Quote of the day

From James Delingpole:

Trump wields Twitter like a cross between a surgeon’s scalpel and a theater commander’s Daisycutter bomb.

It's from an article in which he analyzes how the President is playing to his popular base, rather than to other politicians and diplomats, particularly when he re-tweeted graphic illustrations of fundamentalist Islamic violence.

[President Trump] was sending a message to the people he cares about: all those ordinary people out there, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and beyond, who are shocked, appalled, scared by the way their countries are slowly (or quite quickly in the case of some countries, Sweden, for example) surrendering to Islam; who feel betrayed by the pusillanimity of their political leaders and let down by the failure of most of their media to report on the rapes and the sexual grooming and the violence being committed disproportionately by Muslims, both immigrants and home-grown radicals; who feel unable to speak – except in embarrassed whispers – about their fears about being stabbed or machine-gunned or blown up or mown down by yet another jihadist simply for the crime of going about their daily, Western life; who bitterly resent being tarred as Islamophobic or xenophobic or uncaring when all they want is to be allowed to live their life in peace in a country whose traditions, laws and cultural values remain the ones they grew up with and which make their homeland worth living in.

These are the people Trump was reaching out to with those tweets.

As for the rest – all those politicians and media types and cry bully activist groups – they just fell into Trump’s trap.

Trump wanted them to react in the way they did. It was part of his strategy ... if you want the short version, ask yourself this: how do you think most ordinary people – the ones outside the politically correct politics/media bubble – responded when they saw the president’s tweets?

Did they go

a) “I heard some people on the BBC tell me that Britain First are far right and far right is, like, the worst thing ever. So by retweeting them Donald Trump was literally endorsing fascism!”

or

b) “Trump gets it. Why don’t the other politicians get it?”

I suspect it’s mainly the latter.

There's much more at the link.  It's very interesting reading.

As I've said before, I did not vote for President Trump, and feared that he might be a liability in office rather than an asset.  However, his performance since his inauguration has surprised me, mostly pleasantly.  Sure, there have been some missteps, but I think he's completely steamrollered the "business-as-usual" bureaucrats and administrators in Washington D.C., and discombobulated our purported allies by insisting that he's going to put America first, rather than the international community.  Frankly, that's long overdue.

He's made a good start. Now, if he could just build that damned wall, and kick out the millions of illegal aliens who are leeching off our taxpayer dollars, and . . .

Peter