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In The Art of the Hostile Takeover 101, Donnie gets an F. [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-29
The Preamble .
The one common thread during the campaign was “If I were King,” he sang, “nothing bad would ever have happened.” This was an interesting claim with no basis in reality. Without any critical thinking whatsoever, millions believed him.
His character.
His whole life has been a zero-sum game coupled with the narcissistic belief in his intellectual capacity. Any loss is someone else's fault or fraud and cause for revenge. If only god were so perfect a specimen.
Rule by Sharpie
Once the Great Orange Asp had been ensconced on the throne, no wish could be denied when blue books could be scribbled upon with a Sharpie. Revenge is sweet.
The Methodology
Bend like a pretzel before admirable autocratic strongmen. Threaten your allies with tariffs and delegate all the messy stuff to others. By messy stuff, I mean everything that will make you look bad in the polls and gives you plausible deniability with a simple “I don’t know anything about that”.
Diplomacy?
It is for losers, except if we win something.
Initial results thus far
Today, Le Monde had an interesting editorial on his borrowed motto, “Peace through strength.”
Donald Trump's laborious diplomatic debut -Le Monde in English.
US Vice President JD Vance touted the arrival of a "new sheriff" for world affairs in the person of Donald Trump during his speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14. Two months after Trump's return to the White House, however, this ambition is put into perspective by the amateurism the new administration has demonstrated in international affairs and by the lack of results on the issues it itself presented as imperative.
Trump's handpicked top security and defense officials acted with baffling levity by exchanging confidential information in a group chat on a messaging system deemed unsafe by experts. Especially since a journalist, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine who revealed the scandal on March 24, was inadvertently added to this group. In addition to this fault in the planning of the bombing that targeted Houthi militiamen in Yemen on March 15, there was the administartion's calamitous crisis management. It was quick to downplay the incident, maintaining a disastrous impression of irresponsibility. Trump's usual tactic of blanket denial and blaming the press has shown its limits.
*Handpicked as in the sense of reading the back of a cereal box.
Trump said he was confident of bringing the war in Ukraine to an end in record time. But the negotiations initiated with Russia without any preconditions have so far produced only mixed results. The hastily trumpeted agreement on a Black Sea ceasefire on March 25 highlights the White House's eagerness to achieve a breakthrough whatever the cost. In reality, Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Witkoff said is not "a bad guy," looks to be the one setting the negociations' pace.
Of course, at the same time, he was denigrating his allies.
Yes but
He won his own golf tournament. You had better be impressed. You would hope $18 million was well spent; otherwise, DOGE should get involved. [as if]
This is just a warning about tariffs: in addition to the usual, industries protected by tariffs stagnate, and tariffs are more difficult to cease as a result.
Overall, thus far, you get an F because you highlighted one problem [government waste] but ignored everything else and caused unnecessary chaos whilst ineptly trying to beat it with a TechBro hammer.
One small note
To make any of this stick, you have to break through the MAGA noise machine, and that is going to take some doing.
A Morning Muse
~A
PS as for your Peace through Strength: What a shitshow.
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