Kamala Harris was just a DEI hire. She was fundamentally incompetent but selected and appointed to demonstrate diversity, equity and inclusion as VP. Apart from her remarkable ability to generate meaningless word salad about anything (and everything), she had no redeeming characteristics which would have allowed her to be of value as President – either for the US or for the world. Even as a token woman she would have been a disaster. (I listened to her talk about the LA fires yesterday and it was an embarrassment).
So my reaction to the results of the US Presidential election was first of immense relief that the world would avoid four miserable, wishy washy years of Biden being followed by an even worse four years of Harris. I am not sufficiently opposed to, or disturbed by, Donald Trump as a person or his behaviour to object to him as President. I think he is pompous and crude and vulgar but he has felt the pulse of the working people of the country much more than any one among the Democrats. He is also the appropriate, abrasive personality needed at this time to clean-up after years of mess. A Ronald Reagan would have been far too laid back and would not have suited the needs of the times. The effete Democrats and their intellectual pretensions bring to mind a degenerate Berlin of the late 20s or even the degenerate and dissolute Western Roman Empire before it fell. I am constantly amazed at how closed and petty the minds of “learned liberals” are. I now associate arrogance and nasty intolerance with the Liberal label. Trump, for all his petty faults, does know how to make a deal and he has a gut feeling for the right political direction for the country. He understands, I think, that it is making real things which others want, which is what lies at the core of a country’s prosperity. I think he has an intuitive understanding of what a deal really is. He knows in his bones – even if he does not articulate it very well – that a deal in a conflict situation always involves the minimisation of the total pain. It is only deals made in times of peace and growth where the art of the deal is looking for a maximisation of the total joy. Win/win does not apply to conflict situations. So, I was quite pleased at the election results.
The US – and the world which follows the lead of the US – desperately needs much more than just a course correction. It needs a sharp change of direction away from the elitism of the self proclaimed intelligentsia and the insidious woke virus which has been corrupting and eating away at the body politic. I was not, and am not, even mildly sympathetic to the promotion of sanctimonious wokery, the glorification of freaks, the canonisation of pretend victimhood and the stifling of entrepreneurship. So, I was first enormously relieved to see Harris lose, but I am an optimist at bottom and was also quite pleased to see Trump win.
Unlike many, I am quite hopeful that under a Trump Presidency, there is a much greater probability for resolutions of conflict in the world, for a stimulation of global economic growth, and above all for eradicating the wokery disease now endemic in the US and which has spread across the globe. More bilateralism and less internationalism is badly needed. At least 5 of the UN’s 15 specialist agencies ought to be scrapped. (The EU also needs much dismantling but Trump can only affect this indirectly). A Trump Presidency is needed I believe not only for a change of course in the US, but also for the change that needs to follow in the rest of the world. Europe and Canada and parts of S America and Asia also desperately need to correct course. Mucking out the stables of “social academia” globally is not going to be easy or quick. Under the vacillations of Obama and the utter incompetence of Biden, the Mid East conflagration had become inevitable. Under EU arrogance and Biden’s support of NATO and EU expansion, the Russia / Ukraine conflagration became inevitable. (That Biden was senile and not responsible for what was done in his name for the last 2-3 years is moot).
The cease-fire in Gaza may not last very long but it is a start. It is pretty impressive that it got put in place before he had even assumed office. Biden and his now-pardoned-guilty team got nowhere since the Hamas atrocities of October 7th. The first rule of negotiation I was taught when seeking funding for contract research, and later when I worked in sales, was that the first bid or offer you make should be outrageously positioned to shift the playing field towards you. It is also the first rule when going into an arbitration. Make your claim as extreme as possible. Every arbitrator – of necessity – seeks the middle ground. Now even before he assumed office, Trump started his outrageous positioning. Ultra-woke Trudeau came running and then resigned. Greenland is already on the table even if indignant Danish voices are being heard. Denmark has not done very much for Greenlanders over the years and is no longer the principal in the discussion. It is the Greenlanders who now suddenly find that their citizenship is carrying a growing value tag. Greenlanders are calculating what their windfall could be worth, whether as a part of Denmark or of the US or of both! And so also with the Panama Canal. One outrageous statement by Trump has changed the playing field and even the game being played. In fact some of Trump’s protagonists thought they were playing basketball are now scrambling as they find that Trump has started by playing soccer. I see that on his first day as President the Indian government assured the US that some 18,000 Indians illegally in the US would be taken back by India. Trump has already put BRICS on notice that putting forward alternative currencies to displace the US Dollar would be frowned upon. The BRICS countries are now back-tracking on some of their rhetoric. What were effective threats from foreign countries for Biden are seen as provocations to be avoided with Trump. And so it goes. Trump 2.0 is quite a different beast to Trump 1.0.
The size and inefficiencies of governments around the world have kept on increasing for the last 70 years (not least due to the examples set by international agencies). In a little way, Argentina recently started demonstrating that many government civil servants are really not necessary at all. Trump and his DOGE ar likely to take it very much further. I only hope that some of the good housekeeping gets exported to the profligate and bloated bureaucracy that is the EU. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency “has vowed to cut bureaucratic red tape by 50 percent, reduce federal spending by US$1 trillion over the next four years, and re-engineer the function of government by providing real-time budget tracking to the US public”. We shall see.
And of course common sense needs to return to immigration and the misuse of applications for “asylum”. The self-righteous sanctimony of the liberal left has to be stopped and the high priests of the religion of multiculturalism need to be defrocked – in public.
…. Much to the chagrin of his critics, Trump’s mass deportation plan is remarkably popular — not just among his supporters, but American voters generally, and Hispanics in particular. And Trump already appears to be living up to his pledges — with the controversial CBP One app shut down, a suite of Biden executive orders rescinded, a border emergency declared, and the Laken Riley Act about to be signed into law. …..
Nevertheless, if the contrast between Trump’s first and second presidential portraits is any indication, Trump 2.0 emerges energised, defiant, sharper to the strategies of his adversaries, and determined to complete the mission he was sent to accomplish in Washington.
I am looking to see the Ukraine/ Russia conflict be resolved, not to anybody’s liking, and not perhaps in 100 days, but with the lowest total pain, in around 12 – 18 months. I have no doubt that a workable solution is going to include ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia and some form of restraints on NATO expansion. I look to a focus on growth and an abandonment of virtue signalling – especially by industry. Companies need to get back to providing the best product and abandon advertising how woke they are. I have no objection to an America First policy by Trump’s government. That is actually the duty of any national government in any country. Their primary obligation is to take care of their own citizens first.
Maybe my optimism will be unfounded.
But I think not. The legacy of both Bushes and of Obama look fairly lacklustre in hindsight. Obama’s foreign policy was a disaster and he was particularly bad in many domestic areas. (I was very taken with Obama to begin with, but it didn’t last. He was a nice guy, like Jimmy Carter, but ….). It could be that Trump’s Presidency may turn out to be the next most successful after Reagan.
The k2p blog 