Saturday, October 15, 2016

Trump's Slash and Burn Strategy.



Faced with a mounting wave of allegations from women about sexually inappropriate behaviour Donald Trump has gone to the trenches to do the one thing he knows best to do; hit back! A characteristic of Trump through this campaign has been to fight criticism with fire and never actually answer the critics. He went after Megan Kelly, perhaps his first tirade which should have made us balk and think what is this man up to? When the father of fallen US soldier confronted Trump the result was an almost all night Twitter tirade against the fallen hero's father. More recently and after a better performance at the second US Presidential debate, Trump thought the most important thing for him to do was to defame a former Miss Universe on Twitter at 3 AM!

In the past four days the Trump campaign has announced the 'shackles are removed' and the result is that the tone and the tenor of the Trump camp and more his words have spiralled into a school boy tantrum. However, school boy tantrums usually start and end in the back yard or the school parking lot. Here we are talking of the GOP Presidential nominee who has blamed the Press, the System, the women who accused him as being 'horrible horrible liars'; almost as if his saying it makes it true. In a final coup degrace he has even gone after those within the GOP political set up who would have dared to have found his lewd remarks on tape as offensive.

This is the profile of a sore loser, but not a sore loser in the making, a sore loser in character and temperament which is ingrained into his personality. His vision of 'make America Great Again', while emotionally appealing lacks his own understanding that the die hard supporters who will ignore his sexual predatory personality or his offensive attacks on the under privileged, are not the only ones who will cast their vote on November 8th.   The electorate Mr Trump is much larger and much more silent than you can fathom at the moment and each of your tirades is alienating them from your cause.

Trump has already started talking of a rigged election and short of saying he will not accept any result other than him being the winner, he has worked up his fanatic (and perhaps gun toting) supporters to believe that his loss will not because he messed up but because the system was rigged against him. Side by side he has gone after the media and accused them of being a part of the fix against him. The result has been for the first time in a US election media attending Trump events have had to have police protection. Many weeks ago when Trump said at a rally, on hearing a heckler "Get him out of here I tell you I would punch him in the face", most of us thought he was being light hearted in and in a strange twisted way funny. Now the reality of his twisted mind seems to be coming to roost as it is clear that Trump has decided that if he is to go down he will make sure a great many other elements of the US political system and some good things about it will also go down with him.

Trumps new slash and burn strategy is aimed and taking down the independence of the media, calling esteemed newspapers as crooked, even when some of them have told him if he wishes he can sue them for their revelations about his predatory exploits. Trump is also taking down tolerance, family values (which the GOP always said was a cherished ideal of their party), openness to debate the issues and most of all he is working more like a dictator of a banana republic telling Hilary that she will go to jail, (not be tried by a court of law). One of the biggest casualty of the Trump anger machine is the Republican Party and many of its stalwarts must wonder what the party will look like in the months and years ahead.

Trumps myopia is such that he believes he is ahead in the polls, he believes everyone is lying, he believes that media is out to destroy him, he believes that only he has the solution and is somehow genetically more intelligent than anyone else and knows how to defeat the ISIS, fix America, and fix the world. All fine Mr Trump, but step back, think if you can through your Twitter temper, and see that all you had to do is stick to a script, stick to the issues, lay out your plans in more than just ideas, engage with the people you would not normally sit with, and just show us that to be President you need a sense of embracing differences more than just slashing and burning all those who oppose you.


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