Some Guy ,   


Emperor Xi prefers the Brazen Head Waitresses  ( Younger , Better Looking  , Well Educated and VERY Easy to Pick Up after a few Beers    ----    Most Friday Nights I am Xi's Wingman   --- Chicks Dig The Emperors  ) .

"  ' Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac '  , Ronnie Cakes !   "


J.  " Henry "  Kissinger !

" For the last 18 months, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other top national-security officials have mostly kept their heads down in public as they tried to quietly counsel President Donald Trump. But this low-key consultation process seems to be weakening, as a headstrong president becomes increasingly insistent about his judgment.

The Helsinki summit showed that Trump thinks he’s his own best foreign-policy adviser. The formal interagency process that traditionally surrounds such big events all but disappeared for the U.S.-Russia encounter, with no full National Security Council meetings to prepare for Helsinki or to discuss its results.

Trump chose to go it alone with Russian President Vladimir Putin, literally and figuratively. Officials who wanted to know what happened had to read the president’s tweets or White House press briefings.

“I don’t think there is an interagency process now,” cautioned one prominent Republican foreign-policy expert. “Trump glories in not listening to advisers. He trusts his instincts, as uninformed as they sometimes are.”

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and one of Trump’s closest informal advisers, outlined the challenge: “A major problem for Trump is that he’s a golfer; he doesn’t play a team sport. The rest of the team has to know … what play you’re calling. In golf, it’s just between you and the ball. I think that’s a major weakness. … The world is far too complicated for one person to control everything.” Gingrich added: “It worries me” that Trump doesn’t consult more closely about Russia-related issues with officials such as Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. As of Monday, Dunford still hadn’t been briefed on Helsinki, even though it directly affects the more than 1 million troops Dunford oversees.

Gingrich is unusual among Trump insiders in his willingness to discuss the president so openly. Most top officials fear that Trump will see criticism as disloyalty and purge dissenters, as he did former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. “Trump has tremendous confidence in you when you agree with him, and he doesn’t think about you when you don’t,” noted Gingrich. “This is a president who gets bored,” he said. The trick is “being near him, but not too near.”

How should Trump’s senior advisers deal with a president who operated in Helsinki as a one-man show? That varies. Mattis, a retired four-star general who commands nearly universal respect in Congress, has an especially delicate challenge. During Trump’s first year, Mattis was an effective inside player. He convinced Trump that advocating torture was a mistake and that even a limited military strike on North Korea could have dangerous, unpredictable outcomes. According to Gingrich, Mattis’ discussions with Trump about the catastrophe of nuclear war helped convince the president to embrace an arms-control initiative with Putin.

Trump is fickle, and he may now be chafing at his defense secretary’s careful counsel. A Republican source tells me Trump recently complained: “He’s not ‘Mad Dog Mattis,’ he’s ‘Moderate Mattis.’” Another Republican says that at the G7 summit in Canada in June, Trump asked European leaders, “What do you think of Mattis?” Europeans feared it was a trick question, because too much enthusiasm might undermine Mattis.

Trump has given Mattis the freedom to run the Pentagon. Mattis, in return, has been almost agonizingly discreet, saving his counsel for the president’s ears.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is the “Trump whisperer,” the member of Trump’s inner circle who seems most similar to him in outlook and temperament. He’s the chief action officer on North Korea and Iran, the administration’s two most ambitious, dangerous challenges. Will Trump give Pompeo the latitude to communicate strategy on these big issues to the country and the world? If he feuds with Pompeo, Trump is sunk.

The final piece of the post-Helsinki puzzle is national security adviser John Bolton. He is deliberately tightening the NSC circle, reducing the frequency of formal principals’ meetings, to remedy what he thinks was interagency overkill during the Obama years. Bolton prefers small group meetings with Mattis, Pompeo and Trump. He mistrusts the bureaucracy but will need to use it to cope with so many hotspots at once.

Gingrich is right: Trump, the solo golfer, won’t succeed unless he plays with the other members of his foursome. On his own, he won’t make the cut.  "

" The New York Times recently ran a gentle look at the Democratic Party’s lineup of the most likely 2020 presidential candidates. And with the midterm elections only about four months away, that means some formal 2020 campaigns will begin to organize in six months or even less.

There will be a lot to discuss about how the individual candidates rate and who fills this lane or occupies that space among the Democratic faithful. But rather than get into a critique of this or that candidate at this stage of the game, there are a few fundamental questions to consider when thinking about the emerging 2020 dynamic.

One fundamental question: Who is the “anti-Trump”? In other words, who is the candidate who offers the most vivid contrast to the president? If President Donald Trump was at least in part a backlash to Barack Obama, what does a backlash to Trump look like? Or do the Democrats think that Trump is so flawed that the person who isn’t the president will automatically win in the general election?

Next, do issues matter in 2020? Or is it all about being the non-Trump candidate? Republicans everywhere are hoping the Democrats are in the process of shooting themselves in the foot by galvanizing around a new set of wedge issues such as advocating for sanctuary cities, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), promoting single-payer health care and even raising doubts about capitalism itself.

Republicans want to believe that this lurch to the left represents the Democrats’ abandonment of the center, which would make it easier for the GOP to present a rational voice — especially if the Democrats never get around to having a clear economic message. And if the economy is experiencing relatively robust growth and Democrats appear to be against all the policies that produced the good times, the Democrats will be reduced to shouting left-wing platitudes while Republicans can claim that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for economic decline.

We won’t have to wait until 2020 to see whether Democrats are going too far. The Times’ Alexander Burns notes that “younger progressives have battered entrenched political leaders, ousting veteran state legislators in Pennsylvania and Maryland and rejecting, in upstate New York, a congressional candidate recruited by the national party. … The pressure from a new generation of confrontational progressives has put Democrats at the precipice of a sweeping transition, away from not only the centrist ethos of the Bill Clinton years but also, perhaps, from the consensus-oriented liberalism of Barack Obama.”

Are Democrats in no mood for the type of temperate and stylistically moderate candidates who won for them in 1992 and 2008?

History says a party almost always gets two terms in the White House, so 2020 should theoretically favor the incumbent. But with Trump, who knows? Today, with his erratic trade policies rattling farmers and some manufacturers in the heartland, Republicans in Congress showing no confidence in his handling of Russia and the daily Trump-related dramas that constantly lead the news, Democrats must sense opportunity.

It is too early to take today’s headlines and extrapolate to November 2020. But from what I see, the Democrats probably can’t help themselves. It may be easy for Democrats to think they can win with anyone and therefore have no need to occupy the sensible center. But Democrats could be heading for a classic case of underestimating their opponents and overestimating their own appeal.

If they don’t have a sweeping victory in November taking control of the House and if they lose more than one Senate seat, the Democrats should take heed. They are setting up the right dynamic for a Trump re-election.