Coward Runs Away, Abandons Allies Again
For quite some time now, I have been declaring as often as possible the final results of my four-year psychological assessment of Donald Trump: He is a vain, immature coward who likes to bluster and play tough when safely protected by the crowd, but always buckles and begs for mercy before any legitimate threat. He is therefore the worst possible commander-in-chief for a nation to whom history has handed the mantle of steward of civilization and freedom.
He consistently serves the interests of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Xi Jinping, at the expense of America’s short and long-term wellbeing and that of her allies, not because he is a traitor or a duplicitous schemer, but simply because those thugs push him around a little and he is scared to death they might hurt him. In the technical language of the psychiatric profession, we may say he is a hopeless weenie.
So now, as expected and long-hinted, Trump has “decided” (a fancy word for nodded his head in servile acquiescence) to pull U.S. troops out of Syria precisely in order to leave a clear path for Turkish genocide in the north. The genocidees will, of course, be America’s strategic allies, the Kurds. Why has he made this decision, even (in a rare move) acting against the strong urging of his own puppet master, Mitch McConnell? The answer is cowardice. Donald Trump would sell his mother into slavery in a heartbeat if he thought it was the best way to save his own hide or avoid getting mixed up in any situation that might expose his weakness.
His cult will continue to praise him for his cowardice (or “weeniedom,” in the academic jargon), because they praise everything he does, and reserve the loudest praise for those actions most destructive of America’s interests and national dignity. Much like their reality TV idol, Donald Trump’s cultists do not love America. They do not even like America. Please do not try to convince me otherwise. I’ve heard it all, and laughed at it all. Trump’s millions of true believers — the talk radio and “conservative blog” devotees, the red-hatted worshippers at the shrine of smug stupidity — would, just like their hero, flush America down the toilet in a New York progressive minute, rather than risk a revelation that would dent their delicate egos.
Donald Trump, in the past three years, has publicly, and with self-projected fanfare, unblinkingly sold out South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Ukraine, the G-7, the Kurds — have I left anyone out? Oh yes, he has sold out America of course, but that goes without saying; he’s been diminishing his country’s international standing in every way he can for thirty years. That, after all, is part of the mechanism whereby he, a vain ignorant blowhard girlish pre-teen wimp, was elected by millions of Americans who actually believed he was the very opposite of all those things. That inversion of the nation’s vision did not happen overnight. It took generations, during the final one of which Trump himself played a significant role in the ultimate step of flipping those millions’ national self-image, such that they now self-identify as vain ignorant blowhard girlish pre-teen wimps — though of course they use other names for this.
The first thing international leaders learned about Donald Trump was that if you flatter him, he will love you and do whatever you want. The second thing they learned, and are still learning now, is that if he ever faces a real fight with real risk, he will always, predictably, without hesitation, abandon friends and surrender to enemies in the crunch.
And with every one of these not-so-revelatory revelations about his character and his motives, he emboldens the tyrants and thugs of the world, and of America. Their only concern now is that he might lose his re-election bid, leaving them back with the shakier terms of the pre-Trump years, when they were never quite sure how well they could count on even America’s worst leaders to fall at their feet at the moment of truth. With Trump, however, the answer is obvious: He will never fail them.
