Recently I was having donuts for breakfast at a local donut shop.
There was a table populated by a bunch of old guys bullshitting with each
other, eating donuts and drinking coffee. I thought to myself, “This is Trump!” None of them expressed a coherent
worldview. They weren’t meticulously cost-benefit analyzing their political
proposals. No, they were speaking from the “id” and trying to one-up each other
on who had the cleverest political comment. If you had a transcript of all such
conversations from this one group, you’d find the same people voicing support
for opposite policies on different days (like Trump). Suppose you put these men
in charge of government. Just sit them at a table, give them coffee and donuts,
and turn each of their verbal ejaculations into a law. You would end up with an
incoherent, self-contradicting hodgepodge. (Err…more so.) The bureaucrats who
administer the law would be paralyzed by their inability to comply with
contradicting orders. Watching these old guys talk gave me some insight, I
think, into Trump’s popularity. And imagining them directing government gave me some insight into what a Trump presidency would look like. (Or any populist presidency, for that matter.)
Subsequent events show that this was pretty much spot on.
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