Hillary has numerous health issues, including a possible neurological disorder or brain clot (or even the aftereffects of a severe concussion). BUT it doesn't seem to affect her judgement or her train of thought. Trump sometimes acts as if he's coming down with dementia or even Alzheimer's.
Reagan started to descend into Alzheimer's during his second term, and during the Iran-Contra scandal he would ramble semi-coherently at press conferences, then his press secretary and other liasons would have to do damage control. But Reagan never really lost sight of his ultimate prize-beating the USSR without a nuclear war. Winning without fighting, to paraphrase The Art of War. Earlier, Reagan had laid out a coherent plan to outmaneuver the Soviets. The missile defense system may have been part of it-Reagan may have known it was impossible with mid-80s technology, but the point was to panic the Red Army brass, to force them to overextend a brittle system until it collapsed.
But Trump has no coherent vision, no method of his madness. He jumps all over the place. The only real takeaways from all his ranting is that he'd isolate America from the world and blame and persecute scapegoats for America's problems. That sounds very much like the offspring of a mating of Hitler and Pol Pot. It may then be no accident that he greatly admires dictators and authoritarian rulers. The tabloids here in the US regularly talk about how President Trump would destroy his enemies using the power of his office. I read them, and the articles sound a lot like what Nixon tried to do. Trump, however, is lauded by the people while Nixon was reviled.
I personally don't mind an isolationist America, although I'm worried about what China would do once we abandoned the western Pacific, I'm worried that the Chinese would become a bull in a china shop and start conquering their weaker neighbors. Russia doesn't seem to be as aggressive, Putin doesn't really seem to want to reassemble the old USSR, only to reunite ethnic Russian communities with the motherland. All the interventions Putin has done have concerned regions with ethnic Russian populations-Crimea, eastern Ukraine, South Ossetia/Abkhazia, all are majority Russian. China is different, it seems to want a big empire. Look at Tibet and East Turkestan, and how Mao forced them into China. The last time America withdrew from the world, Hitler and Hirohito took it as a signal to build empires, and America was eventually forced to defeat both at extreme cost.
01 Oct 2016, 2:11 pm
