A couple of things first: Many a book and many analyses by experts and insiders much smarter than the blogster, much better connected than it*, will be written about the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. The blogster has time on its tiny hands, so it continues to blab.
The blogster is not interested in the person of Mr. Trump, a spoiled frat boy splashing around in the shallow pool of celebrity but in the mechanisms that make this presidency different from others.
The single most important aspect fascinating the blogster is what it has called "The Taming of the Trump", the ways and means to reign him in and make him conform to whatever standards the blogster believes it has recognized over time.
The "taming" of a president is nothing really new. It is just not called that. It is generally coached into a version of "the demands of the office", or "the realities of leadership", or similar.
Make no mistake, the Republicans so very opposed to Donald Trump are mostly not opposed to his policy plans - with the Russian relationship being the big exception - but to his style or lack thereof.
As the then outgoing president Obama said only last year: politics is also theater. And that's where Mr. Trump has upset so many Americans and people around the world.
Sure, Trump has attacked and offended women, Muslims, Mexicans and others, but make no mistake: it is the way he did it, the openness that made his fellow politicians cringe and run for cover.
There is no conceptual difference in Trump's famous period reference in the first attack on then Fox host Megyn Kelly and the concerns for the health of women cited as reasons for anti-abortion bills.
In fact - as we saw then and as we are seeing during the Women's March and the sit-ins at various airports going on right now - the rambunctious wild assertions coupled with typos on Twitter guarantee ripostes.
Compare any speech of Trump to any of Obama's, for example, their first speeches at the CIA. Both stand in front of the wall, the ritual place to commemorate "heroes". Obama talks values and democracy and valor - Trump talks crowd size and everything is "great".
The Obama administration talks "allies" and "support", Trump talks "American First" and "friends".
The actual difference?
None.
Obama talks about defeating ISIS by strengthening allies and military advisors - Trump talks of bombing the hell out of ISIS.
The difference?
One is smooth, the other uncouth.
Trump calls NATO 'obsolete' and hands European militarists a wonderful argument for more spending. Leading NATO commanders have acknowledged that Russia can not fight a sustained conventional war, so where is the danger? Ukraine, of course, without any regard for history.
The truth is more complicated. Pressure on Russia used to work extremely well for over a decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The West sent in its carpetbeggars, worked with new Russian oligarchs, who may well have saved Trump's business empire from final collapse.
NATO needs the Russian threat to justify its existence although the true reason for its continued existence really is not Russia anymore but the Middle East and Africa.
And Trump has been tamed in this area. A combination of true and made up Russian hacking plus the interests of the ruling Europeans and the military industrial complex have brought Trump around to proclaiming the 'fundamental role' of NATO.
Reporting of this milestone on 28/29 January in the national German news was truly Soviet style: every single outlet ran the same headline. As if on cue, the German defense ministry has plans to buy six C130 transport planes from the U.S.
Domestically, the picture is a little more complicated because the U.S. elites are more fragmented on domestic policy than they are on international/foreign policy issues. While pulling Democrats and Republicans together on the Russian bogeyman was easy, U.S. domestic differences mean that the public, the people, play a bigger role.
The Trump administration itself comprises a variety of elements, anti-Semitic Zionists, anti-Muslim elements, anti-environment, anti-public schools, etc.
This creates some weird alliances, for example, unapologetic torture supporter Dick Cheney coming out against the "Muslim ban".
The blogster won't make any predictions regarding the success or failure of the domestic aspect of "the taming of the Trump". Up until now, the Democrats in the Senate have shown a remarkable absence of backbone in their votes on cabinet nominees.
The world is complicated and not very predictable, the election win of Trump being a good example. So, it remains to be seen if the remaining rapprochement with Russia will evaporate or be blown up. And it remains to be seen if a domestic opposition will form and be successful.
[Update 3/4/2017] February 28 marked the day of the greatest success of the enterprise the blogster called The Taming of the Trump. Yes, it was a shameless cheap reference to Shakespeare, but it meant something: politics is as much theater as any play by the bard.
The speech was just that.
And it worked. The traditional lego blocks of political discourse were called "presidential", yet another shameless exploitation of the grief of a fallen soldier set the tone.
Even the German press threw around the label of "presidential", though most German journalists don't seem to know the U.S. as well as they are paid to portray it.
Be that as it may, The Taming of the Trump now goes into its next act.
* Gender neutral, just because.
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