OUR CARTOON NOBEL LAUREATE
WASHINGTON — You can hear those heads exploding from here to Oslo.
Republican lawmakers are pushing Donald Trump, the most combative man in the universe, for a Nobel Peace Prize. How unimaginable is this?
Just picture a wildly hirsute cartoon figure with a hair-trigger temper festooned with a medal of Alfred Nobel reading “Pro pace et fraternitate gentium” (“For the peace and brotherhood of men”).
“The guy who said he could be as presidential as any president except for Abraham Lincoln is instead about as presidential as Yosemite Sam,” says his biographer Tim O’Brien. “I really think of him as Yosemite Sam — just hopping around in anger, firing his gun wildly, sometimes at his own foot.”
Yet Sen. Lindsey Graham, who once labeled Trump “a kook,” “crazy” and “unfit for office,” told Fox News on Friday: “Donald Trump convinced North Korea and China he was serious about bringing about change. We’re not there yet, but if this happens, President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”
And here’s the part that would drive Trump haters into a frenzy: If he could pull off denuclearizing North Korea, he would deserve it more than Barack Obama did when he had that bouquet thrown at him seconds into his presidency.
And Trump certainly would deserve it more than Henry Kissinger, who won the prize in 1973 for his efforts to end the Vietnam War, after privately persuading Richard Nixon to keep it going for years and while secretly bombing Cambodia.
It would be a paradox: The man so many Americans loathe as a villain taming a charter member of the Axis of Evil.
Of course, any Strangelovian thing could happen when Little Rocket Man and the Dotard actually get together, given that both Dear Leaders live in bizarro fantasy worlds with fawning courtiers, where lying and cheating abounds.
But for the moment, Trump’s peculiar form of diplomacy — a combination of belligerence, bluster, name-calling and ignorance of history — has somehow produced a possible breakthrough in North Korea that eluded his predecessors.
Heads are also exploding from Chappaqua to Hollywood as the unfathomable idea sinks in that, despite Trump’s lack of a moral or political core, despite the fact that he has tarnished the presidency with his nasty bullying, race-baiting, unmoored tweeting and authoritarian tendencies, he could get a second term.
Democrats are spun up all over the country, flocking to the polls in special elections with sky-high enthusiasm, buoyed by empowered women driven by disgust at the Groper in Chief who has so far escaped a reckoning.
They are sanguine that they can convert the Trump hatred into a big bad blue wave for the midterms and win back the House and maybe the Senate.
Strangely enough, though, a strong midterm for the Democrats could help Trump two years down the road if they take back the reins of Congress and go too far, as Democrats are wont to do.
Republicans paid a price in 1998 for pushing to impeach Bill Clinton, and Clinton regained popularity.
As far as the presidential race in 2020, the Democrats seem to be repeating the mistake that Hillary Clinton made: counting on the awfulness of Trump to do their work for them.
They are not grooming a gleaming crop of presidential contenders or honing a seductive message that could win back the alienated voters who put Trump in just because he promised to shake things up.
“We’re dealing with a person who’s psychologically and categorically different from any previous president,” says Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. “He may be the most successful con man in history atop the most powerful nation in history. He has prevailed in a way no other spinner of tales has prevailed.
“He’s shaping the behavior of much of the world, getting inside people’s heads. He’s like Cambridge Analytica. He knows how to determine what people are interested in and like and dislike and respond to. Then he acts in a way that changes the course of things.
“And expecting him to be different or less crazy only makes us the crazy ones. His behavior gets more outrageous, out of control and florid as the pressure on him persists. And it’s only going to get worse.”
That’s comforting.
The New York Times