This title confusing? Or have we gone mad with grief or anger?
How can we appreciate this son of an abusive Father who neither understands nor respects government and all those in it – “losers all” – and seeks to make it subservient to him as CEO or authoritarian in charge of everything?
How can we appreciate a man who, like many in real estate, lies with every breath he takes? This very successful TV reality show host does it so well that he has exceeded a Father who told people he was half Jewish when he was accused of antisemitism attending Bund rallies in Yorkville leading up to the Second World War. How can we appreciate the once rich young man on the loose with a mentor named Roy Cohn, who taught him to never change what he had said no matter how much the truth made a liar of him? This man who still insists that he really won the Presidency in 2020 and we should all believe it now that he has won a second term.
We can appreciate him now because he has purpose and plan, because he has helped reveal how weak the Democratic Party has become and will reveal day by day, year after year the genuine truth of the nature of America in the 21st Century in ways that need revelation.
THE BEGINNING
Make no mistake. A convicted felon is a Presidential candidate an unprecedented three times in a row by a major political party but the result this time will be very different.
In 2016, with no idea of what to do, he was told “…do anything you want, you are the damn President.”
Running for office as a Republican because he thought of the two national parties,” Republicans were stupider”, he did so in 2016 with no respect for government and those in it, but with the single idea that he could impress the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia to let him build apartment houses in those countries.
When he met with us in the Spring of 2015 for the second time, to consider our request that he fix the roof of a NYCHA building opposite his new golf course, he told us he was planning to run for the Presidency. We asked him if he was kidding. He pointed to a number of campaign posters and red hats sitting around the office.
As we left, he said to come back when he was finished with the campaign and then he’d make a decision.
When he actually won the Republican Presidential primary over 17 competitors and then the Presidency over a stunned Hillary Clinton, he sat all alone watching the voting results late into the night. No one entered the room with him. His first fear was that he could not make any money as President. His second thought was that he didn’t know what to do.
He promised much but rarely delivered.
Mostly there was chaos – department heads coming and going, military assistants doing the same. And then came Covid and his fear of a stock market collapse caused strange public displays and actions that destroyed the public faith in his abilities and his intentions…he could not sustain the Presidency.
THE PLAN
He fought his defeat in 2020 with unsubstantiated, unproven claims of fraud but not policy successes and yet stayed right where he was: the once and for all time candidate of the Republican Party. But this time something had changed…while the national convention in 2024 talked of itself as RNC, the word Republican was stricken from everyone’s script. This was the Make America Great – MAGA campaign. This was the beginning of a new regime.
His son, Junior, who had made no apparent impact on anything his father had ever done, suddenly was ‘in play’ stating openly he wanted to get rid of the Republican Party and rename it America First.
Joining with Vice President candidate JD Vance, the two bearded MAGA soldiers carried forward a detailed plan by the Heritage Foundation which had been active in trying to remake the Republican Party since 1973. This time, the effort was developed by former aides in the first Trump Administration and was especially designed for a newly reelected and reorganized Trump Administration: Project 2025.
The Project is very specific…902 pages. With the Trump personality very much in the open and on the loose, the plan is designed to make the President all-powerful, the government smaller and poorer with all the more power under his control, his Make America Great Again supporters in control of the government at every possible avenue and the recognition that the Democratic Party is actually weaker than its “all wrong” effort against him in this Presidential election.
DJT did not receive 50% of the vote although he did get a larger popular vote for the first time. Winning by 1.5% of the vote his election is in no way a mandate in any other mind but his own.
And we are already seeing his methodology two months before his swearing in ceremony.
Once again, there is news about him or from him every single day. While he took several months in 2016 to put together a Cabinet and a series of government appointments, now we see a speedy selection of his cabinet including a large number of his most loyal friends and relatives whether their appointments are appropriate or not.
The watchword is loyalty not talent nor experience.
This approach is supposed to pressure traditional Republicans in the Senate to swallow hard and permit these appointments.
Whether they succeed or not one thing is true – the Republican Party controls the Senate by one vote and the House by five votes. Yet Donald knows this: the current Democratic Party is broken with no possibility of success in sight.
JOKESTERS OR WOKESTERS
The stunning series of mistakes by the Democratic leadership in forcing Joe Biden out of his run for a second term has been written about ad nauseum.
If we want to clearly see the Democrat’s weakness, we have to look beyond the campaign and into the mess the Democratic Party is making of New York.
The party is weak and broken because it is leaderless.
At this moment the Republican Party doesn’t exist at all.
The Democrats are divided into two essential groups…a younger, under-educated group who call themselves ‘progressives’, and an older group who too often seem to be going nowhere…but playing the power game with the real estate developers who control NYC.
The progressives started out working ferociously to end racism in New York. They believed that racism was most obvious in the way the criminal justice system worked and so they moved to Defund the Police and when that really wasn’t done despite a lot of noise, voted to approve new rules about bail that let suspected criminals out of jail before the paperwork on their arrests has been completed.
More importantly they also ended a long-running protection of each member of the NYPD – an immunity law which protected each from direct, personal action against any member of the police force from anyone of the general public.
With no personal protection, members of the force no longer serve to first protect the public from danger…but rather focus on capturing a criminal after a crime has been committed.
There are no police on the streets – no matter the neighborhood. No police cars roaming …nothing.
