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Wanted: Boy with Big Thumb
The stonewall dike is leaking here and there and everywhere
When it gives way, it could cause a political tsunami with the power to rearrange the two party system, an arrangement the Founders never intended in the first place. The repeated warnings in the Federalist Papers about “factions” included how they would arise by economic inequality or by geographical loyalties or even by what we have come to call “personality cults” — a phrase unknown to Madison or Hamilton but a reality in the times of monarchy from which the Constitution was intended to launch the experimental republic.
An experiment of 243 years is an eye blink easy to miss on the grand canvas of history Donald John Trump has never studied. Trump seldom stews over how to square Chairman Mao’s dictum that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” with Talleyrand’s famous advice to Napoleon that
You can do anything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them.
It takes very little encouragement for Mr. Trump to go off on a rant about his status as commander in chief of the most powerful military in the history of the world. That’s a conclusion that requires a comparison between war elephants and tactical nukes with an adjustment for the respective times. This is a comparison Mr. Trump is not equipped to make.
