(07-13-2018 07:51 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(07-13-2018 07:18 AM)JustAnotherAustinOwlStill Wrote:  Sorry, I had to pop back in for a quick question. How can any of you Trump apologists defend this trip to Europe? He's insulting our allies left and right, threatening (again) to leave NATO, blatantly lying about the outcomes of meetings, taking credit for things accomplished by his predecessors, and claiming again to be "a very stable genius". And of course claiming Merkel (who grew up in East Germany) is controlled by Russia.
Here's a description from one of the "Senior European Officials":
"Usual Trump: a stream of incoherent sentences. ... The allies looked the other way as when the old uncle gets nuts."
And then he goes to Britain and gives and interview where he criticizes May's Brexit deal, says she should have listened to him, and says Boris Johnson (who wants to topple May and become PM) would make a great Prime Minister. Whether he realizes what he is doing, I have no idea. But he literally just went to visit our closest ally and attempted to topple the government. Unprecedented doesn't capture how out of bounds this is.

Diplomacy has a certain way of being done. Trump is not a diplomat and doesn't do it that way. He does things the way he did them in business. Exaggeration and hyperbole are the land developer's stock in trade. More than anything else, he reminds me of the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack.

Will it work? Who knows? It's very high risk, which is why I did not vote for Trump. I saw him as the high risk, high reward candidate and Hillary as more the status quo. I thought the best Trump could be was better than the best Hillary could be, but that the worst he could be was worse than the worst she could be. I did not like where we were, but his beta was just a bit too high for me.

So far it's been some good, some bad, net/net probably not a whole lot better or worse than Hillary, just different goods and bads.

I do think the issues he is raising need to be raised. We really can't continue to bear the cost of being the world's policeman--in dollars, or in lives and limbs, or in the number of people it pisses off. Nor do we have as great a need as when we hatched this system to win the Cold War. But the reality is that somebody has to do it. The world is still a bad place, and some parts of it are very bad. We certainly can, and should, bear a large part of the load. But who picks up the slack and does the rest? Will that be NATO? The British Commonwealth? Japan and Korea? China? Russia? I like some of those answers better than others.

Part of the problem is that the issues Trump is raising should have been raised and resolved 25-30 years ago, when the fall of the Iron Curtain brought the Cold War to its end. We won because our economy ultimately far outperformed the USSR's, not because we won military battles. Ross Perot said what I had been thinking when he said that in the post-Cold War era, economic power will be more important than military power. We need to make that shift in gears.

We need to have the strongest military in the world, by leaps and bounds, but never to use it because nobody dares pick on us and we don't go picking on them. And we need economic, tax, regulatory, education, and infrastructure policies that enhance our ability to compete in the global market. That hasn't been our approach, because we are in many ways still fighting the Cold War. Trump is changing that. For better or worse? Who knows? I think is right substance in many ways (though I don't agree on tariffs or immigration), but the form is certainly very different and at least somewhat off-putting.

You're right that Trump is often addressing and raising issues that need to be raised. Unfortunately he often either does it in a fashion that is counter productive, uses language that is non-nonsensical, back peddles as fast as he forward peddled, and on, and on.

I listened to the press conference that he and May had this morning. It was so sad how poorly Trump spoke and expressed his "ideas" (if you could call them that), as compared to May who did a fantastic job clearly and concisely expressing her opinions of complex problems. We live in a complex world where simple solutions are almost rarely correct, and we have a POTUS who can hardly answer pointed questions like, "how special is our relationship with the UK."