A decade ago I liked some of Brooks' columns but have avoided most of it recently. Today I think he has "come up for air" after discovering some bottom-dwelling truth, his column appears in the Tampa Bay Times.
Brooks starts out talking about the mobbed-up hoodlums and corrupt union bosses Trump had to deal with as a successful builder in NYC and Atlantic City. But, he adds:
I can’t help but wonder if that kind of background has provided a decent education for dealing with the sort of hopped-up mobsters running parts of the world today. There is growing reason to believe that Donald Trump understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies.Brooks then cites hopeful signs in our dealings with North Korea, China, and Iran as examples of where perhaps Trump knows better than his predecessors. And he concludes:
I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here. The world is a lot more like the Atlantic City real estate market than the GREs.Honestly, it isn't a bad hypothesis. The other DrC and I have been binge-watching Gotham, having only recently 'discovered' it. The mafia model of "show respect but threaten extreme violence" Don Falcone practices isn't so far removed from Trump foreign policy.
He's had nice things to say about Kim and Xi, but freeing up Mattis to slaughter ISIS fighters wholesale makes the violence point too. Not for our Donald the measured "proportional response," he says clearly "cross me and I'll murder your society, root and branch." It seems to work.
