Motus Mentis

5 Comments

1. whitewall says

   The closing sentence of Kimball’s piece is the root of it…Trump is not a product of “their” tribe. Or any permissable tribe for that matter. He talks like too many of “us”.

   Posted November 14, 2017 at 7:33 pm | Permalink
2. Joseph Moroco says

   Kimball lost me when he brought up Max Boot. The guy is less than a joke.

   I vaguely remember on Laura Ingram after we “won” Iraq and no WMDs showed up, Kimball expressed confidence that they would be found.

   Whatever Trumpism is escapes moi, but wisdom will not be found emanating from Kimball or Boot.

   Posted November 16, 2017 at 11:38 am | Permalink
3. Malcolm says

   Hi Joseph,

   It seems to me that Mr. Kimball only mentions Max Boot’s take on Trump in order to disagree with it from top to bottom.

   Posted November 16, 2017 at 3:55 pm | Permalink
4. Jason says

   No need to remove my earlier comment, Malcolm; simply too quickly jumped the gun in assuming that Yankah is Jewish, and I was worried that this might have left a bad taste in some mouths. Anyway thanks for you and Whitewall telling me that my remark didn’t offend.

   Concerning the essay, while Kimball makes good points about Trump’s accomplishments, I think he and other conservatives are way too sanguine about the president’s character issues. I must confess, for instance, that I find many of his tweets to be shocking, and considering how remarkably cautious public figures must be with their words it is hard for me to see how one just puts Trump’s pensees aside because illegal immigration is down, or unemployment is low. And I would pose this obvious querry: what happens when there is a crisis, say American military involvement in Asia, not exactly a remote possibility before the next election? Everything in Trump’s nature will encourage him to rely on bluster and demonization, when the situation will instead – largely – call for cool statesmanship and persuasion. There won’t be the margin for error that exists for the commander-in-chief currently in “calmer” times.

   Posted November 16, 2017 at 4:48 pm | Permalink
5. antiquarian says

   I agree with the main premise of the piece– that Trumpism is just a name and that this what this Max person is doing is, to paraphrase, merely describing his view of the world as distorted by the walls of the bubble he’s in.

   I do not, however, agree that many of the things Kimball lists are actually Trump’s accomplishments. Two items clearly are– the court nominations and the regulatory reform. I quite agree that those are creditable to Trump, that they are accomplishments, and that they are substantial.

   I do not agree with him that the cheapness of energy, the consumer confidence, the growth, the unemployment level, or the tax plan are Trump’s accomplishments. Presidents can do very little about the economy, and those are no more Trump’s accomplishments than much of the Great Recession was Bush’s fault. The tax plan is the doing of Congress; though the President is having some impact on it, it can hardly be thought of as “his”. Finally, though it is Trump’s doing, only time will tell if Iran is an accomplishment.

   The thing about Trump is not the man himself, but what his election represented. That is what I hope America comes to focus on. Horrifyingly, many leftists appear to be doubling down on their previous worldview, the one the country went out of its way to reject a year ago. I would trade a lot, and most certainly I would trade Trump as president, to destroy that worldview.

   Posted November 25, 2017 at 10:00 am | Permalink