Trump—Triumph or Tragedy

Contrary to the contentions of those misguided (or deviously Machiavellian) Americans now agitating for a “Convention of the States” in order to amend the Constitution in some unpredictable fashion, the ridiculous and intolerable situation which confronts this country today is not the product of “the supreme Law of the Land”. No, indeed. It is the result of decades of disregard and even disdain for, and thoroughgoing disobedience to, the Constitution in both the District of Columbia and the States, by a totally dysfunctional, if not outright disloyal, professional “political class” and the vicious, predatory factions in the Establishment for which the “political class” works. But, obviously, in keeping with traditional methods of political reform, the stranglehold which the greasy fingers of this cabal press into Americans’ throats can be broken only upon the emergence of viable candidates for high public office whom the Establishment does not control. Increasing numbers of patriotic Americans, disgusted with the present noxious state of affairs, and desperate for change which is worth believing in and struggling for, are asking whether Donald Trump is such a candidate. Will his emergence on the political scene usher in a time of triumph, or the final act of an American tragedy?

To be sure, because there are no probabilities of unique events, the past never provides perfect parallels for the future. (As the expression coined by advertisers in the automotive trade has it, “your mileage may differ”.) Yet, just as the enjoyment of a deceptive prosperity in 1928 predictably collapsed into the anguish of a real depression in 1932, today’s data indicate to every perceptive observer that an economic, social, and political crisis of substantial magnitude cannot be averted in this country (and the rest of the world as well) during the foreseeable future. Indeed, in light of the unbearable burden of America’s public and private debt (most of which is not only entirely unfunded now, but also quite incapable of ever being funded); the incompetence, corruption, and criminality of the Federal Reserve’s banking-cartel and Wall Street’s financial casinos; the disappearance of high value-added jobs (as in manufacturing) through off-shoring and globalist “trade deals”; the impoverishment of the middle class and destitution of the poor; the utter unsoundness of this nation’s currency; and especially the Establishment’s perverse principle that the very worst criminals in the Axis of Financial Fraud which runs from New York City to the District of Columbia are both “too big to fail” and “too big to jail”—due to all of this, in comparison to the approaching national calamity the Great Depression of the 1930s will appear to have been a period of economic rationality, social tranquillity, and political stability. And, most ominously for Mr. Trump, in this benighted era in which the President is viewed by all too many as “the Decider” whose actions determine the course of events for better or worse in every sphere of human endeavor, whoever happens to be the President from 2017 through 2020 will be held economically, politically, and ideologically accountable for whatever transpires, be it good or especially be it ill. (One might discount these concerns by pointing out that, were Hillary Clinton elected President, she would face the same Hooverite danger of incumbency in the midst of an economic collapse. Unlike Mr. Trump, however, Mrs. Clinton would benefit from the inestimable advantage of having the big “mainstream media” as ardent propagandists indoctrinating Americans with the party line that only the fascistic, socialistic, or other policies of political racketeering which her Administration promoted could eventually restore prosperity.)

So, if Mr. Trump is not fully prepared—well before the fact—to tell Americans exactly how he plans to deal, expeditiously and effectively, with the hard times that are surely on their way, if he is elected his Administration will be blamed for the collapse, even more than Herbert Hoover was pilloried for the Great Depression. Not only that: Having run on a fundamentally anti-Establishment platform, Mr. Trump and all of his political and ideological supporters—be they constitutionalists, advocates of federalism and limited government, Tea Party-ites, or simply average Americans who hope that by electing an “outsider” they can finally escape from domination by the “two” major political parties and the string-pullers in the Establishment who control them from behind the screen—will find themselves decisively defeated, defamed, discouraged, and dumped into the dustbin of history. The Establishment will emerge triumphant, more puissant, irresponsible, rapacious, and vindictive than ever before.

So, what is to be done—by Mr. Trump certainly, and indeed by any candidate for “the Office of President” who aspires to be a true political “outsider” both in words and especially in deeds? For one thing, he must not make Herbert Hoover’s mistake of attempting to deal with an economic cataclysm by employing the very same discourse, analyses, tactics, policies, and types of persons as advisors which and who were responsible for the crisis. First and foremost, as the essence of his electoral campaign he must stop talking about evanescent “issues” concocted largely by his opponents and disseminated through “the mainstream media” as part of their incessant dissemination of disinformation, but instead must apprise Americans as to what the real score is at the opening of this, the fourth quarter; then set out his unique plan for the rest of the game.

