Trump finally did it. He lost it all over a mosquito. It was enough to make you wonder if the mosquito was real or imagined. And it was an example of the root cause of our society’s problems. Out of a 70-minute speech, social media lit up with 15-seconds of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump trying to kill a mosquito.
And it finally told us why we could never believe in Trump as President of the United States. He reminds us too much of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 until 1990. It is true: Trump in drag would even look like Margaret Thatcher.
While often defined as a political libertarian, Thatcher was to, to say the least, heavy handed. Her autocratic style had somewhat more direction than Trump’s. She was definitely better focussed. They hardly called her “The Iron Lady” for no reason.
The best social media comment on Trump’s “Mosquito” speech was by Republican strategist Stuart Stevens. He said “A concerned family would be talking about taking car keys away from Donald Trump not giving him nuclear codes.”
But in this age of 140-character assessments and assassinations, people should have listened to all 70 minutes of his distorted speech. The best part was when he threw his speech notes in the air and the rest was off the wall rather than off the top of a deranged mind. And he totally lost it when he tried to defend his defence of the late Iraqi leader Sadaam Hussein.
It reminds us of Baroness Thatcher in her dotage. A writer had agreed to do a ‘repair’ on an interview with her for a chapter in a book. The only problem was there was very little in her answers to suggest that she understood the questions. What the publisher received was a very interesting summation of what she might have said—had she understood the questions.
There is no question that Trump can afford writers to write sensible speeches. He is not good at it but we have also seen him use a teleprompter. What is obviously wrong is that he changes his mind. What we get in speeches by Trump is a constant flow of him changing his mind. These are not speeches, they are rants.
In this sense Trump and Thatcher are of a kind. It is as though the ghost of Baroness Thatcher resides in the Bermuda Triangle and communicates in some way with Trump to give him her political strategy—such as it is.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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