All Trump, all the time,,, part (4)

Why the fight with the leading Republican conservative television network, Fox News? Because if Trump can set the terms with these guys and thereby with the forces that run the Republican Party establishment, Trump can set the terms with anybody.

What astonishes me (and disturbs me slightly) is that Trump is ripping up the political landscape inside the US.

Trump is transformative because he is aiming – I believe and in part observe – at the renegotiation of everything that besets America: political correctness, lack of suitable immigration controls, relationships with the USA’s trading partners, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and I suspect, Islam itself, and the tolerance which has been extended to it by Western political cultures and legal frameworks.

There is no monster he is not confronting, and people, especially America’s enemies, have every reason to be concerned.

Maybe the inclusion of tolerance of Islam on the list of things that needs to be renegotiated will seem a stretch to some. I sympathize with your doubts. Nevertheless the largest unspoken issue in Western political life these days is “what are we going to do with it?”.  Right now it sits in our constitutional structure and in our multi-cultural accommodationist framework as unassailable, even as jihadists seek to make our society unlivable, our freedoms nugatory, and our streets unsafe for non-Muslim women, and later for men.

We experience a totalitarian social ideology seeking to reform our lives in its intolerant image, and the people who come under police observation, and the harassment of human rights commissions, are those who draw attention to the problem, not the makers of the problem, or the inspiration for their deeds.

My fascination with Trump is that the guy is ripping up any rulebook that gets in his way, and he appears to be getting away with it, and to a degree we are breathing easier because someone, at last, seems to fighting the political decadence into which the United states has fallen.

Shenanigans around televized political debates are nothing new; I just finished reading of some that occurred when Ronald Reagan debated GHW Bush in New Hampshire back in 1979.

What distinguishes Trump is not so much his rudeness, which I deplore, as his ruthless determination not to accept terms that he considers disadvantageous. As Scott Adams observes, he is changing the game before he even enters the room to play it.