A. First on Mr. Trump’s agenda must be to lay before this country a candid and accurate assessment, in detail, of the present situation—what it entails, how it came about, and why it will inexorably play out to this country’s destruction if the right steps are not taken in due course. He must be as unsparingly honest and coldly clinical as a physician who warns his patient that the patient suffers from a disease which will have fatal consequences unless radical treatments are employed as soon as possible. And, just as such a physician would do, he must explain that the necessity for these treatments derives from the source, nature, and inevitable effects of the disease. Of course, Mr. Trump would not be the first to describe the hard times now bearing down upon us, or to explain the origins of the danger. I, for one, have been writing about this subject since even long before my earliest commentaries for NewsWithViews, such as “‘Homeland Security’—For What and For Whom?” (8 March 2005) and “Are Monetary and Banking Crises Inevitable in the Near Future?” (17 March 2005). Other noteworthy prophets of the obvious include Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson on economics, John Whitehead on this country’s burgeoning para-military police state, and Frosty Wooldridge on the disastrous effects of unlimited immigration. Mr. Trump, though, enjoys the decided advantage that, as a candidate for the office of President with the savvy and financial wherewithal to generate his own mass publicity, he cannot be dismissed as a nonperson by “the mainstream media”. Although the big media may go all out for character assassination, they can neither impose anonymity on him nor consign what he says to the oblivion of Orwell’s “memory hole”.

From his self-made “bully pulpit”, Mr. Trump needs to emphasize that the present situation is not the product of disembodied “trends” or “historical forces” for which no one in particular, or for which everyone in general, is responsible. The situation confronting America today has resulted from specifically human actions. And (as everyone conversant with Austrian economics knows) all human actions are the products of some identifiable individuals’ purposeful behavior, or misbehavior. Therefore, Mr. Trump needs to expose and excoriate the actual culprits in the Establishment out of whose witches’ cauldron the contemporary septic mess has overflowed. Consequences must be connected with actions—actions must be associated with names—and to names must be assigned moral and political responsibility, if not outright criminal culpability, for past, present, and future events. I, for one, am not responsible for America’s plight; and I presume that vanishing few of my readers are, either. But some identifiable individuals are at fault here. And this country is entitled to know their names, what they have done, and why—and, most to the point in a political campaign for the highest office in the land, what the leading candidate intends to do about it all. Obviously, the rogues’ gallery must include at least the dominant figures and operatives of the “two” major political parties, as well as all of the factions and other special interests, both domestic and foreign, for which those “two” parties are partisans, fronts, transmission belts, stooges, and gaggles of useful idiots (if not outright co-conspirators). These individuals, after all, have exercised actual control over America’s political, economic, social, and cultural institutions for decades upon decades. If those institutions have gone to blazes, it is not illogical or unfair to conclude that the men and women in charge of them lit the matches.

Of course, exposure of this dirty linen will confront Americans with the hard reality that their country’s body politic, and the economic, social, and cultural institutions over which it presides, are riven with irreconcilable conflicts. Yet for America to come to grips with such divisions is not without historical precedent— although in the past that problem was usually recognized for what it was, not swept under the rug as it tends to be today. For the prime instance, when “the Representatives of the united States” promulgated the Declaration of Independence, they did so “in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of the[ ] Colonies”. Not all of the people, but only “the good People”—because the Founders were well aware that Americans in their day were far from being united. Some were “good People” who favored independence; some were attentistes who sat on the political fence, abiding events; and some were Tories who supported King George III. From the Patriots’ point of view, whatever the Tories’ personal merits as individuals, as a group they were to be accounted “bad people”, with whom no political reconciliation or compromise was possible.

