Over and Over, Trump Reuses Catch Phrase "Like the World Has Never Seen Before"

They’re not the same vibes—unless, of course, you happen to live in Seoul or Guam or Hawaii—as back in October 1962 when the world thought it might be coming to an end as Russia and the United States eyeballed the brink of mutually assured destruction over missiles based in Cuba, but the tension everywhere is still palpable as our unpredictable, unrestrained mad-libber-in-chief practices schoolyard diplomacy with  an equally juvenile despot longing for recognition as a world leader.

Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” ad-lib response to North Korea’s nuclear threat was widely reported. But it took Stephen Colbert Wednesday night to put Trump’s coda “like the world has never seen before” in context. He aired clips of the Trumpster using the same tagline at least four times before, when speaking about his political movement (12/8/16), unleashing an energy revolution (8/8/16), economic deals (8/27/17) and airports he’s landed in (3/29/16). https://youtu.be/xzdaSklrg6w?list=PLiZxWe0ejyv8l1W8d5rKFdHYSYIqkpf7b.

Trump doesn’t mangle the English language as, say, George W. Bush sometimes did. Yet, despite telling us he has the best vocabulary, he constantly repeats words, such as “sad,” “amazing,” “beautiful,” making it understandable that he would repeat a catch phrase “like the world has never seen before” whenever he wants to add emphasis to his hyperbolic pronouncements. In so doing, however, he waters down the impact. So sad!

Trump Channels Nation's Founders

A recent article by Politico’s national editor Michael Hirsh argued that far from being a boorish yahoo with extreme un-American views Donald Trump really is channeling the thoughts of the nation’s founders and some of its greatest presidents in their advocacy of few if any foreign entanglements (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/founding-fathers-2016-donald-trump-america-first-foreign-policy-isolationist-213873). 

It’s a piece replete with citations quoting Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Adams and John Quincy Adams to buttress the idea that foreign ventures would ensnare the country in affairs best left to people on the other side of the Atlantic, the Pacific, of course, being no point of reference to their late 18th and early 19th century minds.

Since the start of World War II, however, the United States has been globally engaged, first fighting the Axis Powers, then confronting Communist Soviet Union, China and Cuba in a Cold War, followed by a patchwork of alliances and adventures in the Middle East, the most recent being our tragic years-upon-years involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and our arms-length position vis-a-vis Syria.  

“But it is fair to ask, as Trump is, why we are simply continuing, through inertia and with little change, a system that was built up to thwart a set of threats that no longer exist,” wrote Hirsh. “Maybe this vast, expensive global order was necessary against Hitler, and later Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev—the very real threats of tyranny, totalitarianism and international communism in the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s—but is Putin’s Russia, or Xi Jinping's China, really enough of a threat to justify the same expense and effort? It’s also fair to ask—as Trump does, in his blunt way—whether U.S. allies have grown a bit spoiled and barely notice any longer who’s holding that defense umbrella over their heads, allowing them to continue massive spending on their welfare states.”

Trump’s advocacy of a reimagined United States relationship with our allies, and by extension our adversaries, has tapped a reservoir of innate American isolationism made all the more potent by a failed war in Vietnam (though the feared Domino Effect never transpired) and the twin disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

In the end, though, it should come down not to the electorate’s knowledge of historical admonitions but rather to the confidence Americans have in the knowledge, leadership and diplomatic skills they want in their next president. Trump has displayed little of those skills as he has rampaged through the Republican primary process, flipping positions as quickly as one changes gears in a sports car. He is not thought highly of in most foreign capitals. If he’s elected, heads of state will have to deal with him but they might never be confident his word would be his bond.

The closest we have to a Republican head of state is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the second in line to be president should tragedy strike the chief executive and the vice president. Ryan has yet to endorse the presumptive nominee of his party, but with each passing day Republican office holders appear to be swallowing their scruples and lining up, however reluctantly, behind Trump. It’s only a matter of time before Ryan caves, and without extracting any implementable concessions.

It seems they are all more interested in winning than in protecting the principles of the republic and their party. Their professed animosity toward Hillary Clinton trumps (pun intended) the reality that The Donald is unfit to be president of the mightiest country in the world, a country that has been a symbol of equality and decency throughout the world but under Trump would be willing to discriminate against Muslims and would sanction torture. The damage to American prestige would be incalculable.

No criticism is more pointed than from within one’s family, so here’s an excerpt from Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist of The New York Times, describing the factionalism of the Republican party that led to Trump’s rise and his own failure to foresee his appeal: 

“So to catalog my wrongness: I overestimated the real commitment of both factions’ leaders to their stated principles and favored policies. (Even though I didn’t agree with many of those policies myself, I assumed from the party’s longstanding resistance to change that someone did!) I overestimated their ability to put those principles ahead of personal resentments. And yes, since to acquiesce to Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is to gamble recklessly with the party’s responsibilities to the republic, I overestimated their basic sense of honor.” (http://nyti.ms/1rZxgcB)

Fifty Years Ago Today

I was sitting in art class on Friday, November 22, 1963. Mrs. Franzblau was the teacher. No doubt, my high school sophomore classmates were like most of our predecessors. We made fun of her. We paid little attention to her. We giggled a lot and bantered a lot during the art exercises she tried to get us to master.

Suddenly, the loud speaker on the wall at the front of the room crackled with static. It was a few minutes after one pm. An announcement was made that the president had been shot in Dallas. All students were to return to their home rooms for subsequent early dismissal.

