Trump Has No Vision or Positive Driving Moral Force

This comment from Michael Neville is Quote of the Day stuff:

Another problem that Trump has is that he doesn't know what he wants, other than self-aggrandizement. He has some vague idea about what his hard-core supporters want or more often don't want and to keep them happy, gives them lip service But Trump doesn't have any plans that last more than the time it takes him to have a new thought on something else. He is, to use the old cliche, a mile wide and an inch deep.

And it is spot on. When I look at someone like Obama, I get a real sense of moral fibre and character that I know has driven and will drive his politics. And this means that his politics will have a moral calibre to it. Some people look at politics and merely equate it with economics, thinking in toa simplistic a way. The two are, of course, hugely linked. But politics is, by definition, moral philosophy. It is what one thinks should be done on a societal level.

Indeed, Obama's pre-presidency life stands in intellectual contrast to Trump's:

He read deeply and widely about political and international affairs, graduating from Columbia with a political science major in 1983. After spending an additional year in New York as a researcher with Business International Group, a global business consulting firm, Obama accepted an offer to work as a community organizer in Chicago's largely poor and black South Side. As biographer David Mendell notes in his 2007 book Obama: From Promise to Power, the job gave Obama "his first deep immersion into the African American community he had longed to both understand and belong to."

Obama's main assignment as an organizer was to launch the church-funded Developing Communities Project and, in particular, to organize residents of Altgeld Gardens to pressure Chicago's city hall to improve conditions in the poorly maintained public housing project. His efforts met with some success, but he concluded that, faced with a complex city bureaucracy, "I just can't get things done here without a law degree." In 1988, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he excelled as a student, graduating magna cum laude and winning election as president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review for the academic year 1990-1991. Although Obama was a liberal, he won the election by persuading the journal's outnumbered conservative staffers that he would treat their views fairly, which he is widely acknowledged to have done....

After directing Illinois Project Vote, a voter registration drive aimed at increasing black turnout in the 1992 election, Obama accepted positions as an attorney with the civil rights law firm of Miner, Barnhill and Galland and as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He launched his first campaign for political office in 1996 after his district's state senator, Alice Palmer, decided to run for Congress....

Obama was able to get campaign finance reform and crime legislation enacted even when his party was in the minority, and after 2002, when the Democrats won control of the Senate, he became a leading legislator on a wide range of issues, passing nearly 300 bills aimed at helping children, old people, labor unions, and the poor. [source]

I could add much more, but you get the point.

Trump, on the other hand, is renowned for grabbing women's pussies, validating his daughter as a "piece of ass", and being on the end of some 3,500 lawsuits before his presidency (and as of May, has been sued 134 times since his inauguration - that should be far more by now).

Psychologists have seriously claimed Trump has personality disorders and he is clearly a bona fide, hardcore narcissist. Everything is about him. This is what has driven his business life. Being face of The Apprentice was about self-aggrandizement. His buildings are about being bigger and flashier than anyone else.

There is no depth to the man. He is an obsession with himself. Go read the Greek tale of Narcissus.

So what does this say about his politics?

Well, it means they are broadly empty. They are empty of moral value that appeals to anyone outside of himself and his immediate family. The only reason he kowtows to right-wing Christian conservatism is that he can use it to his own ends. And those being scammed in this way cognitively dissonantly turn a blind eye to the idea that they are selling their souls to the orange devil.

This vacuous hole in Trump's moral character presents a problem for him because he has nothing that stretches across the society that is the collection of societies that is the US. Obama had burning issues of social justice that helped to drive him further and further into politics (and originally into law). Trump decided to become president because, it seems, it would be fun and would be great for his image and sense of self, where that self is to be bigger and "better" than everyone else.

This means he has nothing to bring to the table with regard to any political or social issue and he can be manipulated by anyone else at the table. Or, if he is not being manipulated, he is changing his mind and opinion in order to fit with those around him.

As NBC News stated in "The 141 Stances Donald Trump Took During His White House Bid":

President-Elect Donald Trump took 141 distinct stances on 23 major issues during his bid for the White House.

His campaign's constantly-evolving views — often championed as a way for Trump to use unpredictability to cut better deals for the nation — make it difficult glean a political agenda, or even a set of clear, core policy views ahead of his presidency.

It's unclear, for example, if Trump plans to round up and deport the nation's estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants or give them a pathway to citizenship. After announcing he'd ban Muslims from entering the country ten months ago, it's unclear if that policy still stands -- his campaign some times says he's expanded the policy and other times that he's limited it.

After more than a year and a half of stadium rallies, around-the-clock interviews, sweeping primary wins, and one stunning general election victory, the Republican president-elect has the most contradictory and confusing platform in recent history. This is a catalog of his views over a 511-day span, from June 16, 2015 to November 8, 2016.

It is well worth reading the analysis and list of his flip-flopping in that piece.

He is not driving social change or policy, but being driven by others and his need for acceptance and power.

This, when you look through history, is dangerous ground.

And yet people sing his praises in perhaps the most egregious example of cognitive dissonance. Because they see him as a facilitator of neo-conservative wet pipe-dreams, they forgive him his absolute terrible character flaws. Sometimes they appear to sing the praises of those flaws with such mental contortions and gerrymandering as to beggar belief.

If Trump had been running as a Democrat, those same people would have eviscerated him entirely.

And he could have, if he thought he could win as one. After all, he once donated to them.

Flip. Flop.

Flip.

Flop.

"Oh look, shiny thing! Oooh, a reflection. Hmmmmm..."