In the late 1700s, much more in the economic, social, and cultural realms united Patriots and Tories than divided them. The decisive fracture appeared along a political fault-line: namely, whether “the good People” were entitled to enjoy the plenitude of “the rights of Englishmen”, or were to be consigned to a second-class status at the mercy of the British Imperial Government. “[W]hy should we enumerate our injuries in detail?” asked the Continental Congress in 1775. “By one statute it is declared, that parliament can ‘of right make laws to bind us in all cases whatsoever.’ What is to defend us against so enormous, so unlimited a power? * * * We saw the misery to which such despotism would reduce us.” A declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North America, now met in General Congress at Philadelphia, setting forth the causes and necessity of their taking up arms (Thursday, 6 July 1775), Journals of the Continental Congress, Volume 2, at 146-147.

Today, an arguably worse situation exists. For, with the advent of “multiculturalism” as the Establishment’s strategy of social control through engineered social dissolution, almost everything has become a source of divisions which the Establishment exploits for the purpose of accreting to itself powers even more “enormous” and “unlimited” than any to which the British Parliament aspired in Colonial times. Yet, in confirmation of the old axiom that le plus ça change le plus c’est la même chose, in contemporary America the primary division between “the good People” on the one hand, and “the bad people” among or allied with the Establishment on the other hand, appears in the same stark political terms. Just as in the late 1700s, “the good People” of the contemporary United States demand only that to which they are entitled: namely, “the rights of Americans”, which “the bad people” are bending every effort to strip from them.

In reliance upon the , “the good People” want to maintain “among the powers of the earth, the[ir] separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”—not to be swept up into some supra-national “new world order”. They want the public officials who administer the “Governments” this country’s Founders “instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” to exercise only “just powers”; at every turn of the political wheel to seek out and conform to, not to disregard and dispense with, “the consent of the governed”; to acknowledge “[t]hat whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”; and always to remember, in fear and trembling, that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce the[ People] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”. In short, “the good People” want to remain sovereigns in their own land, not subjects, serfs, or slaves of a global imperium run by and for the benefit of gigantic corporations devoid of souls, hearts, or consciences, that scorn “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and violate them with impunity.

As this country’s sovereigns, “the good People” want, deserve, and have an absolute legal right to enjoy the benefits of the Constitution their forefathers “ordain[ed] and establish[ed]” “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. In contrast—

• The Establishment intends to dissolve “a more perfect Union” in this country in order to absorb Americans within a global “new world order” in which their national identity disappears.

• The Establishment intends to “[dis]establish Justice” by creating a dichotomy of legal status between its members and minions, on the one hand, and average Americans, on the other. For the Establishment, one sort of “justice” will prevail, and quite another one for everyone else. Private special interests will be the beneficiaries, not only of “bail outs”, “bail ins”, and other subsidies under color of the excuse that they are “too big to fail”, but also of abusive “trade deals” that enable supra-national corporations to usurp the constitutional authority of Congress “[t]o regulate Commerce”, thereby permanently alienating Americans’ ability to control their own economic destiny. And those corporate interests, along with the rogue public officials who do their bidding, will be “too big to jail”— the worse their offenses, the more complete their immunities.

• The Establishment intends to undermine “domestic Tranquility” by sowing the dragons’ teeth of disharmony, dissension, discord, and division throughout society, in pursuit of its strategy of divide et impera. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the aid and comfort the Establishment extends to invasions of America by illegal aliens who refuse to assimilate but instead assert a right to impose divisive “multiculturalism” on everyone else, with the inevitable result that every thread of traditional Americanism will be ripped from this country’s social fabric.

• The Establishment intends to pervert “the Army and Navy of the United States”—after the Militia, the primary national instruments for “the common defence”—into hordes of witless myrmidons deployed for aggressive military adventures overseas, in violation of the constitutional principle that “the genius and character of our institutions are peaceful, and the power to declare war was not conferred upon Congress for the purposes of aggression or aggrandizement”. Fleming v. Page, 50 U.S. (9 Howard) 603, 614 (1850).

• The Establishment intends to supplant “the general Welfare” with “corporate welfare”, so that special interests among 1% of the population can amass unlimited wealth at the expense of the remaining 99%. And, worst of all,

• The Establishment intends to render utterly “[in]secure the Blessings of Liberty”, by empowering a para-militarized police state to oppress average Americans at every turn, in a manner far more egregious than anything King George III and his Ministers could ever have contemplated, let alone attempted.

Indeed, the Establishment is well on its way to accomplishing each and every one of these goals.

