Locator: 44675OPED.
From The WSJ: link here --
Cipolla divides people into four categories: helpless, bandit,
intelligent and stupid. In any normal interaction between two people, he
contends, the helpless person suffers a loss while the other gains. The
bandit exacts a benefit while levying a loss on the other. The
intelligent person gains while enabling the other person also to gain.
The defining trait of the stupid person is that he gains nothing while
obliging the other to take a loss.
Mr.
Trump’s fans can argue with his despisers about whether he belongs in
the category of bandit or intelligent, but he definitely can’t be
classified as stupid according to Cipolla’s definition.
The
astounding fact of recent years, however, is that Mr. Trump’s chief
political opponent—Joe Biden—is a perfect specimen of Cipolla’s idea of
stupidity. For four years, Mr. Biden has made decisions and pursued
policies that made his supporters, party, country and foreign allies
worse off, and in almost every case he has gained nothing and very often
suffered commensurate political losses. You could make a cogent
argument that Mr. Biden belongs in the category of helpless, so often do
his decisions benefit his political adversaries, chiefly Mr. Trump, and
not himself. But those blunders—principal among them his insistence
that he was capable of running for re-election—have exacted massive
costs on the rest of the country.
For
three years Mr. Biden made it policy to do nothing on the country’s
southern border apart from revoking Mr. Trump’s executive orders. What
did he gain from this dereliction? The answer isn’t obvious.
Mr. Biden
overrode his military advisers and insisted on a total and immediate
withdrawal from Afghanistan, with no clear plan to extract Afghan
allies, U.S. citizens or American military hardware. A loss for the
U.S., for sure. But where was the benefit to Mr. Biden or his
administration?
Mr.
Biden openly defied the Supreme Court’s ruling on his student-debt
cancellation plan (the justices “tried to block me, but they didn’t stop
me”). He thus managed to sow resentment among Americans whose debts he
didn’t forgive, encourage a generation to indulge in foolish borrowing,
and make himself look like the lawless strongman he accused Mr. Trump of
being.
In
each of these instances—and there are many others—Mr. Biden not only
created ruin, discord and embarrassment for those who wished him well;
he did so without gaining any advantage for himself.
This
perhaps explains why he has been so comparatively active since losing
the election in November. These are the months when, no longer beholden
to the electorate, an outgoing president can do things he knows to be
dumb or counterproductive and suffer no harm for it.
In
December, Mr. Biden pardoned 1,499 criminals, many of them guilty of
heinous offenses and showing no signs of repentance. What was the point,
other than to attract the praise of a little band of activists and the
righteous scorn of everybody else? Then the president commuted 37 of 40
capital sentences. In a single move, he managed to offend the families
of murdered victims (some of them children), express his contempt for
the law and the courts (there was no question of the trials’ fairness)
and reveal that he has no principled objection to the death penalty (he
passed over the three most infamous killers). And for all that, he
gained nothing for his legacy or his party.
Much more at the linked opinion.
Meanwhile, did Trump just win a "tectonic" election? Link here.
From the linked oped:
“I was
at first inclined to think of this election simply as a repudiation
election,” he says. He now suspects that Mr. Trump’s victory might be a
“tectonic election”—one that marks a permanent structural change in the
American electorate and political parties.
He characterizes only three past elections as tectonic—1800, when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams
and the Federalist Party quickly withered; 1860, when Lincoln’s victory
established the Republicans as a major party that would dominate
presidential politics for seven decades; and 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt trounced Herbert Hoover and cemented the modern Democratic coalition.
If
your name isn’t Donald Trump, the idea that 2024 could join this list
may strike you as counterintuitive. Kamala Harris carried 19 states and
received more than 48% of the aggregate popular vote. Mr. Trump didn’t
even manage a majority. (Neither did Lincoln, but he had three
significant opponents.)
“It’s
not a landslide in terms of numbers,” Mr. Guelzo acknowledges, “but it
is a landslide morally speaking. What I mean by that is that the DNC was
running against a presidential candidate that everybody was convinced
was unelectable against nearly anyone. They could have put up almost any
candidate and the confidence was that the country was simply not going
to buy the idea of a return of Donald Trump to the White House.”
