President Donald John Trump is a revolutionary true to the meaning of the word. He started and completed a revolution, remarkably without the baggage of killing and maiming.
He has dramatically transformed the American political landscape. The attributes of the nice and noble approach to politics such as gentlemanliness, courteousness, politeness, even telling the truth are all gone. He took politics from the long coat-tailed, wigged gentlemen sans long coattails and wigs, and brought it to the ordinary citizens, who saw nothing wrong with getting into the House of Congress not by the front door, but by climbing the walls and breaking the windows. The ordinary citizens, the Joes and Janes, whose blood boiled when they heard an immigrant commit a crime, always consider him their Dear Leader. They have formed the base and are faithful cadres of MAGA. They don’t greet “the others”, meaning their opponents, with “Have a good day” but “F— you”. Respect for the institutions, such as don’t break the windows of the Capitol, don’t throw a U.S. senator of the other party down and smash his face against the surface of the street, has ceased to exist. Advice and Consent is out, guns and fists, literally and figuratively, are in.
The American Democratic Society’s norms that we have known them have been changed drastically. The President has turned the White House into pure blue and blonde (or gold).
Where the revolutionary goes, of course, his followers follow, and naturally into his cabinet. Regardless of the philosophy behind his picks to serve in his administration, true to his base, he brought the ordinary Joes and Janes into his government.
But ordinary people have their limits that is why they are called ordinary. To put a mask on to hunt for illegal immigrants, convincing the willing Arabs to part with their billions, to chase after anti-MAGA opponents, seem to have been done competently by them, even though the last one seems to have run into some thoughtlessness and incompetence.
But the government of a country as huge and complicated as the United States of America sooner or later will run into huge and complicated problems requiring skills, brains, and temperament to handle them effectively. The national affairs in the first half of this year seem to indicate MAGA’s lack of it. So, wooing ordinary people for votes and staying away from hiring high mental caliber people for government works for fear of loss of control and loyalty, are two very different things. The latter may lead to neglect and failure in governing.
The president understood politics for what it essentially is: a game – pure and simple. Nothing to do with serving the people, or higher calls, or national (implying a nation of necessarily different people) security. He understood how it worked better than the Democrats and read the pulse smartly.
Political power in America is the votes. He said that his supporters were so loyal they would stick with him even if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot somebody. It was considered by the ruling polite society, which was about to be displaced, as a reckless statement. But in hindsight, as things turned out, that statement eerily indicated his confidence and insight. It showed him to be an astute politician who knew his voters.
For years the so-called establishment had laughed about him and never taken him seriously. They besieged him with problems of all kinds. He is not a Teflon businessman or politician to be sure. Problems have not slid off him. He took them head-on and beat them or made it go off the target, himself, with all the means he could think of including denying and stubbornly not accepting what his opponents believed to be the truth. He has had a single purpose, and all his energy is focused on it: winning and winning at all costs.
He is an Ayn Randian pragmatist: relentlessly pursuing self-interest but carefully staying within the rules of the game. If the rules constrained him, he would work to beat the rules by entering politics and went for the most powerful position on earth: the U.S. Presidency.
At the 2026 NATO Summit in Ankara, the President openly confided to the press: “My whole life, that’s all I do is deals… That’s how I became president, I guess.”
This must be an accurate self-description of who he is, a dealmaker, an honest assessment of himself at the age of 80 looking back. He does not claim to be the most successful businessman. He does not claim to be the most astute American politican even though he could very well be.
Why did he say it?
JOHN P. LE PHONG
(This article appears on X, thelephongjournal.com, and Facebook)
