The Biggest Flip-Flopper: Donald J(ackass) Trump

A common political epithet in the United States is "flip-flopper." This is considered a devastating characteristic, denoting indecisiveness and weakness. (And of course "weak" and "indecisive" leaders are assumed a priori to be BAD leaders.)

So here's a trick Trump's Establishment enemies have missed: tagging Trump with the "flip-flopper" label. He's certainly provided loads of soundbites they could use to devastating effect to "brand" him that way.

Just on the issue of DACA, how many times has Trump seemed to change his mind by saying different and contradictory things? [1]

But instead of pasting a Trump-style sobriquet to Trump's forehead, like "Flip-Flop Donald," the bourgeois yakkers of the Establishment media persist in trying to figure out what Trump "really means" or "really wants" or what his "actual position is." And the bourgeois politicians of the Democratic Party keep trying to "negotiate" with Trump and get him to "clarify his position."

What fools. Perfect foils for the inveterate con man Trump. A standard m.o. (modus operandi) of con men is confusing their marks, keeping them psychologically off-balance, the better to manipulate them, to buffalo them into the traps the con man sets.

Trump doesn't have positions. He's a fast-talking but very predictable con man who uses verbiage as a weapon, pure and simple. What he "wants" at any given moment is what he senses will produce an advantage for himself. If tomorrow the racists and xenophobes and fanatical nationalists of America lost interest in "the wall," so would Trump. His "positions" change from day to day, or even from sentence to sentence because he is winging it. He's a creature of almost pure instinct. So trying to figure out his calculations is a fool's errand because he does very little calculating.

Why would a person who calculates have the assistant Attorney General take credit for firing the FBI Director, have the story put out that it was because Comey was unfair to Hillary Clinton (!) and then go bragging to the Russian Foreign Minister and the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. how he fired Comey to get the "Russian meddling" investigation off his back, AND tell a TV interviewer the same? For that matter, why would a guy whom the Democratic Party and much of the Establishment media was branding a Russian stooge or colluder or puppet for months, even MEET with Russian officials if he was doing any kind of logical thinking that can be called "calculating"?

Furthermore, there are plenty of other examples of Trump's irrationality.

Trump is very easy to figure out. He is a narcissist, an egomaniac, a con man, a rip-off artist, a braggart, and a real estate hustler.

And lest the media make us forget, a racist.

    Trump reporting to his Russian handlers (as some would have it) 

Foreign Minister Lavrov, Ambassador to the U.S. Kislyak.

1]  DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is the program that Trump's predecessor, Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama created by executive order in the last year of his eight year reign as part of his "legacy building" to be able to pose for the bourgeois version of history as a progressive. Under the program, "illegal" immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents, who have "clean" records, are temporarily exempt from deportation ("deferred action," get it? meaning they are still subject to deportation at a later date) and must either be enrolled in school or have a job. They are forced to pay a steep $495.00 registration fee every two years. They also had to expose their location: residence, phone, email, thus making later round-up easy. 780,000 young people are enrolled int he program.

I fulminated against this program at the time Obama announced it, because I foresaw how the information the DACA-ites would be required to give up was the equivalent of Jews registering with the Nazi "authorities" and sewing Stars of David to their clothing. (And for a small percentage of deportees, death is indeed the fate they meet in their dangerous "home" countries of Mexico, Central America, Haiti, Colombia, and so on.)

DACA-ites are referred to as "the Dreamers," a reference to "the American Dream." You see, America is, in U.S. propaganda, this paradisical land which everyone in the world aspires to live in.

But America only looks good to the "Dreamers," with their "dream" (delusion, it is turning out) of being accepted as "Americans," in comparison to the hellish, lethal lands of their origins. Lands that are lethal in all cases in part or mostly because of the malign power of the U.S.

To take the most obvious examples, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are fascist death squad states where violent criminal gangs are also allowed to run rampant. This is because of a U.S. coup (Guatemala 1954), support for a coup (Honduras by Obama and his Secretary fo State, Hillary Clinton, who hadf the effrontery to boast of her crime in one of her autohagiographies) and support for fascist death squad governments (El Salvador).

Even in Mexico, the U.S. helps prop up corrupt regimes and validates a stolen presidential "election" every six years.

Then the U.S. has the nerve to persecute people fleeing the results of U.S. "foreign policy." And its border guards regularly murder people.

Evil Empire.

More Evidence Trump Voters Are Idiots. YES THEY ARE! YES THEY ARE!

More Evidence Trump Voters Are Idiots. YES THEY ARE! YES THEY ARE!

We're hearing a lot of apologia for the approximately 25% of the U.S. adult population who are morons. We're lectured to stop "condescending" to them, that we need to "talk" to them to "understand" them.

The problem isn't that people capable of rational thought and action don't "understand" Trump voters. The problem is that millions of Trump voters are SO IRRATIONAL that they vote against their OWN OBVIOUS SELF-INTEREST.

Case in point: this headline from the New York Times:

California Farmers Backed Trump, but Now Fear Losing Field Workers

Well DUHHH! Didn't these idiot farmers notice that their workers were Mexicans? And didn't they notice, for a whole two years, Trump attacking Mexican immigrants, calling them "rapists," and vowing, OVER and OVER and OVER AGAIN, to BUILD A WALL and MAKE MEXICO PAY for it? Those were effectively campaign slogans of his!    

This is one of many examples of the self-destructive nature of Trump voters, There will be more in the years to come.

Democratic voters suffer from a similar if less severe case of false hopes invested in con artists who they think will save them. But that's another story, which I have touched on in past essays.

For the vast majority of people in the U.S., if they voted for the party whose policies would benefit them, and avoid parties whose policies are harmful to them, the correct choice would be the Green Party. It would basically take a treatise for me to demonstrate that fact, which this is not. If large numbers of people would read it, it would be worth the effort. Merely stating it as fact sounds dogmatic, but it is not. I'm not particularly committed to the Greens. They simply are the best choice available. (Of course, to actually change the U.S., the malign power of the Deep State, the permanent military Goliath and the “black” government of secret police agencies, would somehow have to be neutralized. Congress would have to be captured, and the Judiciary largely restaffed with new judges. Oh, the media would have to be something other than the mouthpiece of corporate oligarchy and imperialism. Speaking of the corporate oligarchy, it too would have to be cut down to size. So voting Green is really just the start of a daunting political project. Only a change of consciousness on a mass scale among the population of the U.S. would make all this possible. That's a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition.

There's a hoary cliché that two things one should never discuss at family gatherings are religion and politics. That's because, for most people, both are matters of “faith” (irrational attitudes and belief) and not susceptible to rational discourse.

But then, the lack of rationality seems to be the curse of homo sapiens. (Global warming, anyone?) And an ingrained viciousness. (War, torture, repression...add your own examples.) That viciousness not only eliminated the Neandertals (I suspect) but helped make this species globally dominant, to the detriment of innumerable other species, and increasingly of itself.

If you want to waste your time reading a long, repetitive article that reports the obvious, you can read it by clicking on the title: “California Farmers Backed Trump, but Now Fear Losing Field Workers,” New York Times, February 9, 2017.