Looking for Trump in all the wrong places

[mia]

Michael Lewis: Looking for Trump in all the wrong places

Back when he was president, Barack Obama told me that only two people treated any interaction with him as a zero-sum game. One was Vladimir Putin, the other congressional Republicans. Both behaved as if there was no such thing as a win-win situation: Any gain for Obama was a loss for them, and any gain for them must also entail a loss for Obama. The moment that the Russian president or congressional Republicans saw he wanted something, they went to work trying to keep him from getting it — even if it was something they might otherwise have approved of.

Approaching any aspect of life as a zero-sum game has obvious practical costs: Deals that leave some people better off without making anyone else worse off suddenly don’t get done, because making some people better off now, by definition, makes other people worse off. It also comes with some psychological side effects. It cripples your imagination. It blinds and deafens you, as you sort of know what your adversary is going to do or say before they do or say it. Or, rather, you know how you are going to make sense of it: uncharitably....

Trump has obvious weaknesses as a public speaker. His advisers declined the invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner last year because they didn’t think Trump could pull it off. “The central problem,” Wolff writes, “was that the president was neither inclined to make fun of himself, nor particularly funny himself -- at least not, in [Kellyanne] Conway’s description, ‘in that kind of humorous way.’” Bannon’s gift was to realize that he could simply ignore Trump’s weaknesses and play to his strengths, and a lot of people, distracted by the strengths, would never see the weaknesses. Hang a giant American flag in the atrium of American political life, and people cease to notice the art hanging from the ceiling.

Eventually, Bannon walks me out into the street. It’s dark and quiet, but for the sirens. “It’s ridiculous. It’s like a country under siege,” he says. “It’s over the top.” The dome of the Capitol rises like a reminder of something over the Supreme Court. Bannon points to a battery of police officers standing around a metal barrier they’ve erected in the street. “You know what that is?” he says. “It’s a blast shield.” The houses inside the blast shield, he notes with real wonder, are now more valuable than the ones on the outside. And he’s on the inside.

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/02/09/michael-lewis-looking-for-trump-in-all-the-wrong-places/

[dchill]

1. Bannon seems to think that he is reasonable, and a...

responsible adult. He is neither, and never will be.

[Hortensis]

2. There's a lot of zero sum thinking on DU, but people

shouldn't be mislead into thinking professional Democratic Party legislators are prone to it even if they do recognize a need to respond to the current angry zero-sum sentiment among some of their constituents.

Our legislators cannot pass any law in a crowded and diverse nation without hurting some group, and the same goes for the state level, which is something every decent and honorable politician, and all who want to be reelected, learns to care about very quickly.

The astonishingly ruthless indifference to wellbeing, the abandonment of duty and altruism, to pursue zero-sum tactics as SOP occurred entirely in the Republican Party.

Not ours.

COUNTDOWN TO NEXT STEP IN MAKING AMERICA AMERICA AGAIN: 269 days

[mia]

3. "COUNTDOWN TO NEXT STEP IN MAKING AMERICA AMERICA AGAIN:269 days "!

No zero-sum tactics, but tap into the anger that will ignite voters to support Democratic causes..