Trump's 'Nuke the Moon' Image Works

Yesterday I was on a private Facebook group, and we were discussing this “fantasy of impeachment” from lefty pundit Sally Kohn:

Straightforward from here:
1. Impeach Trump & Pence
2. Constitutional crisis
3. Call special election
4. Ryan v Clinton
5. President Clinton

— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) February 15, 2017

There it is. The snowflake’s delusion. Impeach Trump and Pence, get Hillary and Ryan to run against each other, ?????????, President Clinton.

This admittedly enchanting illusion ignores the fact that you can’t impeach two people at once and that, even if you managed to impeach both Trump and Pence, Ryan would simply become president without any runoff, and in fact, that if you impeached Ryan too, there would be a line of succession to go on. It also ignores the fact that, on any given day, given a head start of ten points (or more; they DID go all out) of media favoritism, Hillary couldn’t beat a syphilitic camel. It, in fact, ignores the fact that “that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”

But, more importantly to me, those who are scheming and trying to “Nixon” Trump are missing an important and distinguishing factor between the two Republican presidents (perhaps because all Republicans look alike to them).

That important distinguishing factor is as follows: Trump is not Nixon.

I know, I just blew your mind, right?

Admittedly, I’m not a student of Nixon, but I’ve read a bio or two, as well as references to him in fiction of the time. Also, my friend who lived through the impeachment gave me some perspective on the whole thing when Clinton was in the process of being impeached. (I lived through the Nixon impeachment too, but I was in Portugal, and young, of which the greatest handicap was the first. If you think our media is leftist — and it is — you must understand European media make it look like Drudge or Breitbart.) My friend said that Clinton wouldn’t step down because he didn’t have Nixon’s personality. When things turned sour — according to this friend, and not contradicted by what I’ve read — Nixon went paranoid and closed up, creating a sort of “fortress White House” and making the cover-up far worse than the crime.

Billy Jeff, on the other hand, smirked through his impeachment, mealy-mouthed the meaning of “is” and continued being president after what should have been a death blow, because … well, because he had no principles or shame or anything to prevent him from continuing to exert power.

Which brings us to Trump.

I don’t need to tell people here that I was against Trump before I was for him. In fact, I only decided to vote for him the week before the election, and only because knowing what I did about Hillary, I thought it was likely that a Hillary win would be a boulder rolled over the grave of the republic. (And everyone who’s been to Boulder knows how hard it is for anyone, even someone wrongly buried, to dig through that many hippies to get out.)

Since his election, I’ve been forced to defend him so much that I’m not absolutely sure where I stand right now, but having looked at his appointments, I’ll say I’m “guardedly optimistic.”

I’m not saying that tomorrow he won’t decide to ram through single-payer health care by executive order, but I’ll say it seems more highly unlikely every day. His leftist tendencies might very well be in abeyance, if not completely killed by the ridiculous hatred the left has thrown at him since his election. In fact, like many used-to-be-leftists, he might have glimpsed the true face of the left, which is not a spectacle any sane person can withstand unscathed.

But the thing is, we don’t know. Tomorrow he could sign an executive order declaring keeping cats as pets illegal, or perhaps making the owning of at least a cat mandatory. Because that’s his personality. And having seen him in action for almost a month now, I’ll say if he did it there would almost certainly be some deep reason for it, and it might even be a good one, but we wouldn’t know, and we couldn’t anticipate what he’d do until he did it.

Which brings me to that private Facebook group, in which I said even if they tried to impeach Trump on some technicality, he’d bring up the times Obama and Bill Clinton had done things as bad or worse, and then, metaphorically speaking, wag his thing in their face and laugh.

Someone said, “I hope it would be metaphorical.”

Which brings us to … can we say he wouldn’t do ANYTHING? Well, no.

Early on, back when I was in the political closet (having judged, accurately, that should I be revealed as a libertarian, the houses I worked for then would cease to publish me) I used to read Frank J’s magnificent IMAO.us and I was highly impressed with his concept of Nuking the Moon.

The Nuke the Moon strategy was dubbed “a realistic plan for world peace”:

Now, if I were president, here’s what I would do. Next time some country does something we don’t take a pining to, such as supporting terrorism or speaking French, I’d pick the dumbest reason for an attack, e.g., “A ‘q’ should always be followed by a ‘u’. I don’t make the rules, Iraq, but I will enforce them.” The more irrational you look, the more scared the country will be that you will really hit them hard. I’d then give the country the old one-week notice until bombing starts. Then, after just twenty-four hours, I’d start bombing. When the stupid dictator calls to complain, I’d say, “I meant one week max. Oh, and by the way, ground troops — one week.” I’m sure that would be enough to capitulate the average evildoer, but some extra measures could help intimidate others as well. Like, instead of just saturation bombing a city, super-saturation bomb it. After annihilating everything until nothing but ash is left, I’d nuke the ashes. It’s that extra bit of extremely disproportionate use of force that makes other countries start to wonder if America “has it all together” and really worrying who we’ll lash out against next.

Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick’n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone’s conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we’ll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn’t be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we’ll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can’t we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, “Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald’s before they think I don’t like them.”

Sometime ago, it occurred to me that what America had done in electing Trump is, in effect, nuke the moon.

Oh, sure, right now the other countries — largely deceived by their press — think that they’re dealing with a conventional fruitcake, of the sort that could come to power in one of their countries. Hence all the craziness about Trump being EXACTLY like Hitler — except for, you know, not having it in for any minority, just trying to protect the country’s borders, trying to restore gun rights to the population, and other such minor inconvenient stuff — which is why, as the saying goes, fascism is always descending on America but always falls on Europe.

But, sooner or later, our magnificently unpredictable president will accumulate enough data points to make even Europeans (some of whom even speak French. Read IMAO and tremble) realize that no, they’re not dealing with a conventional European-style ruler. In fact, they’re not dealing with a conventional anything. The man has reasons for what he does, but he thinks in such a twisty way that he could go down the sides of a corkscrew without getting hurt.

Sure, some of his plans are bound to backfire. He’s only human.

But that doesn’t matter so much as the fact that he’s completely unpredictable, particularly to the hide-bound conventional minds of the rest of the world.

We’ve nuked the moon with Trump. And I think I like it.