The mixture of inexperienced showman and potential President is truly disconcerting, and he acknowledges that absent his realty show persona, he would not be the presumptive candidate of his party.
It was a tell-all interview, including how he would have occupied the oil fields of Iraq with a permanent U.S. military guarded Guantanamo-like enclave never before described. We all know that the era of colonialism ended a while ago, but Trump being unsteeped of this history is comfortable advocating its return, which given the instability of the world, just may in a modified form be something to investigate. statement (3/28/16)that women should be punished for having an abortion is only incoherent if we don't think about the assumptions that would criminalize the doctor, but not the woman. This is a reversion to woman as dependent, who is not deemed to be an adult with full rights, which also implies responsibilities.
The pro-life myth is not benign or even coherent. It is based on a concept of patriarchy, where a women who for her own reasons, perhaps economic, or a fetus who will suffer from disabilities, chooses not to give birth. Actually, far from conservative theory, only extreme communitarianism would deign to usurp such a decision from the mother. So, in the metaphor of pro-lifers, the doctor "murders" the child in her womb. Certainly, she hires the person to do the actual killing, and in circumstances such as this, the person who initiates the crime is always culpable.
This was not an example of his having "mis-spoke" or even a reversal of his
position. In his revised statement which was comically a claim to be
like the Republican saint, Ronald Reagan, he tacitly affirmed that his
thinking through the principles and consequences of being "pro-life"
would logically lead to criminalization of the instigator of the
killing, the mother. Trump, on-the-fly enunciated the above principle,
and only then did he
learn that being pro-life incorporates this myth of the evil doctor, as
if he is descending on vulnerable pregnant women and persuading them to
kill their
child. It is telling that Trump had previously been pro-choice, and by
internalizing its principles just assumed that being a pro-life
Republican was also logically coherent.
It
could be that anyone who checked all the boxes to become a "legitimate"
candidate of one of the two parties has also internalized their truisms
and the toxic partisanship that follows. We are fixated on Donald Trump
not only for his showmanship, but how this performance has demonstrated
the rigidity of our two party system. For him to implement the changes
that he so glibly advocates will take a personal transformation from
carnival barker to scholar-administrator that as of now are only
capacities he has hinted at. Anger at this hubris for promising more
than is possible, or admiration for his courage to destroy our current
system? It will be an interested choice for the American voter.
Trump seems to be of the "might makes right" school of thinking. That might have worked several centuries ago but he lacks compassion and understanding.
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