Under these circumstances, no common ground can be found, no dialogue conducted, no compromise reached between “the good People” and their candidate for “the Office of President”, on the one side, and the Establishment and its candidate, on the other—any more than common ground, dialogue, and compromise are possible between justice and injustice, “the general Welfare” and the avarice of special interests, or what the Second Amendment calls “the security of a free State” as opposed to the oppression of a police state. One side or the other must prevail. In this struggle, as General MacArthur said: “There is no substitute for victory.”

B. Mr. Trump (or any authentic political “outsider”) can depend only on “the good People”; and “the good People” can depend only on him. But to gain their confidence, Mr. Trump must take “the good People” into his confidence, with confidence that, knowing what he intends to do and why and how he intends to do it, they will rally to him through every vicissitude which awaits them.

1. He must convince “the good People” that he is committed to fighting the battle, both before and especially after his election, on their, not their enemies’, terms. At the minimum, that requires bringing into his campaign, and eventually into his Administration, a set of advisors not drawn from the ranks of the professional political courtiers who have carried water for prior Administrations. The sorry records of those Administrations provide conclusive evidence that these individuals’ misguided conceptions of “public service” have been the primary causes of, and therefore will never provide the solutions for, America’s woes.

2. Mr. Trump must emphasize that no one can “make America great again” unless and until “the good People” steel themselves to yank this country by its bootstraps out of the very deep hole into which past generations of incompetent and disloyal politicians have cast it. In line with the old adage that “a pessimist in an optimist who knows the facts”, he must warn “the good People” that a great deal of economic pain and social unrest will be unavoidable in the short term—and that stern measures must be implemented, prodigious efforts expended and costs incurred, and agonizing sacrifices endured in the near term—if the necessary reforms are to be achieved in the long run. That he is the one Presidential candidate ready and willing to take charge and shoulder responsibility is not enough. For he can succeed only if “the good People” are prepared to do their part to the utmost of their abilities. He can be no more than the obstetrician for America’s renaissance; “the good People” must give birth to it.

3. Glittering generalities, “sound bites”, and slogans will not suffice. Rather, Mr. Trump must set out with specificity the nonnegotiable reforms his Administration will implement. Here, I can touch on only a few of these, and only in a limited fashion:

(a) In furtherance of the President’s oath of office—that he “will to the best of [his] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”— Mr. Trump must promise to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”. Without that as the guiding principle and constant practice of his Administration, nothing of permanent value will be achieved.

(b) In fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence, he must assure “the good People” that he will bend his every effort to preserve this country’s national sovereignty, integrity, and identity—not only by securing its borders against invasions of illegal aliens, but also by rooting out those internal subversives who are employing “multiculturalism” as a battering-ram to break down America’s political and social cohesion, preliminary to the submergence of “the good People” in a supra-national “new world order” which will eradicate “the separate and equal station” “among the powers of the earth * * * to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”.

(c) Because “representative government” cannot function if Americans do not know what their ostensible “representatives” are actually doing, and why they are doing it, Mr. Trump must promise “the good People” that he will put paid to the present-day fetish of governmental secrecy and lies (which depend upon secrecy for their efficacy). His Administration must open the public records to public inspection to the fullest extent consistent with the constitutional definition of “national security”—that is, the security of the nation, not the security of “the political class” and its string-pullers in the Establishment.

For a prime example, Americans must be afforded access to all of the public (and, to the extent possible, private) records concerning the 9/11 event; and those records must be subjected to the most wide-ranging critical analyses, letting the chips fall where they may. In addition to that, novel methods for elucidation of the truth must be employed. Being something of a scientist myself, I favor actual experiments. Every theory which can be disproved through experiment must be discarded. So, as a scientific first step in testing prior Administrations’ theories of what happened on 9/11, Mr. Trump should promise that his Administration will build an exact replica of World Trade Center Building 7 as it existed on that fateful day—set it on fire—and see whether or not it collapses into its own footprint at near free-fall speed, as did the original. If it does not, certain conclusions can be drawn, on the basis of which further actions can be taken. In light of the serious consequences which this country has already suffered, and will continue to endure, because of the Establishment’s theories of 9/11, whatever such an experiment may cost will hardly be excessive.

