Dear Peggy, Your Opinions Never Mattered and They Don’t Matter Now

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

At the end of last month, the political columnist and author, Peggy Noonan, published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled:  “How Trump Lost Half of Washington”.   In the sub-heading of that piece, Noonan lamented how the “old ambassadors were willing to give him [Trump] a chance” but, instead, he “destabilized the whole town”.  Noonan furthermore quoted “Don Corleone” of Mario Puzo’s “Godfather” fame and she wrote the following about the self-titled “stable genius” in the White House:

Pretty quickly and to the entire edifice of Washington, it became clear Donald Trump was not a Jacksonian shock to the system, which is what his supporters think he was. He was a daily system overload, a one-man frying of the grid.

One by one the ambassadors shut down and turned away. Their objections were not about policy, they were about behavior. What they feared was not extreme conservatism or extreme liberalism. They didn’t fear originality or a new synthesis. They feared Madness of King George-ism. They’d come to think the president was, irredeemably, a screwball. In the nuclear age this is a dangerous thing.

… It was all this—the president’s disdain, his well-fed resentments—that not only left Washington thinking Mr. Trump was crazy. It made Washington itself a fertile field for crazy. It was in this atmosphere that the Steele dossier, with its whacked out third-rate spy fiction, became believable, that sober-minded officials reportedly wondered if they should wear wires when they met with the president.

He destabilized the entire town.

So Trump destabilized the Washington Establishment.  Are you surprised?

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PROTECTED vs UNPROTECTED

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Peggy Noonan, former Reagan administration speech writer and current Wall Street Journal pundit has, like most of her peers, been wondering what’s gotten into the unwashed masses lately that makes them such unpredictable voters. And she’s come up with a useful conclusion: The rise of Donald Trump (and similar iconoclasts in other countries) is due to the gradual division of society into the protected — that is, people who make the rules and therefore benefit from them — and the unprotected, who don’t make the rules and end up getting screwed. The latter have finally figured this out and have stopped supporting the former. Here’s her latest OpEd piece, in its entirety:

Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected: Why political professionals are struggling to make sense of the world they created.

 

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

 

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

 

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

 

But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.

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