The Art of the Bluff
“He’ll never enter the Oval Office again, it’s impossible”. Thus spake Nancy Pelosi, the so-called “Speaker Emerita” of the United States House of Representatives. And by all reasonable measures she was correct. However, the conditions surrounding this presidential election were extraordinary as was the one of 2016 when Donald J. Trump first appeared on the American political scene.
Then he faced a seasoned opponent, a former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State who was favored to win by virtue of her experience, political connections and because “it was her turn”, not least due to the fact that she had stood by “the Lothario of Little Rock” during his self-inflicted disgrace while in the White House. That she was an awful campaigner and public speaker who clearly didn’t believe the words on the index cards placed before her, meant nothing to those who pushed her to the podiums from sea to shining sea. But Americans don’t appreciate being called “deplorable” when they disagree with a particular point of view, or “garbage” for that matter. So, they turned to a real estate tycoon, a television created celebrity, more noted for his ability to brand every product he touches after himself and for his various romantic liaisons that produce accomplished and attractive offspring. Many, if not most, initially thought that his was a bogus campaign; a publicity stunt to be used to gain name recognition for future real estate projects or to acquire political contacts. They were wrong. If he had any self-doubt he didn’t show it and if he thought, at some point, that he would not succeed he didn’t admit it – to anyone. He worked his way and perhaps bluffed his way through.
To “bluff” has become a pejorative term as if it denotes dishonesty. This notion is probably derived from its use in the playing of card games. But this is not necessarily so. Bluffing may also be used to gauge an opponent’s resolve in any kind of confrontation or the limits to which he will allow his resolve to be tested. Politicians, businesspeople, statesmen, law enforcement, all employ it from time to time. Trump uses it regularly, to great effect.
He did rather well during his term in office considering he had no governmental experience, in fact being the first man to have assumed the Presidency without having held any prior political position and no flag rank in the armed forces. He also had to contend with years of investigation into whether he was a Russian agent based on information invented by a retired British spy and funded by political opponents. Under these conditions, remaining focused on your duties can be an extremely trying proposition. But he was able to function until the allegations fell apart and when the pandemic occurred, he ordered the production and distribution of a vaccine that ultimately defeated it; a notable achievement admitted even by his successor.
After his defeat in the 2020 election to Vice President Joseph “just call me Joe” Biden, a man who should have taken the Amtrak out of our nation’s capitol decades ago, Trump found himself impeached for the second time – this time as a private citizen, another first in American history. Then the lawsuits began, most of them frivolous and brought solely for the purpose of ensuring that he would never be elected to any political office again. Trump faced all this and more, hence the “Speaker Emerita’s” evaluation of his chances of regaining the Presidency. But it slowly began to backfire. To many Americans it started to look like Trump’s enemies were “piling on” and people didn’t like it, probably because many of them felt that at some stage in their lives it had happened to them as well.
Of course, all of this paled to being shot during one of his political rallies and being targeted again at his home in Florida while playing a round of golf. The action report of the Secret Service concerning both these events has yet to be released.
And say what you will about the man, like him or dislike him, love him or hate him, Donald Trump has the intestinal fortitude rarely seen in a politician. That is also part of his appeal, he’s not a politician, though he possesses political skills. He doesn’t vacillate, he doesn’t equivocate. The people who wait in line for hours in the freezing cold to hear him speak all say the same thing; “he tells it like it is”. And that is another part of his appeal; Americans are so weary of double speak and empty phrases from those they elect, who see the same problems that they do but refuse to acknowledge them or the fact that they helped to create them.
Trump has one gift that you can’t teach at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government or anywhere else for that matter; he can almost instinctively identify a cause or an issue that his fellow citizens care deeply about and take the position on that issue that they will strongly support. It is indeed a gift and he will use it again. But there was more to Trumps’s return from political oblivion, namely, what had transpired in the ensuing four years since he had left the Oval Office.
The litany of failure due to corruption and incompetence is too long to list here; suffice it to say that in only four years the United States was distorted in almost every respect. Transportation fiascos, with the Secretary of that department intent on discovering racially prejudiced highway construction, even while a supply chain crisis occurred during his two month leave-of absence which he took when he said he was “having a baby”, drag queen poetry readings for third graders in public schools, the arrival of millions of “newcomers”, also known as illegal immigrants, entering the country with little or no vetting resulting in soaring rates of crime even in some of the smallest towns in America and the documented loss of contact with 85,000 unaccompanied children into the hands of no one knows who. A rate of fiscal inflation not seen in forty years, enormous amounts illegal narcotics being carried in backpacks across Mexican deserts and through Canadian forests into the country with few if any attempts to halt the flow, and the list goes on and on. The administration was so lax and disorganized that the Secretary of Defense spent 10 days in hospital and didn’t bother to tell the President. And the President didn’t notice! Chinese spy ballons peacefully gliding over America’s military facilities, not over Guam or Midway, but over Montana and Kentucky!
The humiliating departure from Afghanistan was probably the worst case of incompetence and dereliction of duty seen by the U.S. armed forces since their exit from Vietnam. It shocked our allies and emboldened our enemies.
This is the record that Trump ran against. It would have been astonishing had he lost.
After a disastrous debate between the President and Trump that great political analyst, actor George Clooney, wrote an article in The New York Times, (also known in Democratic Party circles as ‘The Bible’), offering that, perhaps it was time to catch that Amtrak to Rehoboth Beach. And so, with a not so gentle shove from the ‘Speaker Emerita’, a long, very long, career in Washington D.C. was ended. It now fell to a hapless Vice President to snatch victory from the jaws of almost certain political death.
It didn’t help matters that she had to represent a party platform that she was obviously an integral part of; she was, after all, the Vice President of the United States.
It was a record that she could not run on and could not run from. However, it was also a badly conceived campaign. Black and Hispanic voters were taken for granted, (as usual), and young voters were thought to be ‘in the bag’. “But times they are a ‘changin’”, which is always compelling until they are “changin” against what you hold dear.
And then – the end. During an interview on the TV morning show “The View”, Harris was asked, before a fawning audience, what she, as President, would do differently than her boss. She responded, “I can’t think of anything I would do differently”. And then, just like that, it was over. Some question if it had ever begun.
Kamala Harris ran a campaign based on “joy”. But there was no joy in Mudville – just mud. And when that’s the case, you lose.
Donald J. Trump became the only man to defeat a sitting President and a sitting Vice President and was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States in the greatest comeback in American political history. Greater than Richard Nixon’s in 1968, greater than Grover Cleveland’s, who was the first and previously only man to be elected to a second non- consecutive term as President. By any measure, it is an historic achievement and, without a doubt, will be studied for years to come.
It is just three months since Donald J. Trump took the oath of office and the world has already changed; some cheer, some weep. We can now only watch as old friends become adversaries and new friends are made. And then, someday, the new friends may drift away and the old friends return. Such is life, among people and nations.
The next three years and nine months will see many things happening in many places, whether it is the establishment of a sovereign wealth fund or the reorganization of international trade, the acquisition of Greenland or a great war in the Pacific. But we can rest assured that the words of Lord Peter Mandelson, Britain’s new ambassador to the United States will prove prophetic - that President Donald J. Trump could be “one of the most consequential” in modern American history.