I was trying to generate an image of Trump riding a war eagle and leading a barrage of narratives to overwhelm the Left’s defenses but my prompt engineering skills aren’t up to it today.
So two notes about the past few days.
The first is about this piece from John Konrad:
I opened my NYTimes app today. They’re trying, but they can’t keep up. News that broke just hours ago is already off the homepage.
THIS IS CRUCIAL
The entire liberal deep state command and control system is broken. Let me explain.
The NYTimes’ primary function isn’t journalism. It’s narrative coordination—setting the frame so the entire political-media machine knows how to think about an issue before it takes off.
Konrad goes on to provide a model for how the media-government complex sets narratives. I agree with Konrad in that the problem is that such actions take time and the Trump Administration isn’t providing any of it.
In the last three days, Trump has shut down USAID, created a radical new vision for Gaza, and banned men from women’s sports.
Any one of these stories would be an entire news cycle in and of itself, and they are coming on consecutive days. In fact, this has been business as usual for the past 2.5 weeks and the media outlets cannot keep up. The stories today are federal workers taking buyouts and Bondi deweaponizing the DoJ.
I’m really going to have to buckle down and write that piece on John Boyd and political warfare.
Repeat after me…. “OODA is not a linear process.”
The second note is Trump’s proposal about taking over Gaza.
Shocking? Yes. Bizarre? Yes, again.
But…
What I noticed was that few news outlets, even conservative ones, placed Trump’s statement within an overall gestalt regarding his behavior. Even fewer outlets have placed the statement within Trump’s past approach to the Middle East.
In his first administration, Trump scored some impressive accomplishments because he recentered the Middle East away from an Israeli-Palestinian axis and, through the Abraham Accords, towards one based on national interests, specifically in regard to Iran. The Biden administration threw that all away.
Trump is a dealmaker. He looks for leverage. He is not a traditional politician or statesman.
The ugly truth is that up until this past Tuesday, the “consensus” regarding the Palestinian problem had fallen back into a familiar Tommy Friedman-esque binary of either a two-state solution or perpetual conflict (not that the two are mutually exclusionary). In a negotiation, being faced with only two options is akin to “silver or lead”, it’s not where you want to be. Trump went looking for a third. We’ll see where it goes but never fall into a trap of having a narrative thrust upon you that only offers two options
Next week? I’ll have a post on why the Palestinian problem and the proposal for DC statehood have the same solutions.
“not that the two are exclusionary.”
Is there even the faintest reason to believe that a two state solution would reduce the conflict? More likely exacerbate it since ti palis could continue their attack from behind the shield of an “inviolate” border.
To the extent I can decipher Trump’s proposal, it is preconditioned on us rebuilding Gaza with the Gazan’s somewhere else. Possibly the reason he wants Greenland because nowhere else will have them. I figure the Israelis are perfectly capable of rebuilding it without the Gazan’s. Possibly, Israel could promise to rename itself Palestine after the departure of the “palestinians” so that “From the River to The Sea, Palestine would be Free” At least for a day or so which would be infinitely longer than there would be any freedom with the “palestinians” actually in charge.
One of the veterans governing I think the Democrats do right now is that they need to raise money for 2026. There are a few reports out there not help Democrats are being driven to action with the protests that overnight filibuster because of any phone calls and constituents but more than likely it’s because they need to raise money.
The Democrats have two problems they are completely out of power and they have lost chunk of funding from corporations which was a large part of the funding if advantage about the past 10 years.
I’d be curious to see it various fundraising filings are for the next reporting cycle as opposed comparables in 2022.
I think there was a President that said something like; “Elections have consequences.”
Speaking of which, guess who’s library has both cracking walls and a racial discrimination suit against the prime contractor? Besides being butt ugly.
MCS: “Is there even the faintest reason to believe that a two state solution would reduce the conflict?
An astute observation, sir!
An obvious question that usually goes unasked — Where did Hamas get the money to pay for all those well-armed young men, and all those missiles they fired at Israel?
Obviously not from Gaza’s non-existent thriving export industries, nor from Gaza’s non-existent world-class international tourist facilities. Best guess is that the US taxpayer has been funding both sides of the Hamas/Israel war — with the Hamas side funded through cut-outs like US Aids and the UN. Why don’t we stop funding wars, and leave it to the residents to fight it out between themselves?
> They’re trying, but they can’t keep up.
I noticed how fast Trump was tossing out clay pigeons, poor sods don’t know which ones to go after.
They’re giving up and going after Musk, who isn’t just a motion blur