Many people have voiced frustration at the various contradictions of Donald Trump, contradictions for which the president seems to have avoided paying a political price with the electorate — especially with his strong base of supporters. But few have assayed the character of Trump so succinctly and with such unstinting effect as Eliot A. Cohen, the director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins and a former State Department official under Condoleeza Rice in the George W. Bush administration.
[Amazon: The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force by Elliot A. Cohen]
Cohen begins a recent piece for The Atlantic with this sentence: “Donald Trump is not much of a man.” Cohen proceeds to enumerate the reasons his conclusion about Trump’s “manliness” is inevitable. That the president regularly “whines…feels sorry for himself…gropes women…bullies the weak” are just a few of the reasons Trump’s manliness is dubious, according to Cohen. Cohen brings attention to Trump’s five deferments from military service during Vietnam to illustrate the contrast between the life paths (and characters) of Trump and his new choice for Chief of Staff, John Kelly. Cohen is hardly a liberal softy who doesn’t like Trump’s purported “tell it like it is” style. He is the author of The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force (see link above).
Reagan: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” A thought for all those as appalled as I am by what we see daily.
— Eliot A Cohen (@EliotACohen) July 25, 2017
