America First–European edition

rhetorical claim: ideas basic to the European project that Mr. Trump categorically rejects include believing 1) that the future will be one of interdependent, postnationalist states engaged in win-win trade; 2) that military power will become less relevant as progress marches on., and, 3) that international law and international institutions can, should or will dominate international life. Individual nation-states will remain, in Mr. Trump’s view, the dominant geopolitical force.

Mr. Trump therefore thinks the EU’s political establishment is just as blind and misguided as they believe he is. He thinks Europe is making itself steadily weaker and less relevant in international life, and that Vladimir Putin’s view of the world is almost infinitely more clear-eyed and rational than Angela Merkel’s.

rhetorical effect: The distillation of the idea that foreign policy is driven only by self-interest. This argument about ideals vs. realism goes back at least to Thucydides, with the realists almost always coming out the worst.  A perfect storm is brewing in the Atlantic. In personality and in style, Mr. Trump represents almost everything Europeans dislike most about American life. He is even more abrasive when it comes to matters of substance. The Trumpian mix of zero-sum trade policy, hard-nosed foreign-policy realism, and skepticism about Europe’s future leads him to think of Europe as both a weak partner and an unreliable one. Small wonder, then, that virtually every encounter between Mr. Trump and his European counterparts leaves the relationship under greater strain.

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affirmative action bias

rhetorical claim: In the upside-down thinking of affirmative-action advocates, academically rigorous schools should be more focused on achieving racial balance and less focused on maintaining high standards. Asian displays of academic excellence therefore become problematic. Asians are somehow to blame for outperforming others, and they are to be punished for the historical injustices that blacks suffered at the hands of whites. This is what happens when you try to reconcile what is irreconcilable: group preferences on the one hand and equal treatment of individuals on the other.

rhetorical effect: justifies racially segregated schools, the privatization of public education, and the destruction of teachers’ unions.

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foreign policy “experts”

rhetorical claim: thank God Trump isn’t a foreign policy “expert.”. Our increasingly miseducated rulers sought abstract impossibilities, the quest for “everlasting peace” over the last century has increasingly given us “never-ending war.” As Matthew Peteron argues:

Does Donald Trump have enough experience and expert wisdom to give away as much to North Korea as the American foreign-policy establishment, with all its experience, top-shelf degrees, and stratospheric test scores, has given away in the past 30 years?

Does Donald Trump have enough experience and expert wisdom to keep the hostile stalemate the American foreign-policy establishment created and fostered with North Korea since America first waged the Korean War?

For that matter, does Trump even have the experience and caste of mind to start a war, say, in the Middle East, that costs trillions of dollars and disrupts and inflames the region as President Bush and his entourage did? Does he even know how?

Does Trump have the expertise to take over the wreckage of such a war and support jihadist rebels, help create ISIS and a global refugee crisis, and give Russia the most power it’s had in the region since the peak of the Cold War, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did?

The truth may alarm you. Trump has never even started a war before—not even a little one.

Trump understands the other guy better, and read and dealt with him personally and politically, without the baggage of the silly and contradictory views of human nature absorbed by our elites at fancy schools and exposed in their hollow rhetoric.

rhetorical effect: belittles education and experience in foreign policy; makes Trump out to be an agent of peace whereas he is antagonizing almost every other country; lumps together apples, oranges and bananas (North Korea, ISIS, Russia)  in a crazy rhetorical salad

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a special place in hell

betrayal

rhetorical claim: Justin Trudeau’s betrayal of America on trade has earned him a special place in hell.

rhetorical effect: reinforces Trump’s “you’re either for me or against me”, winner-take- all siege mentality. Crisis is his brand, and he’s always under fire from “enemies” eager to “betray” him, any opposition no branded as a “betrayal” in this total war mentality. As Thomas Friedman argues, this idea that Canada is now an enemy

tells you all you need to know about how differently Trump looks at the world from any of his predecessors — Republican or Democrat. Everything is a transaction: What have you done for ME today? The notion of America as the upholder of last resort of global rules and human rights — which occasionally forgoes small economic advantages to strengthen democratic societies so we can enjoy the much larger benefits of a world of healthy, free-market democracies — is over.

“Trump’s America does not care,” historian Robert Kagan wrote in The Washington Post. “It is unencumbered by historical memory. It recognizes no moral, political or strategic commitments. It feels free to pursue objectives without regard to the effect on allies or, for that matter, the world. It has no sense of responsibility to anything beyond itself.”

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sitting up at attention

rhetorical claim: Trump on Kim Jong-un: “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

rhetorical effect: reveals Trump’s true aim: to become an autocractic dictator. He subsequently said this was a “joke,” which it is, in a Freudian way of giving away the game–revealing all in a thinly-veiled way. Americans do indeed need to “sit up at attention” when it comes to Trump’s further tyrannous maneuvers, lies and policies designed to criminalize debate and dissent.

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infest

rhetorical claim: America is being infested my immigrants who may well be murderers, gang members, rapists or whatever.

rhetorical effect: best explained by David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

continues his ugly pattern of describing illegal immigrants as subhuman. And “infest” is particularly stark, because it suggests that immigrants are akin to insects or rats — an analogy that Nazis frequently used to describe Jews, as Aviya Kushner notes in The Forward.

On the same subject, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie predicts that Trump’s dehumanizing language “will only get worse as November approaches.” Bouie adds: “To energize its voters, the White House plans a campaign of vicious demagoguery.”

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tender age facilities

rhetorical claim: the Trump administration has had to set up “tender age” facilities to house babies and infants who were being illegally smuggled into the US.

rhetorical effect: justifies what Jennifer Rubin calls:

moral madness, a betrayal of universal human values that marks the lowest point in the Trump presidency — or any presidency since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

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bias

insubordination

rhetorical claim: the DOJ’s Inspector General’s report clearly shows anti-Trump bias and insubordination by James Comey and various investigators. It shows beyond any doubt that the DOJ was out to clear Hilary and fame Trump. The entire Hilary e-mail investigation and the entire Mueller investigation must themselves be investigated by a Special Counsel

rhetorical effect: a hall-of-mirrors: let’s investigate the investigation of the investigation. Similarly to Benghazi, this Clinton derangement syndrome will never go away. Anyone opposed to Trump is by definition both biased and insubordinate (see “sitting up.” above.)