“The Shabbiest U.S. President Ever”
George Will, a lifelong conservative, once called Donald Trump
“the shabbiest U.S. president ever.”
and this was in 2019!
Seven years later, his warning reads like prophecy,
as America, NATO, and Civic Virtue continue to erode.
George Will and the Long View
George Will. Here is what he once wrote about Trump - he called him “the shabbiest U.S. president ever.”
“The shabbiest U.S. president ever is an inexpressibly sad specimen.” He wrote.....I have been reading George Will since 1974. Yes, nineteen-seventy-four.
He was the first arch-conservative I ever encountered. I disliked him then, based on the views he expressed in his column. If memory serves me correctly, he wrote at the time for Newsweek, not Time.
I may be mistaken on that detail, because I did not like Newsweek much and therefore tend to associate him with it.
Both magazines were delivered simultaneously to our home. Neither my brother nor my very humble self needed much encouragement.'
We devoured them.
My respect for George F. Will has grown over time. I never did find out what the “F” stands for, but I did come to appreciate something more important: he formed his opinions from principle and stood by them.
What Will Was Really Saying
In that essay, Will was not merely insulting Donald Trump’s style or temperament. His argument was far more serious.
He was saying that Trump represented a collapse of civic virtue, constitutional restraint, and presidential dignity. In Will’s view, Trump was not just embarrassing. He was institutionally corrosive.
Will portrayed Trump as a man trapped in a shallow, transactional existence, incapable of genuine friendship beyond utility, untouched by history, and unmoved by the dignity of the office he occupied. Power, in Trump’s hands, was not stewardship. It was self-soothing.
He suggested that Trump lied not primarily to deceive others, but to reassure himself. That the endless boasting and obvious falsehoods functioned as emotional crutches rather than strategy.
Most damning of all, Will implied that Trump’s relationship with his supporters was one of contempt disguised as solidarity. Loyalty was demanded, not earned. Numbers were not to be expanded, only hardened.
This was not a partisan attack.
It was a character judgment.
And it came from a conservative.
Isn’t This What They Midwifed?
I could not help thinking: isn’t this precisely what they inadvertently midwifed?
For context, George Will is a long-time conservative thinker aligned with limited government, constitutionalism, etc.
Yet within that same tradition, opposition to government efforts to support the most marginalised groups in society often became instinctive, almost a Pavlovian reflex.
“Small government” often meant this: "Be a dwarf when it was time to shoulder the burdens of the bottom 10, 20, or 30 percent of society".
Yet government was allowed to be big when it came to protecting the interests of the top 1 percent.
Is this the right time to speak about offshoring American jobs to China?
Done with profit and dollar signs in corporate eyes, only to later blame China for growing rich by mastering the very jobs America handed over?
Or should I wait one more paragraph?
A Missed Moral Imagination
In my MBA class in Texas a fair amount of time ago, I probably annoyed the professor and a few classmates when I asked a simple question:
How much greater might America have been if those jobs had been offshored to poor minorities within the country, instead of exported entirely and leaving those communities even poorer?
I went further. I suggested that perhaps Black Americans may have been the implicit target. They had grown economically stronger during the heyday of Detroit, That strength, I argued, may have appeared threatening to the guardians of an oppressive economic order.
That was not the right time or right way to say it?
The rehearsed answer came quickly: minimum wage laws made such ideas impossible.
Not one to give up easily, I suggested something deliberately provocative:
Why not moor ageing aircraft carriers just outside U.S. legal jurisdiction and retrofit them as factories with alternative wage structures? Better than scuttling them.
Absurd? Perhaps.
But no more absurd than hollowing out entire cities and then blaming their residents for collapsing.
At least George Will was honest. He preached what he actually believed. A far cry from Today's 'life long' conservatives.
Everything Trump Touches Dies
George F. Will’s assessment was published seven years ago, on January 19, 2019.
