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Welcome to The Gulch, Bruce. You, too, Renata.
Oh, yeah, I've already voted for the Tangerine Tornado for being a bull in a Deep State china shop yet NOT being batshit commie crazy. Will do it again.
I view Trump as an (hopefully) 8-year speedbump for the prog left. That's why they're losing their minds. Notice how they act as though he's going to be in office for 100 years?
I am also incredibly impressed with his ability to get things built in New York City. It has to be the epitome of regulatory morass. I read the "Art of the Deal" and the degree of multi-tasking he was doing back then was excellent preparation for the White House. Perhaps no president since Eisenhower has had that level of preparation.
I figure that gives the people 8 years to get started on restoring the republic.
An objectivist is not just someone who enjoyed the Atlas Shrugged movies. As an objectivist, I understand Donald Trump as a muscle mystic. His populist appeal to self-identified "conservatives" reflects his psycho-epistemology of range-of-the-moment deal-making. He ran for President as a Republican because that was the easiest market to enter for the biggest gain. It would have been laughably easy for him to run as.a Libertarian or Green, but those parties have little chance of success. For most his life, Donald Trump has been a Democrat. In 2012, the Democrat Party was already dominated by Hillary Clinton. As a Republican, he could win the Presidency. It was just a rational market decision for him.
In the novel, Atlas Shrugged, the character most like Donald Trump was Cuffy Meigs, the conservative who wanted to conquer North America, and who called Dagny Taggart "the little girl who knows so much about railroads." He was described as virile and handsome in a barroom kind of way.
Yes this is the public image given for Trump, he may be encouraging that view. It is a vote winner as the populous are fed up with the public intellectual type of expert always on TV and the press. The ones interviewed by groveling presenters who plug the latest book.
These experts are portrayed as deep thinkers, knowledgeable, and always calm. They share with the pollies the ability to reverse direction on a dime.
So, the comments on Trump's actions are correct, but that applies to all politicians, the defining difference is that Trump is less of a hypocrite and better at describing the realities of power concentration.
I agree that Donald Trump is a master at concentrating power in himself and his office.
The question was about objectivists and Donald Trump. You and I might both call ourselves objectivists, but certainly, Ayn Rand gets the Capital-O for that. So, you would have to explain the errors in her logic and facts.
Atlas Society analysis here:
https://atlassociety.org/commentary/c...
"Martin Anderson was part of Reagan’s inner circle from his 1976 presidential campaign and was Reagan’s top domestic policy adviser in the White House in 1981. Anderson was also part of Ayn Rand’s circle. Anderson has explained that while Rand might not have liked Reagan, Reagan had an appreciation for Rand."
This is a more libertarian analysis:
Such inquiries can show us the historical fault lines visible in current debates between libertarian, small-government types and so-called “values voters," conflicts that reach back at least to Barry Goldwater, who had no sympathy for the religious right in his heyday. Even in his old age, the conservative senator from Arizona was, for example, “pretty secure in feeling that discriminating against gays is constitutionally wrong.” In a 1994 interview, Goldwater resisted what he called the “radical right […] fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it.” “If that ever happens,” Goldwater said, “kiss politics goodbye.”
Thirteen years earlier, in 1981, another figure much-revered on the political right felt similarly about the rise of the “moral majority” after the election of Ronald Reagan. Asked what she thought of Reagan, Ayn Rand replied, “I don’t think of him. And the more I see, the less I think of him.” For Rand, “the appalling part of his administration was his connection with the so-called ‘Moral Majority’ and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling, apparently with his approval, to take us back to the Middle Ages via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.” Rand’s primary concern, it seems, is that this “unconstitutional union” represented a “threat to capitalism.” While she admired Reagan’s appeal to an “inspirational element” in American politics, “he will not find it,” remarked Rand, “in the God, family, tradition swamp.” Instead, she proclaims, we should be inspired by “the most typical American group… the businessmen.”
http://www.openculture.com/2014/10/in...
Donald Trump's businesses depended on government subsidies and exclusions. He followed his father by buying up distressed apartments and turning them into HUD housing. He just upped the ante with casinos and hotels.
I did not vote for him in 2016, but I did favor him over Hillary Clinton specifically because Sec. State Clinton was adamantly anti-Russia and I did not see any advantage to that. Problems between the Ukraine and Russia go back through centuries of tribal warfare. I perceived Hillary Clinton as hard against Vladimir Putin's expansion. In 2016, I perceived Trump, with his business interests in Russia and around the world as a globalist who would not confront Vladimir Putin. It is true now that at least on the surface, Trump literally embraces reactionary nationalists like Victor Orban and Narendra Modi. I do not know what to make of that, but I remain hiopeful in the long run for global capitalism, open borders, and free trade. The short term looks grim, I grant you.
Trump was reared in NYC in the real estate and building trades where there is plenty of corruption, both "legal" from the government, like subsidies, exclusions, and who knows what other red tape to cut through, and "mafia" union types (he knows a thug when he sees one and how to deal with them) and he was successful in building and maintaining a business in that environment. Branching out away from his father's model into casinos and hotels was his genius adding to the mix. He knows financial colossal success and dismal failure. He knows when to fight and when to cut a deal.
As far as the Russians go and being "hard on Putin", IMHO, Hillary was just smoke screening and playing her party line (and sucking up to the MSM narrative). If she stuck to her pretending to be tough and actually acted on it with cheering from the MSM we could have ended up with a shooting war with Russia either in the ME or Ukraine - Trump wasn't buying any of that crap even after he was elected. Also, IMHO and hindsight being 20/20, she was probably looking for bigger Russian donations to the Clinton Foundation or more payola via Uranium 1 - meaning she really didn't give a damn about the Russians (or the Ukrainians) one way or the other as long as she could use them in some way to increase her power and line her pockets.
Trump is no puppet of Putin and isn't soft on Putin, either, but he deals with Putin the same way he'd deal with any other thug. Be polite, but turn up the heat behind the scenes. His dodge answer to that idiot reporter in Helsinki should show us at least two things about Trump: 1) He isn't going to bitch slap a thug adversary in public, like the reporter was pressing for and 2) He isn't going to telegraph a punch and tell an adversary what he's going to do before he does it, like the reporter in Helsinki was pressing for and like the MSM is ALWAYS pressing him to do on the world stage - and they hate him for not doing what they want him to. They don't want to just report the Presidents agenda, they want to set it - Trump doesn't buy into that crap.
Clinton $0.5m to $240m
Trump $4.5b to $3.5b
(From OldUgly's meme time a year go. )
By some standards the Clintons are superior having made more money. Where from? Bucket loads from Russia, no obligation of course.
But, Trump having business interests in Russia, bad.
Victor Orban. Has told the mush-heads in Germany and EU that Hungary will not take in any 'share' of the savages that they have allowed into their countries with disastrous results. Hated by the EU deep-state as is Nigel Farage.
Narendra Modi. Part of (slow) recovery of India from the spiritual crap of Mahatma Gandhi and commi-fellow traveler Nehru. Some freeing of the economy, stands up to religion-of-peace fanatics.
Both heroes.
Open borders = Thanatos, the death wish.