In a recent incident a deranged man with a knife started stabbing people on the west side and then proceeded to move across to the east side stabbing people as he went. He stabbed three people to death. There were no police on his personal journey until he reached the east side.
In the most recent example of this reality is the shooting of the CEO of a major healthcare insurance company. As this is written, the murderer has left the city by bus, the FBI has offered a $50,000 reward for information and despite all kinds of pictures of him, not a single policeman crossed his path on the morning of the incident…spite the usually busy area and the murderer’s stop for coffee in a Starbucks.
Nor does he discuss the many uncontested contracts awarded to insiders in his administration, nor the corruption inherent in charges against his actions with the Turkish Government nor the fact that many of his closest advisors have suddenly walked out of his administration with no genuine reasons for the abandonment.
He has had a number of Police Commissioners and now has picked a talented, proven administrator but one with no connection to the NYPD or any police department anywhere.
We have no new information about corruption but recall, as we have before, that when the Liberal Party was established in 1943 as the first “third” party allowed a place on the electoral ballot in NYC’s history, it pledged to make the Republican Party humane and the Democratic Party honest.
Today’s Republican Party in NYC is MAGA. Nothing humane there yet.
And that seems the path no matter what. It’s candidate for Governor in the last election helped elect four Republican Congressmen from the area…giving the party a majority of five in the House of Representatives. Its candidate for Governor was MAGA and lost to Governor Hochul.
Lawlor is clearly a MAGA recruit.
Will there be further indications that the Democratic Party in NY has an honesty problem? Or that Mayor Adams has cleared the way to be reelected?
Late news is that he is talking about switching to become a candidate of the Republican Party. He became a Republican years ago when he won several elections as a Republican candidate for the State House.
But the growing influence of this new under-educated generation of Democrats is everywhere.
Their most recent actions indicate a desire to make a better more comfortable New York without knowing how. It’s as if they have an idea and if they can get it passed by legislative members like them, they act to introduce it…no matter what the result.
And so, with the right kind of pressure that finally won support from a Mayor looking for help, they changed the impact of McGuiness Boulevard, a main commercial three lane road that connects Brooklyn and Queens to Manhattan.
Now there is only one lane of traffic at key places in that road, totally tying up traffic but insuring that there is room for parking and a critical bike lane because bikes are a main method of transportation for these young people who can’t afford a luxury apartment but can rent one room in an apartment building.
They are now also suggesting that a similar plan be approved for Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue where they will build a central median lane with trees, bushes, works of art but save room for parking and bikes.
They see these actions as building like Italian piazzes.
They recently also ruled in favor of new affordable high rise buildings along Eastern Parkway until the leadership was told these buildings would block the Sun from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and destroy all the floral life in that historic park. Now area residents have formed a group, hired a law firm and are trying to stop the development.
Another move is to build a skate park on Eastern Parkway – open from 6 am to one am every day and right across from multiapartment buildings long established on the parkway.
The attempt is to remake New York in ways that will please them no matter what impact they have on anyone else living in the area.
When complaints from older residents push back, they seek and find the leadership against them and stand outside their houses to tell those residents to move to Florida…that Brooklyn belongs to them.
The average age of all people now living in Brooklyn is 32.5 years.
New York’s future has arrived.
Late news indicates that among a small key number of House Democrats seeking leadership of the critical Oversight Committee is AOC.
FINALLY
The older national leadership of the Democratic Party badly led it into a Presidential election by giving the Presidency back to a man their age who should be out playing golf.
‘Woke’ has genuine meaning. It is to be aware of the essential racism that exists in America since its founding – now more like India’s class system – and doing something human for those who have suffered.
‘Woke’ has, like so many things borrowed and misused by an uneducated public no longer able to teach its children how to write their names and add or subtract to make change – been seriously distorted so as to become simply stupid…and even dangerous.
Both national political parties reflect the essential disinterest of a public seriously jaded and disappointed by the failure of an America only able to produce and sell weapons as it loses its ability to produce anything of value in the World other than personal wealth and what it can buy.(see Elon Musk and his use of money to buy himself some special power and influence.)
Because little is being done to redesign education in America, the future is not bright and the challenges we face will take courage and patience and a leadership which does not now exist.
World History teaches us that once a great nation loses its power and influence it never regains it.
No one would have predicted that a small group of thirteen colonies would have been able to defeat the British Empire, the most powerful assemblance of power and influence ever known.
And yet they had leadership: the Jeffersons and Adamses and Hamiltons and Franklins and Washingtons.
We will never re-educate America without people of such ability and vision.
If we can find the courage and heart to seek and find what we need, we can be what we were. It is the only way.
12/13/2024
Well-stated as always. When the political history of the first quarter of the 21st century is compiled and the first thorough and balanced history of the 2024 election is written, historians and political scientists may very well point to something in the American voter and American society that resonated with Mr. Trump’s and his public statements. Peggy Noonan recently said in an interview that many Americans are uncomfortable with the 21st century. In the meantime, leadership is needed. We need to start with the 2025 NYC elections behind a fusion, centrist candidate. Who will be that standard bearer? Time will tell. Happy holidays! Professor Stephen Rolandi, Larchmont, NY
“And yet they had leadership: the Jeffersons and Adamses and Hamiltons and Franklins and Washingtons.”
I think plurals are inappropriate. These men were unique.