One of the juvenile put-downs that I have been reading from GOP partisans for close to 8 years is :how’s that hopey-changey thing working for YOU?”. This, of course, being a riff off of Barack Obama’s “Hope and CHange” tagline from his 2008 campaign.
Well, right now, every other damn commercial break, I see adverts for Donald Trump on TV. Hope and Change? Some of these adverts make that tagline look utterly, mundanely unambitious. Donald Trump is promising to fix Everything That Ails America (although as is usual with him, he is claiming to be planning to fix issues that I don’t think exist – at least not in the way that he and his supporters think).
“Make America Great Again”, for sheer ludicrous overreach, knocks “Hope and Change” out of the park. The promises associated with his ideas are expansive, incoherent, and seem to be mostly rooted in the Golden Age Fallacy. He is not going to resurrect the Appalachia coal industry for example. Those days are gone for ever, over a long time ago.
If Trump does win the election, I suspect that his supporters will be hearing one hell of a lot of comments like “How’s that Make America Great bullshit working for YOU?” in a year or so. Given that Trump has already demonstrated his utter cluelessness on so many topics, it won’t be long before fundamentals start to unravel. One of the skills of being a leader is knowing when to stay the hell away from something that isn’t broken. Trump’s behavior pathology, one of the aspects of which is that of an impulsive gambler, is a poor fit for that measured approach.