On Booman’s thread The Trump Phenomenon is No Joke thread, DerFarm replied to a comment I made about taking Trump seriously rather than treating him as some kind of fool by saying:
Why CAN’T we laugh him out of the arena??? We did it with Santorum. No one here is saying to IGNORE him … just laugh him out of the sphere.
I wrote a response to this. It grew. Read on for more.
You cannot laugh a clown offstage, DF. Not even an evil one. He has embraced…no, make that quite consciously amplified and emphasized…his clownishness. I suspect that this act plus his undoubted negative emotional power and sheer size-based physical power…the power of his voice, of his almost Kabuki-like gestures…is the secret of his success in negotiations. People go in thinking he’s just another dumbass and then he wastes them. Dominates them. Bet on it. They don’t know what’s hit them.
The only people who can effectively oppose him are those with either the threat of superior power…more resources and/or the ability to “make him an offer he can’t refuse” (Remember, he’s big in the casino scene. There are still some bad, bad boys floating around behind the gaudy tourist trap fronts of those Disney-like casinos. Bet on that as well.), or those who understand his dumb-act game.
So…understand in order to fight.
Understand your own forces and the enemy’s. You be bettah off.
Sun Tzu knew.
Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time.
Sun Tzu-“The Art Of War”
Trump’s crack about McCain not being a war hero? How he likes winners, not losers? Watch. He’ll win on that one, too. Every time some PermaGov fixmeister neo-whatever site lambastes him he will gain more converts.
Watch.
He’s like the mythic Greek Hydra. Cut off one head and two appear.
Eurystheus sent Heracles to slay the Hydra, which Hera had raised just to slay Heracles. Upon reaching the swamp near Lake Lerna, where the Hydra dwelt, Heracles covered his mouth and nose with a cloth to protect himself from the poisonous fumes. He fired flaming arrows into the Hydra’s lair, the spring of Amymone, a deep cave from which it emerged only to terrorize neighboring villages.[4] He then confronted the Hydra, wielding either a harvesting sickle (according to some early vase-paintings), a sword, or his famed club. The chthonic creature’s reaction to this decapitation was botanical: two grew back, an expression of the hopelessness of such a struggle for any but the hero. The weakness of the Hydra was that it was invulnerable only if it retained at least one head.
The details of the struggle are explicit in the Bibliotheca (2.5.2): realizing that he could not defeat the Hydra in this way, Heracles called on his nephew Iolaus for help. His nephew then came upon the idea (possibly inspired by Athena) of using a firebrand to scorch the neck stumps after each decapitation. Heracles cut off each head and Iolaus cauterized the open stumps. Seeing that Heracles was winning the struggle, Hera sent a large crab to distract him. He crushed it under his mighty foot. The Hydra’s one immortal head was cut off with a golden sword given to Heracles by Athena. Heracles placed the head–still alive and writhing–under a great rock on the sacred way between Lerna and Elaius, and dipped his arrows in the Hydra’s poisonous blood. Thus his second task was complete.
It is certainly going to be a Herculean task to beat this guy.
Like I said…watch.
So far, I don’t see any Heracles-level opponents. From any party.
Do you?
I thought not.
Watch. It’s gonna get interesting. If he’s foolish enough to confront the real PermaGov forces, then he will go down. One way or another. Until then? Can you imagine what he would do to HRC in a “debate?”
Please.
A horrible thought!!!
He’d crush Jeb Bush like a soft little rich boy nuisance. Which is what he is.
Of all of the possible candidates, I see only Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul as capable of dealing with him in a public debate, and I’m not sure Paul has the emotional chops to pull it off. Maybe O’Malley as well, but I haven’t seen enough of him. Also Biden, who is as tough as nails behind that “I made a gaffe!!!” front. It won’t be a policy wonk fight, that’s for sure.
Watch.
AG