Week of 05/14/2018

Trump The “Great Fixer”
– by David Matthews 2

My father, same name but without a number after it, once had a very destructive hobby.

He was curious about how things worked.  He was an electrician by trade and he wanted to know how things did what they did and why they did what they did.  So, when he was bored, what he would do would be to take something apart, break it down to the base components, and then put it back together again once he figured out how they all fit in.

Bear in mind that he wasn’t trying to fix something that was broken.  The device would work perfectly before he got his hands on it.  He just wanted to know how and why it worked.  And, no, he did not have the Internet to help him, and, even if he did, he wouldn’t use it.  He was very old school that way.

The good news is that, in most instances, my father would figure out how that device would function.  The bad news is that, more often than not, he would not be able to put it back together and have it work exactly like it did before he opened it up.  Sometimes he’d break something that he didn’t know could break.  Sometimes he’d break a quality seal that would render the device useless.  Or sometimes he’d forget a step somewhere and he wouldn’t be able to piece it back together.

Needless to say, my mom was very nervous about this hobby of his, and she made sure that he stayed away from the really big things – washer and dryer, the car, the refrigerator, the house, the pets, the kids – unless they were not working.  But he’d render a few lamps, some fans, clocks, and a lot of his own devices useless to pass the time away.  He was a curious electrician.  That was who he was.

President Donald Trump likes to claim that he is the “master” of the “the deal”.  Hell, his magnum opus is called “The Art of the Deal”.

So it really should not come to anyone’s surprise that he would prove his “mastery” as President.  He demonstrated it by making deals with companies to supposedly not lay off their workers (which they did anyway).  He reached out to Democrats to supposedly make deals about those immigrants who came to America illegally as children (which he then reneged on).  He even supposedly brokered the deal to reform taxes (which really wasn’t his, but it happened when he was in office so he’ll claim it’s his).  Recently he “arranged” to have North and South Korea meet and talk about officially ending the Korean War, and he’ll meet with North Korea’s Panda Bear later on.  (Actually, China has more to do with this, but, again, it is happening when he’s in office, so he’ll claim it was all his as well.)

But these are just deals that Trump could make, or at least the ones that were made with him in office. 

Why stop there?

A “master dealmaker” – as Donald Trump claims to be - wouldn’t just “make” deals.  They would also “re-make” past deals.  Call it a “do-over”.

So Trump pulled America out of the Paris Climate Accord.  He pulled us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  And, as of this column’s posting, he proudly announced that he’s pulled America out of the nuclear deal with Iran.

And... people are perplexed by this.

Why?

This is what Donald Trump pretends to be!  He touts himself as a “master dealmaker”!

And it doesn’t hurt that all of these deals were made when his predecessor was in office, so Trump can immediately declare all of them to be “bad”, “horrible”, and “the worst”.  After all, Trump is dangerously obsessive in wanting to erase everything President Barack Obama did, so everything Obama does is just “wrong” according to him and his cultist supporters.

And, let’s get brutally honest here... even if these deals were good and working and doing everything they were meant to do, Trump would dismantle every agreement he can get his hands on.  Every deal.  The Iran deal, TPP, Contract with America, NAFTA, the Louisiana Purchase, the Treaty of Tripoli, the U.S. Constitution... hell, he’d go after the Ten Commandments if he could somehow convince his theocratic friends to go along with it.

Why would he do this?  So he could remake them, of course.

You see, much like my father and his little hobby of dismantling devices just so he could see what makes them tick, a supposed “master dealmaker” like Trump wants to be the one to re-negotiate deals, to make them better.  Then they would be “his” deals.  They would be “his” legacy, not the legacy of the ones that spent the time, energy, and effort to come up with the original agreements.  No, those would be “garbage”.  They would be “disasters”, and “wrong”, and “bad”, and “horrible”, and any other simple words Trump could use to demonize those old deals.  Only he - only Trump - could make them “better”. 

Hell, Trump’s greatest deal of all has been convincing both the cultist voters and the entrenched fascistic leaders of the GOP that they should embrace him as a political messiah and give him, more or less, free reign to do what he wants.  The party that despised him, that rejected him, that declared “Never Trump”, suddenly became buddy-buddy with him.  That is one hell of a Faustian deal that Trump forged for himself!

The problem comes when breaking these old deals results in more problems.  Breaking the Iran nuclear treaty has already resulted in gas prices skyrocketing.  Kiss that “tax cut savings” that you believed you were getting goodbye.  Israel, the troublemakers that they have been recently, have been ratcheting up for another conflict that they expect America to blindly support. 

And if that’s not bad enough... if Iran does decide to restart their nuclear program, Saudi Arabia has threatened to start their own.  Just a reminder: this is the nation that gave the world Osama bin Laden.  Think about that.

Those are the repercussions of just one deal that Trump has broken.

Here’s another and more devastating repercussion of Trump’s obsessive deal-breaking: our reputation loses its value with the rest of the world.  Any entity that has any kind of agreement with the United States now has to wonder if Trump will suddenly renege on that agreement just so he could “renegotiate” a better deal.

We’ve had bad deals before.  The agreement that ended the Gulf War was poorly-done, but America still held up to our end of it.  We still honored it, even though it left Saddam Hussein in power.  Why?  Because that is what honorable leaders do.  If an agreement is crap, we still honor it, even as we work to forge a better one.  We don’t just say “You know what?  This deal is garbage.  I’m going to walk away from it and force people to come up with a new one that favors me and also so that I can claim the credit for it.”  That’s what tyrants do, President Trump.  And you don’t want to be seen as one, do you?  That would harm your “brand”.

Donald Trump may delude himself of being a better deal-maker than Satan himself, but even Satan, with all of those loopholes he would weasel in, would still grudgingly hold true to that agreement.  That’s what a true “master dealmaker” does.  It’s a pity we really don’t have one in the White House... just a rich hobbyist.