It has taken us 15 years since the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, but finally, in the person of Donald J. Trump, we have the leader that we deserve, a leader who reassures us that he alone can solve this problem, who tells us that he knows better than the generals and pointy-headed foreign-policy experts how to deal with ISIS and other iterations of Islamic extremism.
It’s a relief to have such a strong man to lean on in times of peril.
A lifelong real estate developer, Trump tells us that he developed this grasp of strategy while attending a military-style New York boarding school, while running a beauty contest in Russia and while making Trump ties in Chinese factories. And really, it’s hard to argue with a resume like that. He brings a skill set unlike that of any previous American president.
Now, Trump can’t tell us what his strategy against ISIS might be, but there’s a reason: Like the Coca-Cola and Colonel Sanders recipes, it’s a secret. But last week he did offer a hint: His plan, he said, is to call all the generals together and give them 30 days to come up with a plan.
Why no one else has thought of that ingenious approach in the past 15 years, I do not know. It seems so obvious, you know? But then, I guess that’s the genius of it.
Trump further reassures us that this undisclosed plan is the product of the same keen foresight and judgment that led him to oppose the invasion of Iraq. As he told NBC’s Matt Lauer this week, “you can look at Esquire magazine from ’04. You can look at before that. I said it’s going to totally destabilize the Middle East, which it has.”
I’m sure it’s no cause for worry that Trump never said any such thing. The Esquire interview came out in August 2004. The debate over the Iraq invasion occurred two years earlier, in the late summer and early fall of 2002, and the invasion took place in March 2003. So he must have gotten his dates a bit mixed up, that’s all.
As Trump keeps reminding us — he did so again with Lauer — even Vladimir Putin seems to think Trump would make a fine American president, so really, what higher authority could there be? Trump also explained that he’s immune to this flattery that he keeps bringing up, endlessly, as if he’s obsessed by the thought that he has impressed a man such as Putin.
Besides, it goes both ways. Trump lauds Putin — a man who assassinates his enemies, who imprisons those who dare object, who rules over a brutal oligarchy that has stripped Russia of much of its enormous wealth and left its economy in shambles — he lauds that man as a great leader, just as he had previously lauded China’s massacre of its own students at Tianamen Square.
“They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength,” he said of the Chinese government back in 1990. “That shows you the power of strength.”
Because that’s what we need in this country: Strength. We need men — certainly not women, who are better off posing in bathing suits and can’t even look presidential — we need men who understand the importance of irrational action without thought, who appreciate the power of bluster and intimidation, who believe that if we want some other nation’s oil, then dammit we ought to just take it.
It’s taken us 15 years to get to this point, but we’re finally here.
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