(d) Mr. Trump should explain to “the good People” that, by setting aside all constitutionally unwarranted governmental secrecy, his Administration will be able to enforce the Bill of Rights and other constitutional and statutory guarantees of Americans’ freedoms in a rigorous fashion against rogue public officials and their co- conspirators in the private sector. The Constitution’s goal to “establish Justice” can never be fulfilled except perforce of the principle that no one is “too big to jail”. For far too long “the political class” has been able to sweep its serial malfeasances under the rug, either through the wrongdoers’ suppression of the evidence of their wrongdoing, or by grants of “immunity” to one set of wrongdoers by another set of wrongdoers when wrongdoing slips into the light of day. The time has come to employ a firmer broom in more trustworthy hands. For, as the old saying has it, “a new broom sweeps clean”—and an iron broom sweeps cleaner yet. Such a thoroughgoing housecleaning is especially needed with respect to those rogue officials whose “long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” has “evince[d] a design to reduce [Americans] under absolute Despotism”. As the apt slogan of the Navy’s “Silent Service” had it in World War II, “find them, chase them, sink them”.

(e) Of all possible wrongdoing by rogue public officials, nothing could be worse than fomenting international warfare. Not only because modern warfare is hideously homicidal and egregiously expensive, but especially because the prosecution of wars abroad inevitably encourages the imposition of despotism at home. “[T]he common defence” is the constitutional standard. Therefore, Mr. Trump must assure Americans that he will end America’s involvement in aggressive military adventures overseas. Moreover, he must guarantee that he will see all of those rogue public officials who and the private special interests which have fomented or otherwise been responsible for or otherwise complicitous in such adventures brought to justice, through execution of those “Laws of the Union” which enforce the principles of the Nuremberg tribunal. See Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), Volume I, arts. 6(a), 7, 8, and 9, at 5-6. See also my NewsWithViews commentary “A New Nuremberg Moment” (6 September 2013). After all, these crimes—steeped in conspiracy and aggression—have resulted in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of needless deaths and injuries; destruction of the political integrity, social stability, and economic viability of whole countries; and huge wastage of resources by “military-industrial complexes” in both the United States and the other nations which have foolishly participated in these operations. And they continue even today, unabated in their savagery. See, e.g., Felicity Arbuthnot, “US Apocalypse in Mosul in the Guise of Bombing ISIS”. For such wrongdoing there can be neither excuse, nor exoneration, nor expunction from the pages of history.

Mr. Trump recently announced his “foreign policy” with a rousing speech. Yet it lacked the clarity and wisdom of George Washington’s Farewell Address with respect to foreign affairs, alliances, and the like. (Indeed, Mr. Trump could not go wrong by adopting as his guiding principles all of the tenets of that document.) Much of his speech was, as the wag once said, “déjà vue all over again”. To be sure, Mr. Trump’s reliance on the principle of, shall we say, “strength at home, businesslike diplomacy abroad” is a workmanlike approach, along the lines of Theodore Roosevelt’s precept, “speak softly and carry a big stick”. Nonetheless, I wonder how anyone can imagine, on the one hand, that this country cannot control its own borders to the extent of repelling an invasion of illegal aliens from a nation as militarily impotent as Mexico, but, on the other hand, that it can deploy to the very frontiers of Russia and China sufficient forces to awe those powerful nations into sheepish compliance with policies dictated from the District of Columbia at odds with their own compelling national interests. Indeed, one need look only to the débâcles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya to understand the limits the real world imposes on the hubris and fantasies of American military interventionists. (The only saving grace here is that Mr. Trump evidently desires to avoid a major war, whereas Hillary Clinton would likely prove a worse warmonger, and more feckless a war-fighter, than even George W. Bush.)

Finally, Mr. Trump’s promise to crush ISIS militarily rests on the naïve premiss that ISIS is some truly “foreign” force. He would do better first to investigate whether ISIS is in large measure the product of the devious intentions or simple-minded incompetence of the CIA and the Pentagon—and that therefore the initial step in the process of eradicating ISIS must be a thoroughgoing housecleaning of those agencies. (A parallel investigation should be conducted to determine the extent to which certain of America’s ostensible “allies” are at fault in this matter, too.) Mr. Trump might also want to inquire, for example, why the NSA, the DIA, the CIA, the FBI, FINCEN, the IRS-CID, and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies at home and abroad have not been able (or willing) to employ their extensive networks of surveillance to ferret out the sources of and routes for ISIS’s funding. After all, although logistics is not everything, everything depends on logistics. How does ISIS raise its revenue and pay its bills? Who are ISIS’s bankers, money-launderers, and so on? And why have they not been exposed, and steps taken to eradicate their operations? Inquiring minds surely want to know.