Anyone who concluded at the time that America was entering a downward trajectory, a period of self-reinforcing decline, would not have been wrong.
I do not know which part of Donald Trump’s résumé is difficult to understand.
He accelerates decline, weakening what he touches.
It was clear even before his first election, and again when he ran for a second term, that his presence would deepen social fractures and erode institutions.
There is even a book with this exact title, Everything Trump Touches Dies, written by Rick Wilson, a Republican. It was first published on August 7, 2018, several months before Will’s scathing assessment, and more than two years before Trump’s assault on American democracy.
I am still trying to understand what, precisely, triggered Will to write with such severity nearly two years before January 6.
Perhaps the answer lies in his observation that:
"halfway through this experiment with an incessantly splenetic presidency, much of the nation had grown accustomed to daily mortifications, or worse, had lost its capacity for embarrassment"
The Unmistakable Pattern
The evidence is hard to refute. “Make America Great Again” was always a scam!
America today is is considerably less than it was 12 months ago and much much diminished than it was the day Obama left office.
Trump has Made America Less Again #MALA - just as he did in his first term, in every respect
He's Made America Less Again Economically
Made it less (again) on the world stage - lost all its soft power - for nothing...
Imagine if China pulled off a masterstroke and became a democracy, automatically emerging as the de facto leader of the free world, a title that at the moment seems to sit more comfortably with the president of France.
Trump accelerates decline, weakening what he touches.
He has made NATO, the most formidable military alliance in history, weaker.
His indulgence of Vladimir Putin emboldened Russia’s catastrophic miscalculation in Ukraine, accelerating decline there as well.
Evangelicalism, too, is in decline. Independent research shows that U.S. church participation has been falling for decades, and the Trump era appears to have accelerated that trend.
Even white supremacy has begun turning inward. Many former MAGA adherents can no longer stomach the reality of what they always were, but never fully confronted.
And this may be the only genuinely good consequence of his rise.
Christians in Nigeria, Finding Out the Hard Way
A few days ago, 160 people were kidnapped from a church. Not surprisingly, those who once celebrated U.S. missile strikes in Nigeria are suddenly very quiet, as though pretending nothing happened might somehow put Humpty Dumpty back together again, or keep him on the wall so he never fell in the first place.
Wasn’t it all predictable?
The problem with people who cannot learn from history is simple: they believe history begins only from the moment they “opened their eyes.”
There is a well-intentioned saying in Nigeria: “When you wake, na your morning.” The problem is setting your clock by it.
Once the average Nigerian learns a new historical fact, it often becomes an instant rallying cry.
Overhearing, “You know Istanbul is the same city as the fabled Constantinople, don’t you? Once a Christian city,” is sometimes enough to ignite one pastor, then ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, and before a week has passed, ten thousand.
Weeks are then spent delivering angry sermons denouncing Islam.
Then they learn about Ilorin.
“You also know Ilorin was invaded in 1812 and became part of the Sokoto Caliphate?”
And the firestorm restarts.
Yet there is almost no similarity between the Islamisation of Ilorin and the fall of Constantinople. None.
Different histories.
Different politics.
Different social dynamics.
Different centuries.
But what is the point of explaining historical differences?
Many have already decided what history “means.” They are not seeking understanding, only confirmation. And confirmation is always cheaper than wisdom.
The Achille Lauro Lesson
Some of us remember the Achille Lauro hijacking.
I remember that an old Jewish man in a wheelchair was shot by terrorists and pushed overboard. His name Leon Klinghoffer has stayed with me all these years. May his soul rest in peace. , . I followed that story closely. 1985 or 1986.
Here is the sequence of events that preceded it:
Ronald Reagan had just ordered twin bombings of Benghazi and Tripoli, in response to a discotheque bombing in West Germany that American soldiers frequented.
The terrorists explicitly cited those bombings as their justification for the hijacking.
Why This Still Matters
So why is this story relevant?