I'm an early baby boomer, born three years into the population explosion of 1946-1964 when more than 76 million gained entry onto the nation’s census rolls. I'm therefore bemused when the John Fitzgerald Kennedy assassination is portrayed as one of the defining moments of my cohorts. Truly, few of them were old enough to fully comprehend its significance. Bill Flanagan, born in 1955, a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning, said the death of JFK resonated so powerfully with those who were kids at the time because “it was the moment our parents went from believing in all the great things that were going to be, to regretting what might have been.”

It’s a nice turn of phrase, but I’m too basic a person to wallow in the psychology of the moment. I can’t say I remember my parents moping about the assassination, though they were deeply disturbed by it. It didn’t stop my father and mother from working hard in their small manufacturing business, from prodding their three children to excel in school. Like most families that fateful weekend, we watched the round-the-clock network coverage. I seem to recall being home from school Monday and watching the funeral on television. Yet it would not be until 1968, when Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were felled by assassins’ bullets, that sudden, unimaginable tragedy struck a more intimate chord within me. By then I was 19, a sophomore in college this time, old enough to recognize and fully comprehend racism, intolerance and inequality, old enough to worry about the war in Vietnam and what the prolonged conflict might mean to me, personally, if I were drafted when my college deferment expired. 

That’s not to say I was oblivious to national and international events as a younger teenager. I can recall watching Kennedy’s press conferences, at least the ones he held late in the afternoon after I returned home from school. I remember watching on television our United Nations ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, use aerial photographs to expose the buildup of Russian missiles in Cuba. Did I think the world was about to come to an end? Probably not. It was more like a war game being played out before our very eyes as we saw our navy intercept Russian freighters on the high seas. It was only later we learned how close to the brink of annihilation the world had come.

A wasted world is what is lamented at the end of Camelot, the Lerner and Loewe musical of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that opened on Broadway in December 1960, a month after Kennedy’s election victory over Richard Nixon (the show closed January 5, 1963, 11 months before the president’s fateful trip to Dallas, and, coincidentally, my father’s birthday). 

Jacqueline Kennedy depicted her husband’s presidency with lyrics from the last song of Camelot, “a brief shining moment.” Just months after it opened, I saw the original Broadway production of Camelot, starring Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, Robert Goulet and Roddy McDowall. Each year my parents, usually our mother, would take my brother, sister and me, individually, to a Broadway musical. I loved Camelot. My mother gave it mixed reviews. The next year we saw Kean, about the life and loves of Edmund Kean, the noted 19th century Shakespearean actor. I hated it. My mother loved it, partly because it starred Broadway legend Alfred Drake. I remember my mother favorably comparing Kean to Camelot. The public agreed with me. Kean closed after 92 performances, Camelot after 873. 

Tidbits of News

Driving to Brooklyn and back to White Plains Sunday night I passed four Target stores within New York City: one off the Van Wyck Expressway near LaGuardia airport, a second on Flatbush Avenue at Atlantic Avenue, a third along the FDR Highway around 116th Street in Manhattan, and a fourth just west of the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx.

I could have driven all night within the five boroughs and not come across a single Walmart store. Unions and politicians have succeeded in keeping Walmart out of the city.

That might all change in the near future as Walmart pushes to secure smaller locations that don’t need zoning variances. In addition, a new poll by Quinnipiac University found that while nearly 7 out of 10 New York City residents feel Walmart would hurt small businesses, they’d nevertheless shop there (http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2011/03/18/2011-03-18_walmart_bad_for_local_business_but_new_yorkers_would_shop_there_if_convenient.html).

Union opposition to Walmart doesn’t really make sense when you realize Target and other big box chain stores like Home Depot do not favor unions, either. And they are just as aggressive on pricing. With public sentiment starting to swing in Walmart’s favor, especially in low income areas underserved by supermarkets and large discount stores, politicians might be less inclined to thwart Walmart’s plans to take a bite out of the Big Apple.


Harbinger of Spring? I don’t mean to complain. Correction. Of course I mean to complain. That’s my nature. But wasn’t yesterday the day spring arrived? Didn’t a harbinger of spring, a robin, bob along my yard Sunday? So what was all that white stuff falling from the sky Monday? By the time I got up enough energy to retrieve the newspapers from the driveway the plastic wrapping was coated in a glaze of slush. The news is bad enough without being all wet.


Who’s Next? Few people would say Muammar Gaddafi is a nice guy, the sort of head of state we find warm and cuddly. So it shouldn’t be too upsetting to hear the desire of our government is his departure as ruler of Libya.

Only problem is, we have no idea who would be the next leader, whether he (probably not going to be a she) would be more or less friendly to western values. That shouldn’t be a reason to tolerate Gaddafi’s hold on power, but it does recall one of our more serious foreign affairs miscues, our initial support of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, only to have him turn into a half-century thorn 90 miles from our Florida coastline.

No doubt many a State Department analyst is burning the midnight oil (or should be) checking up on the background of the members of the so-called Libyan democratic movement.


There’s a World Out There: If there’s any silver lining to the unrelenting tragedies and conflicts in Japan and the Middle East, it is that our news outlets have focused less on the banalities of our domestic political discourse.

Yes, we have a budget crisis, at national, state and local levels. Yes, we have oodles of conservative Republicans who think they can do better than President Obama. Yes, there’s a debate about healthcare coverage. And support for National Public Radio. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

We’re finding out there’s a whole world out there beyond our borders, a world that is important to track, understand and engage. Heck, even Sarah Palin is in the middle of a foreign tour. Let’s hope she takes lots of notes on her hand.