A recent Medium article applauded the withdrawal of one of Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks. The author was crediting thousands of activists protesting this appointment. They put so many memes on the internet.
Then the author was trying to extrapolate this activism into further activism. Almost as if, if we keep up the pressure, we can bend the will of the Trump administration.
Is the Medium writer correct? Can we really bend the will of this president?
One thing is for sure. It took a lot of political energy to effect the withdrawal. Maybe a million posts on the internet. If we could add up all the time it took thousands of people to post all those memes, it would be hundreds of hours.
Can this effort be sustained? Can we come again and again and again and again to thwart Mr. Trump’s plans?
Maybe. But there is a limit to our free time and energy.
And maybe we were played
My political experience is that things happen in back rooms of political parties and government that the media and common people never know about. There is a lot of strategizing and plotting, trying to bend the flow of politics in a certain way. Sometimes things work out for the players, sometimes not. But there are always back-room people thinking in this way. And they win enough battles to continue playing this game. For sure, this job beats stocking shelves in grocery stores.
My imagination has been running a bit wild for what went on in these Republican back rooms. For me, it is plausible that the appointee had a dual purpose. First, the brokers of power wanted this person in a high place. So, they put him on the appointment list. Second, the brokers knew they might have to sacrifice him. They kind of expected the public to howl. So when the public did howl, it took attention away from the other appointees to the cabinet. So they offer the sacrifice and the other 10 or 20 appointees get a free ride. And if the public did not howl, then they still got their man in place.
In other words, the projected appointee was a deliberate distraction.
Yet the activists believed they were effective in their political action.
One sacrifice for at least 10 free rides. Methinks THEY won.
Published on Medium 2024
Logistics of the Fuel Industry
Addendum
Since I started writing this article, the Trump administration has found a replacement for the position. Now my Mastodon feed is howling about the flaws of this replacement. It seems like all that political energy went into cancelling the original appointment went for nothing.
It could have gone into building a new democracy. The THEY won again.
