Why POTUS is Not for B.S. Artists

The Hillary Clinton camp enjoying a convention bounce that has given the candidate a double digit edge over Donald Trump has been warned not to rest on its oars, under the illusion the election is as good as won. The office of the President of the United States of America (POTUS), which Hillary is aspiring to attain, is not for B.S. artists, according to eminent scholars of the American genre. (More of this later).

It is understandable why the Hillary fans are concerned-getting laid back could be costly at this time despite the fact that current polls including Gallup, the GOP inclined Fox News and CNN/ORC are giving Hillary a margin that goes beyond the expected convention bounce.

Yes the Donald is down but it does look like he is not totally out. His ‘allies,’ Russia and Julian Assange, may come to his rescue by leaking some damaging document that would be to Trump’s advantage and imperil Hillary Clinton’s promising ratings over her Republican opponent. Assange has given notice to the effect that more damaging emails against Clinton should be expected.

Whatever happens, Trump’s sympathisers cannot say their superman’s posture of not stooping to conquer is the best approach to win the coveted title of POTUS. Instead he refuses to walk back his forced errors, doubling down on virtually every mistake that can be explained away or neutralised through an apology.

The supporters of the Republican candidate claim Clinton and the DNC have set Trump up with the backing of the media using the Khan family convention speech as an example. Even if it was a war of words between Khan and Trump, the argument goes, that would have been a mild incident with many attributing it to the usual Trump tendency to respond to every issue that comes his way.

A Trump insider revelation that the man is perpetually glued to the network and poll sites that tell him what he wants to hear, makes interesting reading. Anything to the contrary, in praise of Trump that is, wakes his narcissistic disposition on the reverse side; he would go on tweeter to fight Crooked Hillary and her gang! Except that this time around he went to the extent of declaring war on the mother of a fallen hero, not a prisoner of war like McCain, insinuating her Islamic faith prevented her to speak up leaving the job to her husband. Obviously that was when Trump fell off the gangway.

Trump in his characteristic style of infallibility and playing the strong man who does not apologise but would rather double down did just that and went beyond bar when Khan mounted the DNC convention podium to query Trump if he actually was conversant with the American Constitution especially on provisions related to immigration and immigrants.

Rather than keep the fight man to man, Trump blamed Kazir Khan’s wife for keeping silent during the convention. In escalating the discourse, Trump not only cast himself in bad light as an unfeeling public figure but un-presidential for the most powerful seat in the world. Trump. He even scolded a crying baby in a recent campaign and ordered she should be sent out of the arena!

Trump’s oft-repeated tendency of going off the curve has given Clinton an oft-repeated campaign weapon-the man does not have the temperament of being called the commander in chief of the most powerful country in the world. With the nuclear codes of the atomic bomb on his fingers who knows what he could do if he woke up on the wrong side, competing with the North Korean boy leader whom he admires along with Vladmir Putin. That matter was even highlighted last week when MSNBC host of ‘Morning Joe’, Joe Scarborough claimed that several months ago Trump asked a foreign policy expert who had come to advise him why he could not use nuclear weapons.

Thrice he asked about the use of nuclear armaments and why the US was not making use of it. “Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them,”
It is not just because of this disclosure that fears have become rife Trump cannot be trusted with nuclear codes which he can use in one moment of indiscretion, of losing his temperament to press the trigger.

The Trump camp has vehemently denied this but his utterances and admiration for those he considers to be strongmen have lent credence to the fact he could be an unfolding danger to humanity, a Hitler in the making. Trump had queried why Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia could not be equipped with nuclear weapons, what experts say runs counter to America’s policy of eliminating from the human race, weapons of mass destruction; on another occasion he had asserted he would not just be committed to NATO until he had reviewed the relationship of members with the US on a one and one basis.

A few days ago, President Barack Obama gave Trump a hard flogging with a footnote: he did not have the clout of a President like Mitt Romney and John McCain, but Newt Gingrich, one of his intellectual power advisers, who proposed a “Contract with America,” which helped to dismantle the four decade hold of the House of Representatives by the Democrats, disagreed. Gingrich, a former House Speaker, believes the Presidency is not all lost to Clinton if only Trump can become less unacceptable than Clinton to the American electorate in the next few weeks.

”While Trump could still always win, all of this is badly hampering his ability to broaden his appeal, casting doubt on the notion that he can prevail simply by being slightly less unacceptable than Clinton,” Gingrich said.

What a desperate advice!
Columnist Greg Sargent knows why Trump cannot be less unacceptable in November, his: pathologically abusive tendencies, his hair-trigger overreaction to criticism and slights both real and imagined, and his mental habit of sorting the world into the strong and the weak — the dominant and the submissive.
According to Sargent, Trump lacks basic knowledge of the world and doesn’t appear burdened by any curiosity about the complexities of foreign affairs or domestic policy.

While Trump was protesting to CNN for being called Bulshit by the GPS anchor Fareed Zakaria, he got a double down from the other end. In his Washington Post column last week, Zakaria further proposed a thesis why Trump is what he calls a “bulshit artist” or B.S. for short, adding that like all bulshit artists, Trump cannot be less unacceptable than Clinton, no matter her failings. He anchored his argument on the intellectual treatise of Harry Frankfurt, celebrated moral philosopher and professor emeritus at Princeton, who wrote a brilliant essay called ‘On Bulshit’ in 1986 According to Frankfurt, the bulshit artist is boastful, full of hyperboles and falsehoods and this has been Trump’s mode all his life.

“He boasts about his business, his buildings, his books, his wives. Much of it is a concoction of hyperbole and falsehoods. He’s like that guy we have all met at a bar who makes wild claims but when confronted with the truth, quickly responds, ‘I knew that!’”

The B.S., Frankfurt said, “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. . . except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.”