Donald Trump Is Disqualified By His Lack of Reflectivity

d Trump has again stunned the political world by deciding to boycott the next Republican debate, and claims it is because Fox News reporter Megyn Kelly, with whom he has clashed in the past, will not treat him fairly.

Now, I can not see all the Deep Games Trump is playing, or completely fathom his assumptions about what his potential electorate will go for or at least stand for. But why would he want to let all his rivals gang up and savage him (since we can bet money that his statements and behavior will be the primary topic of discussion, whether Megyn Kelly intends it or not) without him there to blast them, or rebut?

If conventional wisdom is that he has made a huge mistake, well, I'm going with conventional wisdom on this.

But I have been saying all along that Donald Trump does not want to be President. See my article on OpEdNews. Why in God's name would THIS man of all men want to take a job that nominally pays $465,000 per year, about 20% of the average NCAA Div.1 head football coach's salary, with a million more headaches, and everybody's life on the line, as opposed to mere center, guards, tackles and ends?

This campaign has got to be just a game, or the expression of a pathological obsession, for him, not only to win, but to determine the rules of the game.

The presidency of the US is the biggest manager's job in the world. He wants to be the head of the American Empire, with military presence in 129, or 135, or whatever the number is of countries, the seat of the world currency, the UN, everything of planetary consequence gets decided on here.

I have never heard him specifically refer to the concept of Policeman of the World, but I do not think he would be opposed to us being that if he were elected President. I think he would be quick to bomb the hell out of people.

I also think he would deficit-spend to do it until our money was worth nothing.

But he just CAN NOT really want to be President. So far in this campaign, no reporter nor moderator has asked him the elephant-in-the-room question:

"Mr. Trump, would you please describe your current real estate holdings and projected holdings, either on your own or associated with other interests, in the real estate market in Havana and other parts of the nation of Cuba?"

Donald Trump and his Atlantic City gambling-industry associates have coveted the Cuban top-end real estate and casinos market since last century, but the Castros have refused to accommodate the opening of the grateful island to American capitalism by dying. They have just lived on and on.

I was at first astonished and grateful that normalization should be proceeding-- it's not finished-- while the Castros survived.

But then, reflecting on Trump's abiding interest in the island's high-end real estate, I concluded that normalization had to occur because an American gigabusiness consortium could not make deals while the embargo remains in force.

Trump also needs to be asked whether he understood that he would have to divest himself of his far-flung real estate assets if he became President, and how would he go about divesting, who would hold his money.

He's not going to be President, I feel serenely confident of that much. But in the Christian Science Monitor Weekly, Linda Feldmann notes:

" 'President Trump' is still a long shot, and Trump's ability to win the GOP nomination remains unknown. But even today, on the eve of primary season, his place in history is already sealed. He has shaken the Republican Party to its core, and taught the political class some hard lessons about American voters along the way."

What Donald Trump has done is expose a disturbing tolerance among not just low-information voters, but people who look like they ought to see through him quickly, of some positions, rhetoric and behavior that range from tasteless bullying in general and repeated offensiveness to women to only slightly veiled threatening (as with the press).

He's a celebrity, not a politician.


Celebrities don't have to play by others' rules, and they don't have to be the least bit polite about it. And enough people buy that attitude that to date he is the front-runner in one of the two major political parties of the the United States.

But his behavior and tactics-- like the "dancing Muslims in New Jersey" business, or his bullying of the physically disabled reporter-- during this campaign has shown me something about Donald Trump.What he did in the past-- even last night or the night before-- doesn't matter to him.

As Trump biographer Gwenda Blair describes him:

He had no interest in looking back, he had no insight, he had no interest in his own history, he had no rear-view mirror. It was all (about) going forward."

I am not a moralist, but I don't know a better definition of amorality than that the past doesn't matter. Such an attitude, or deeper, a moyen a vivre, should be a preemptive disqualifier of any presumptive aspirant to diplomatic or executive office, even if his selective racism and bullying doesn't disqualify him.

It was George Santayana who said, after World War One, "Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are forever doomed to repeat them."

"Bobby," down in the Comments section, is right: "if he won't come talk to a Megyn Kelly, what's he going to do with Putin?" As the commenter also notes, Putin "likes" Trump.

But how about Xin Jiping?

William P. Homans