History News Network post

Submitted by Lorenz Gude (United States), Apr 24, 2017 at 05:53

I realize this short post is the responsibility of History News Network and not yours, but given a line up of six intellectuals it is crashingly superficial. ...

I have been on your mailing list for years and don't often comment because I usually agree with you and don't have much of any value to add. The best piece I read on Trump last week was Ann Althouse's take down of Casey Williams' "Has Trump Stolen Philosophy's Critical Tools?". What I see in his first 100 days as a Republican, who is neither a neverTrumper nor a Trumpster, is an establishment still reeling from a kind of instinctive Post Modern street fighter that has the establishment emitting all sorts of clueless bilge. Althouse's article added to that perception of Trump.

From my own perspective of psychological type theory I would say that a lot of people can't see Trump accurately because he is of a very odd psychological type in a politician - an intuitive feeler. An extraverted judgemental one at that. (ENFJ) People who gather information with the senses and evaluate it with their thinking function just dismiss intuitive feelers for whom endless possibilities present themselves which they evaluate with their feeling function - that is in terms of their values. They are pretty invisible to thinking types and are easy to underestimate. So, for a simple example, Trump sees someone burn an American flag and he tweets, something like 'people shouldn't be allowed to do that.' Sensate thinkers immediately think of all the settled law on the subject and start talking about free speech. And all the relatives of American Soldiers killed under Bush and Obama recognize that is exactly the way they feel too and are motivated to get off their backsides and go out and vote for Trump and not 'the heroine of Benghazi'.

If you are a thinker - I'm a retired academic and I'm one too - he is always coming from your 6 and following an entirely different script, so he keeps getting inside your OODA loop. Another example. He sees the pictures of the gassed kids in Syria and bang, he whacks Assad 59 times before Rand Paul can get his zipper down and make a flaming idiot of himself. Intuition is instantaneous - you just know - that what makes Trump so fast. That's where I see the opportunity and the danger. He's 70 and I think he knows himself in his own way and believe it is why he put the likes of Mattis, Tillerson and Flynn/McMaster on his team. I believe that he is going to learn the ropes and his second 100 days will be better than his first and that there is a good chance he will continue to roll the establishment just like he did the Republican and Democratic parties. Thanks for all your good work.

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