Trump's Closing Argument
11/05/2016
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https://youtu.be/vST61W4bGm8

Pretty good Trump ad tying together his themes of Hillary’s corruption and globalism. Rather than just attack Hillary over idiosyncratic scandals, he’s pulling together the threads of how Hillary’s ideology and self-interest support each other.

It’s funny how Trump is developing a more coherent big picture framework.

My recollection of Romney’s campaign is that he generally lacked an intellectual framework for tying together his a la carte issues.

With McCain, he had Invade the World / Invite the World. Sure, it doesn’t make much sense, but at least it’s an ethos.

Romney, though, was a more reasonable man than McCain, so he was kind of stuck in nowhere land in the middle.

In contrast to the remarkable spectacle of Donald Trump, of all people, evolving into an insightful critic of the conventional wisdom of the zeitgeist, Hillary’s big intellectual breakthrough in 2016 was realizing how much she really hates people who don’t vote for her due to their irredeemable deplorableness.

That doesn’t mean, however, the details will necessarily work together for Trump. For example, industrial protectionism was likely pretty good for America on the whole during the “infant industries” era (to quote the non-rap Alexander Hamilton). But you didn’t really want to see how the sausage is made. Tariff battles in Congress tended to gross out everybody who wasn’t a hired lobbyist or wardheeler.

Jerry Pournelle has proposed a modest tariff (e.g., 10%) on everything, no exceptions, as a way around the corruption problem. Of course, that’s the opposite approach to Trump’s Art of the Deal inclinations. [Comment at Unz.com]

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