First, a note:
I would like to clarify the intent of my recent essays.
As most of you know, I was trained as a lab scientist. When I chose to leave research, I visited my thesis advisor and asked him if I was abandoning my career by leaving science. He wisely advised me that “Science is not a profession, it is a way of thinking, and whatever career you choose, you will use those skills to lead you to success.”
He was correct. Learning to think as a scientist changes the way you observe the world. You may remember in High School about “Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis.” Or learning about “testing the null hypothesis”. Scientific approaches require one to observe the facts and data, develop a hypothesis based on those observations, and then design an experiment to determine if your hypothesis was correct. If it wasn’t, then you change your position, learn something and more to another hypothesis. Sometimes those results run against your intuitions, your feelings and often, your hopes as to what is true.
I great example was Einstein’s theory that gravity can affect light. It seems crazy that gravity would bend light; it just wasn’t something that most people could possibly believe. Einstein suggested that if this WASN’T true, then the sun would not bend light from behind it. But, in a very famous experiment during WWI, during a complete solar eclipse, scientists were able to observe that stars, clearly mapped behind the sun, were visible on the side of the sun. The only conclusion was that the light from those stars was bent around the sun so that even though they should not have been seen, because they should have been hidden by the sun, they could be seen.
Now we are understanding that Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”, implied by his calculations, is, in fact, true. We call it Quantum Entanglement.
So, for me, I am trying to understand what drives Mr. Trump’s policies, because if we understand how he thinks, we can better understand what is driving his decisions, decisions that will affect each of us and the country during the next 4 years.
This is not Trump Derangement Syndrome. I do not oppose what he does simply because he does it. I do oppose policies that I believe run counter to the goals and hopes of the Founders of this Republic and the 250 years of growth and aspirations inherent in those goals and hopes.
Now, I would like to extend my observations of Mr. Trump that, at least, to me, seem to impact how he views the world, and therefore how he develops his policies.
Friendship.
I have looked through hundreds of articles, posts and publications to try to understand who Mr. Trump considers his “friends”. There are remarkably few sources that I can find that list people that Mr. Trump includes as close personal friends.
The most common description I have found is that nobody from the New York development community will publicly say they are his friends. Nobody claims to be a childhood friend. Instead, there is a common thread among all these sources that Mr. Trump seems to view people entirely transactionally, as assets or enemies. He does not seem to have any real long-term friends or even any long-term business pals. He apparently holds his family close, but even people like Tom Barrack, who stood by him during the death of his father, are cast aside when they either disagree with him, or stop praising him.
This seems to be a consistent observation when speaking to his associates in Mar a Lago, among his golfing buddies, among politicians, employees or associates.
This observation (and it is not an attack on him, just an inspection of how he views the world), suggests that he views people outside of his family as never to be really trusted, because they could turn on you at any time. So, the appropriate way to look at people is to keep them close as long as they remain loyal to you, and to discard them when they don’t.
This mind set explains many of his policies. Canada is not a “friend”, it is a country with close economic ties, whose actions may or may not help the USA. When they sent troops to support the US in WWII, Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam, they were “on our side”. When they followed the US lead on sanctions, or voted with the US on UN resolutions, they were “on our side”.
If their trade balance is in their favor, if their exports are less expensive that US products, if they do not agree with US policies, they are “not on our side”. This means that they are not really “friends”, and we are freed from any obligations to treat them nicely.
When the US created the UN, and placed the US on the Security Council, they were “on our side.” When the UN votes against the interests of the US, they are “not on our side”, and therefore, it is open season on threatening to remove funding, or leave UN organizations like the WHO or the ICC.
When the Democratic Party supported him in NYC, they were useful, when the Republican offered him a better deal, they were not.
All assets are transactional. Putin’s Russia and his oligarchs are useful for Trump’s business, so they should be respected and treated in a way to advantage the US. If Ukraine looks like it will be a loser, then they are no longer a useful asset; they should be forced to accept their fate.
The same can be said for Politicians. If they praise him, they are useful; however, if they oppose him even once, they need to be removed from his circle. Ask Tom Massey (R Ky). He chooses to vote against the CR proposed in Congress, and within hours Mr. Trump is calling for him to be voted out of office: “HE SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him. He’s just another GRANDSTANDER, who’s too much trouble, and not worth the fight.”
The conclusion one should draw from this pattern is that one can expect, over the next few years, as in the past, that people or countries that we have held as “friends” for over decades, or even centuries, can be jettisoned in days if they do not fully agree with Mr. Trump. We may see this in our relationships with Europe, South and Central America, Canada, and Australia. “America First” is an iconic slogan that contains this philosophy explicitly.
On the other hand, what is wrong with having better relations with North Korea, Russia, China, Hungary and Turkey? If those countries want to treat us better, why shouldn’t we shift our allegiances and policies? If they don’t continue to treat us well, we can abandon them just as quickly.