Strats and Tacs

The thrill is gone

I don’t want to overthink it. The Gestalt of Tubby remains what it has always been —lies, racism, and solipsism, accelerated by senility and the desperation of impending demise. And the grand strategy to which he and his top gargoyles are committed — that whole Tycoon - Genius - Big Man On Planet thing — is the same as it’s been since first he lumbered onto the scene, and for a long time it was very successful and in some ways it still is.

But tactics is something else. Everyone talks about strategy like they’re Clausewitz or Bill Parcells because it’s managerial in the cover-of-Inc.-or-Fortune sense, meaning it’s about giving orders, casting blame, and taking credit, and it looks like something any of us could do, or could at least fake (and hey, if it works out, you’re still a master strategist!).

Thus did Steve Bannon win credit for setting this fascist Frankenstein on the path to victory. Did he deserve it, or was it just the corruption of our demos that summoned Trump? Who knows and who cares, unless you’re into evil geniuses.

But a year and a half into Tubby 2, the strategy seems bogged down. The guys who are doing the big work, like Miller and Vought, are not idea men even in the Bannon sense; they’re more like Ehrlichman and Haldeman, following the old formula, just harder and meaner. (Even if they had a Big Idea, how could they get their now thoroughly mush-brained boss to turn away from his monuments and grifts long enough to listen?)

They and the rest of the brain trust are thus obliged to be tacticians, coming up with new ways to effect old strategy. And the tactics are not working.

That’s why they keep coming up with dumb ploys like the Reflecting Pool Vandals bit and the Pivot to Fauci — stunts that, for all their cruelty, not only fail to move the needle but often jerk it backwards. The Iran War is certainly a clusterfuck of tactics — it involves no strategic thought at all. It rides on fumes from the old grand strategy, in that it is meant to make the boss look like a historic leader, but the ineptitude of his henchmen in prosecuting it just makes it pathetic.

A couple of recent news items about the White House seem to follow the pattern.

Take the North Korean thing — Tubby yelling at the South Koreans for failing to support his Iran fiasco, and suggesting that he has more affinity with Nork dictator Kim Jong Un that with the more democratic southerners (who, after all, did put their own attempted putschist in prison), and demanding they trim back their upcoming joint national defense exercises with the U.S.

At first I assumed Trump was just pushing the envelope for personal gratification — he loves getting away with shit, and in his mad king phase must find it amusing to not only spit on the military with his callous remarks about the USS Abraham Lincoln, but also spit on the post-WWII political order (notwithstanding the damage it does to America’s position at the top of that order) by picking the dictator over the democrats.

But then it occurred to me that Trump probably didn’t even know South Korea and the U.S. military were having war games. And if KJU got on the horn and asked him to cut them back, knowing Trump he would have handed him a line of bullshit and then had a talk with Hegseth about it, in the course of which he would forget what he have come to talk to him about.

Instead some White House guy probably sensed an opportunity: Look, we always want to make the boss look like a World Leader, right? So how about if, instead of the war being fucked up because we’re fuckups, why not make it that the war is fucked up because our limp-dick allies are free-riding, like we said NATO was? And he’s going to punish them for it, like we did with the big tariffs?

That they could explain to the boss in a way he could understand and execute. Seems a reasonable tactic for the Big Man strategy. That it showed him to be above not only America’s allies but also America’s interests was just gravy.

The problem is that no one wants this shit. Tubby talking tough to the inferior Ausländers was always the play, but since tariffs bollocksed the economy even the farthest-gone MAGA rubes aren’t excited by his Greenland-style foreign affairs escapades.

The other thing, which I really think is being misread, is Natalie Harp, the blonde factotum who was mainly known as the girl who prints out internet articles for President Grandpa for months, but whose public profile has turned semi-salacious in recent weeks (e.g. “Trump, 80, Cornered on Relationship With Blonde Aide, 35,” “Sen. Jon Ossoff Publicly Questions Trump’s Closeness with Much-Younger Aide Natalie Harp,” etc), after which Trump and his flunkies yelled about it.

Trump’s reaction was portrayed as a hit dog hollering — “taking the bait,” as the New Republic had it. But I think it was a Trump tactic, one that also went bad.

For one thing, the Prestige Press that’s pumping this story are the same dopes who had two White House Correspondents Dinners with Trump this year and whom he left to die in a decoy plane; they don’t have the balls to cook this up unless they’re getting some help.

For another, Trump is an avatar of male supremacy and, as we know from bitter experience, his tendency toward sexual assault has been part of the come-on since Grab-‘Em-By-The-Pussy, part of the Big Man strategy. Back in the first term whenever Trump was shown in the company of attractive young women like Hope Hicks it was an obvious signal that the old man could still get it. Plus he could afford world-class porn stars like Stormy Daniels! The incels and other woman-haters could enjoy this butchitude vicariously.

I can see why they thought it was a good idea to revive it — all the way down to Trump and his stooges appearing to hit back at Ossoff. But since the first term we’ve had the E. Jean Carroll case and the Epstein blowup, not to mention Trump’s obvious physical and mental deterioration. Now even his most misogynist fans might look at Trump as more pathetic than manly. The tell was in Trump mouthpiece Steven Cheung’s rabid response to Ossoff:

Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics. Instead of denigrating hard working people serving their country, Jon should look deep into his soul and ask himself why he’s a miserable person who hates this country. It’s because he’s a radical, extremist Dumocrat.

It’s not that it was out of character for the malignant Cheung — in fact, it’s that it was so expected: A typical and rather tired MAGA concatenation of stupid slurs. When the strategy was working, even such maladroit tactics might carry it along. But when they’re borne along only by the stale air of failure, the effect is very different.