Donald Trump crushed Joe Biden in the big debate preceding the assassination attempt, leading to Biden's exit from the race. Trump's rhetorical style ran rings around the avuncular Biden's.
Can Trump now crush the gifted, tough Kamala Harris? Maybe.
Maybe not.
Trump on the stump is 200-proof Saul Alinsky. Trump's unlikely to have even heard of Alinsky despite tactical similarities.
Harris is formidable in comparable ways.
Saul Alinsky, community organizer and political tactician, was — big reveal — a center-right populist. Alinsky was well to the right of Trump.
Alinsky detested big government. He called Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty" "a prize piece of political pornography," to the dismay of LBJ's "generalissimo of the war," Sargent Shriver.
Alinsky was completely exonerated of spurious claims of communist sympathies by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI — nobody's idea of softies. Alinsky taught Giovanni Battista Cardinal Montini (later Pope Paul VI, hardly anybody's idea of a left-winger) how to drive the Communist Party from northern Italy.
Hillary Rodham Clinton admired but repudiated Alinsky, choosing instead to work within the system. Barack Obama never met Alinsky.
Nor did I. That said, Alinsky was Tea Party — of which I was a leader — before the Tea Party. Alinsky anticipated something rather like MAGA (with ethics).
The left-leaning media routinely pillories Donald Trump for lying. To little effect.
Why?
Trump's "alternative facts" are better cast as dramatic license. J.D. Vance's, too.
For what it's worth, there's something happening here. In "Rules for Radicals" Alinsky states:
"If you actively opposed the Nazi occupation and joined the underground Resistance, then you adopted the means of assassination, terror, property destruction, the bombing of tunnels and trains, kidnapping, and the willingness to sacrifice innocent hostages to the end of defeating the Nazis. Those who opposed the Nazi conquerors regarded the Resistance as a secret army of selfless, patriotic idealists, courageous beyond expectation and willing to sacrifice their lives to their moral convictions. To the occupation authorities, however, these people were lawless terrorists, murderers, saboteurs, assassins, who believed that the end justified the means, and were utterly unethical according to the mystical rules of war. Any foreign occupation would so ethically judge its opposition. However, in such conflict, neither protagonist is concerned with any value except victory. It is life or death.
"To us the Declaration of Independence is a glorious document and an affirmation of human rights. To the British, on the other hand, it was a statement notorious for its deceit by omission. …
"The Declaration of Independence, as a declaration of war, had to be what it was, a 100 per cent statement of the justice of the cause of the colonists and a 100 per cent denunciation of the role of the British government as evil and unjust. Our cause had to be all shining justice, allied with the angels; theirs had to be all evil, tied to the Devil; in no war has the enemy or the cause ever been gray."
One of my most accomplished once-and-future guerrilla-politics comrades-in-arms, Rachel Alexander, ace reporter at the Arizona Sun-Times and columnist for Townhall (and, unlike me, MAGA), regularly indicts Alinsky as a liar for this candid admission in "Rules for Radicals":
"The history of Chicago's Back of the Yards Council reads, 'Out from the gutters, the bars, the churches, the labor unions, yes, even the communist and socialist parties; the neighborhood businessmen's associations, the American Legion and Chicago's Catholic Bishop Bernard Sheil. They all came together on July 14, 1939. July 14, Bastille Day! Their Bastille Day, the day they deliberately and symbolically selected to join together to storm the barricades of unemployment, rotten housing, disease, delinquency and demoralization.'
"What really happened is that July 14 was selected because it was the one day the public park fieldhouse was clear—the one day that the labor unions had no scheduled meetings—the day that many priests thought was best—the one day that the late Bishop Sheil was free. There wasn't a thought of Bastille Day in any of our minds."
While merrily hippie punching Alinsky, Alexander regularly champions many counterfactual statements — if uttered by Trump. In that, she, like Alinsky, Trump, and Vance, is adhering to Alinsky's unsentimental pragmatism: "... neither protagonist is concerned with any value except victory. It is life or death."
By use of this potent tactic, Donald Trump won a crucial victory over the didactic Joe Biden. Trump's crushing Biden wasn't about either candidate's fumbles.
It was about rhetorical firepower.
Harris, with her immediate debut of a "cop versus convict" narrative suggests that Trump will find her a rival worthy of his superpowers. Harris, also a gifted thrower of rhetorical punches, already is redefining the election narrative:
Donald Trump, superhero or supervillain?
Game on! Somewhere at the ringside of the hereafter, Saul and Irene Alinsky must be raising a glass of Jameson's whiskey.
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of the 200,000+ follower "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $104T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.