(f) As far as “domestic policy” is concerned , it will be essential for a Trump Administration to restore the two great powers of government—the Power of the Sword and the Power of the Purse—to “the good People’s” own hands. For no one else is sufficiently trustworthy to exercise them.

(g) In even the short run, little will be accomplished unless and until a Trump Administration breaks the electoral stranglehold of the “two” major political parties and the string-pullers behind them. This will require radically diminishing, if not eliminating altogether, the ability of organized wealth to maintain the oligopoly of those parties, to suppress or capture legitimate political movements, and thereby perpetually to misdirect the course of elections. That a handful of multi-billionaires, primarily through the mega-corporations they own and the myriad special-interest groups they spawn and finance, are suffered to dominate political affairs in this country, setting “the good People” at defiance in election after election, directly contradicts any rational conception of “representative government” and “the general Welfare”. Not only is that state of affairs unsound in principle, but also it has turned out disastrously in practice. For all too long, these individuals and institutions have controlled the composition of Congress, the Presidency, and the Judiciary, as well as much of State and Local government—the consequence being the mess in which this country now finds itself at every level of the federal system. The simplistic theory that “corporate money” can be equated with “free speech” in the political realm has been tested by experiment, and found woefully wanting. (To be sure, it might be argued that the corruption and degeneration of American politics have been the products, not of the injection of wealth per se into politics, but only of the faulty ideas that such injection has promoted, and that if the wealthy were to marshal their resources on behalf of good ideas this country would benefit. Yet there is no denying that, only as a consequence of the massive amounts of irresponsible wealth behind them could the bad ideas prevalent today have become dominant in the political arena. And in politics one must be extremely risk-averse, because the risks of error are too great to be accepted.)

The exclusion of “corporate money” from politics may appear to be a problematic goal, because of the false notion promulgated by the Supreme Court that corporations are “persons” with constitutional rights equivalent to those of real flesh- and-blood individuals. The “personhood” of corporations, however, is merely a sorry legal fiction. Actually, it is a piece of pseudo-legalistic balderdash, coming as it does from a Court with the effrontery to claim that actual human beings who happen to be unborn are not constitutional “persons”. In any event, no need exists for a constitutional amendment to recognize the self-evident truth that corporations have no inherent rights, but rather are merely the creatures of statutes, with only such legal relations (rights, powers, privileges, immunities, and so on) as those statutes grant, and which other statutes can deny, to them. Whatever it may have opined on this subject in the past, the Supreme Court has a long history of changing its mind on constitutional questions. See, e.g., Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808, 828-830 & note 1 (1991). So it is not too much to expect that the Court can be persuaded to reverse itself on this issue, too. And if the Justices refuse to come to their constitutional senses, they can be shown the door; for their tenure is solely “during good Behaviour”, which subversion of the political process in favor of faux “persons” can never be.

Admittedly, the foregoing may constitute no more than a “wish list” for a true Presidential “outsider” who has yet to appear. For only the future will tell whether Mr. Trump is such a man. Yet one must always live in hope. If an obscure commentator such as this author, living in the remote “Canoe Capital of Virginia”, can figure out some of what needs to be done, then so can an eminent real-estate shark from the Big Apple. Ultimately, though, the critical question is not “Can Trump do it?” or even “Will Trump do it?”, but instead “If Trump tries to do it, will ‘the good People’ do their part?” Will they demand his nomination, secure his election, and then stand behind his Administration?

As it always does, time will tell. Some Americans may yet imagine that this country can still play for time. But, as the old saying has it, time brings all things, bad as well as good. And anyone who can tell time knows that “the good People” are running out of time. It really may be “now or never”. If “the good People” do not triumph by electing a true “outsider” to “the Office of President” this November, America’s fate may be sealed, once and for all, in the worst tragedy of modern times.

©2016 Edwin Vieira, Jr. – All Rights Reserved.