So. You thought playbooks were just for football. Something the coaches live by. They take them home at night and carry them to the movies and dinner with the family. Every time they think of a new route for their wide receivers, or a new blocking formation, they have a pocket full of napkins to record it.
Forget about that. Playbooks have been and probably always will be used as a major tool in politics. They are also used in baking, cooking, driving, dressmaking and so on. It is a roadmap, a recipe, directions, a pattern. It is a formula for success. It is something that has been tried before with success. It can be a variant of other trials and failures. But the playbook that is used is the one that is believed to hold the key to success.
Politicians look at failed and successful campaigns from past years. They also look at failed and successful governments and their policies. I want to believe most politicians have the best intentions for their efforts. However, there are those with visions of grandeur. They believe in the illusion of their own vision. Or, they may be believing in that illusion that is being reinforced by others with their own agenda.
Is Donald Trump a little of both? Probably. Donald Trump is no different than other men who wielded power and believed it gave them boundless authority. Those were the men that were in charge during the so-called gilded age. The beginning of the industrial revolution. They believed that rules only applied to those could not afford to play by their rules. They had their own playbook. Donald trump is a throw back to those times. The fact is he has read too many history books, but he has learned nothing.
So he goes to history for more lessons. Only this time he discards the idea of power in business, but he goes to where the real power lies. Government. If you look around the world, most of it's countries are under dictatorship's. Upwards of 70% by estimates. Why democracies are so few and fragile is for another discussion. The fact is people like Donald Trump look at the world and say, "Hey it's easier to be a dictator, and the rewards are there."
It happens more than we are aware. It's hard to maintain a democracy, and that is one of the reasons there are so few. The United States was said to be in the business of building democracies. That is not true. Democracies cannot be forced on countries or peoples. They have to want it more than they want an easy life.
That is how people like Donald Trump use the old playbooks. Gather a group of people who have grievances and tell them that their problems are coming from another group of people. It is so simple that you would think, that could not possibly work. Well, it does and it has, many times for many centuries. All wars are fought because someone is blaming someone for something. All a dictator or authoritarian needs for power is tacit approval by the people.
Donald Trump has bullied and shoved people around his whole life. It is the only way he knows how to manage. In other words he is not an organizer or a manager. He has in fact not made a profit at anything he has done. He is a grifter. His idea of success is to spend one hundred dollars to make seventy dollars. Anyone else that was given his wealth as a gift would now be worth many billions more than his stated wealth.
Donald Trump wants to a dictator because he is a weak man and needs fearful and weaker men to do his bidding. He knows how that works. He does not know how a successful business works. And he surely does not know how a democracy works.
So, Donald Trump, not being and original thinker does the one thing he is capable of doing. He follows a playbook of the some of the biggest losers we have had in the last two centuries. He follows the words of dictators from the last two world wars and between. Donald is doing the very thing any loser would do, and exactly what we expect from him.
Jack Wilson
Opinion