Talking About Donald Trump: Bluster Isn't Strength

-


Would you consider Donald Trump the toughest US president by far?
On the contrary. I consider Donald J. Trump to be the weakest President of the United States after James Buchanan, the Chief Executive who sat on his hands and did nothing to prevent the secession crisis of 1860 before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Trump, of course, loves to talk tough. That’s been one of his personality traits since he became a public figure in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He has always been an abrasive, bombastic man who is fond of attacking other people verbally and invading their personal space to unnerve them. That’s been his shtick for as long as I remember; I remember being appalled when he called for the return of the death penalty in New York State during the media circus that sprung up during 1989’s “Central Park jogger rape” incident.
To me, Trump’s bellicosity, especially now that he is in the White House, is not toughness. It’s a weakness, especially when it concerns the moral and ethical issues of the use of Presidential powers and influence. It smacks of insecurity, of a person who ran for President without really being prepared for the job, didn’t really expect to win, and is now up to his eyeballs in a playing field for which his “tough guy from Queens” persona is not fit.
A real mensch does not kowtow to the leader of an unfriendly rival superpower and side with him against America’s entire intelligence community regarding Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
A real tough President does not try to placate “both sides” in the divide between white supremacists/neo-Nazis and the rest of society, as Trump did after the Charlottesville protests in the summer of 2017.
A strong President does not say “We will build a great beautiful wall on the southern border and Mexico will pay for it,” then take money from the Department of Defense budget (which is badly needed to improve housing conditions and other infrastructure in military bases all over the U.S.) to upgrade a few hundred miles of existing border barriers.
A strong President does not constantly lie about everything, whether it is about the aforementioned wall that Mexico will pay for or the phone call with Ukraine’s President in which Trump said he would continue providing Ukraine with military assistance in exchange for information about Joe Biden and his son’s business dealings.
A strong President does not attack the free press and call coverage of his activities as Chief Executive “fake news” simply because he doesn’t like the reporting. As Harry S. Truman once said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more