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highplainsdem

(48,731 posts)
Wed Aug 9, 2017, 03:19 PM Aug 2017

Richard Wolffe, in The Guardian: God save us from Donald Trump's fire and fury

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/09/god-save-us-from-donald-trumps-fire-and-fury

Donald Rumsfeld and Donald Trump are separated by 14 years in age, and a world of experience. Rumsfeld had served as Illinois congressman, White House chief of staff and US defense secretary before he catastrophically ran the Pentagon through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Trump previously ran a small family business that sank into bankruptcy several times, before he made cameo appearances on a successful reality TV show.

Rumsfeld came to power with a fully fledged ideology of how to exercise power inside Washington and around the world. Trump came to power with a fully fledged plan for self-promotion, no idea how Washington worked and little interest in the rest of the world.

But in their belligerent bravado, in their elderly disdain for the lives of the young soldiers and civilians under their command and care, the two have much in common.

-snip-

As Rummy liked to say, there are known unknowns. And there are unknown unknowns. Donald Trump falls into the first bucket; Kim Jong-un falls into the second.

We know that Trump knows nothing about the world beyond his struggling real estate and what he watches on cable TV. And we know about his ignorance because he blabs about it all the time.

-snip-

Kim Jong-un of North Korea, on the other hand, is an unknown unknown. We don’t know whether he will fire his many missiles towards Seoul, Japan or the US territory of Guam.

-snip-

But we do know that he has found his perfect foil in Donald J Trump, who is happy to punch below his weight, at the same time as sounding like a reckless maniac prepared to burn the entire region.

-snip-

Much like the other Donald, Trump considers everything and everyone before him a sick joke. Rummy happily squandered the global goodwill after 9/11 as he pursued his unilateral path toward world domination. Now, just hours after his triumph in the UN security council, Trump is happily squandering his brief moment of global unity as he walks his own unilateral path toward world domination.

-snip-
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