Because when America elects leaders ignorant of the fine details of geopolitics, the world becomes a more dangerous place.
The best American presidents have always understood this: grievance is the oxygen of terrorism.
Take away the oxygen, and the fire goes out.
If missile strikes could solve terrorism, it would have been buried long ago in the rubble of bombed encampments. It survives because grievance survives.
Force alone does not solve the problem. The logic of deploying violence against minds already consumed by grievance is itself irrational.
We all know that cutting off one head of the terror monster solves nothing. A dozen, perhaps a hundred, more aggrieved recruits rise in its place.
Why do we keep cutting?
Why?
The Question We Refuse to Ask
Why can’t that question be asked honestly?
If we blame a certain religion for the way people act, what exactly are we going to do about that religion?
Nothing.
There is literally nothing anyone can do.
No religion is going anywhere anytime soon.
Certainly not at the behest of another.
Engagement, Not Supremacy
So? So if we are going to live in the same world and live in peace, we must engage. Engage. Engage.
Christian supremacism, or cultural superiority, itself an offshoot of white supremacism, is the real stumbling block.
I need to say this:
Nothing is quite as tragic, or as ridiculous, as Black African Christians adopting that same posture of cultural superiority, especially in their dealings with people of other religions within their own nations.
They too must engage. Engage. Engage. Engage.
Baldwin IV and Saladin
There is a story of the leper king of Jerusalem facing off against a mighty Muslim warrior, Saladin.
Behind them stood armies of nearly 100,000 men on each side.
Yet the two kings rode forward alone to speak.
To engage.
To give peace one last chance.
“If we engage, we will all die,” the Christian king of Jerusalem said calmly.
Saladin nodded.
History records his reply:
“I will send my best doctors.”
The Christian king suffered from leprosy.
Saladin then turned his horse and ordered his army to retreat.
History vs Hollywood
That, by the way, is the Hollywood version.
What is historically solid is this:
- Saladin showed unusual respect toward Baldwin IV of Jerusalem.
- Temporary truces and negotiated pauses did occur.
- Saladin later sent physicians to treat Baldwin during periods of truce, consistent with Islamic medical diplomacy.
Also historically solid are the following:
- Baldwin IV reigned from 1174 to 1185.
- He was famously known as the Leper King.
- He personally led armies against Saladin and was respected, even by Muslim chroniclers, for courage and restraint.
The need to understand history in order to make wiser present decisions has never been more desperate.
I rest my case.
Don Kenobi
#OldManInTheMolue
#Hercules #Hydra #MyFrancisEssays
POSTSCRIPT: How Did Hercules Solve the Hydra Problem?
I do not quite remember how Hercules finally solved the problem of the Hydra. But perhaps it is time we revisited ancient mythology for clues. Revisiting the myth - here's what I discovered:
Hercules faced the Lernaean Hydra, a serpent with many heads.
For every head cut off, two grew back. One head was immortal.
The problem was not a lack of strength. It was the wrong method. The solution lay not in more force, but in a change of method.
He stopped cutting blindly. Each strike made the monster stronger, so Hercules changed tactics.
He brought help. Hercules called in his nephew, Iolaus. The myth is explicit: strength alone would fail.
He cauterised the wounds. As Hercules cut off each head, Iolaus seared the neck with fire. No regrowth.
He dealt with the immortal head separately. The head that could not die was cut off, buried, and pinned under a massive rock. Not destroyed. Contained.
What the Myth Is Teaching
- Some problems grow when attacked directly.
- Some evils feed on grievance and repetition.
- Victory comes from strategy, cooperation, restraint, and containment, not rage.
- What cannot be destroyed may still be neutralised.
- Cutting alone never works. Missiles alone never work.
- Grievance is the oxygen of terrorism. How can you take away the grievance when you either do not know it, or do not care what it is?
- Saladin sent physicians, not missiles.
- Respect matters in adversarial relationships.
DON KENOBI
#BigAgendaAfrica
