Law Professor Dissects Facts About Trump

​Law Professor & Rabbi Fischer Reports on President Trump 

7-19-18, * --  It really is quite simple everyone is smart except Donald J. Trump. That’s why they’re all billionaires and elected President. Only Trump does not know what he is doing. Only Trump does not know how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.  Anderson Cooper and the whole fake news media crowd at MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS … does. 
Remember the four years when Anderson Cooper was President of the United States?  And before that — when the entire Washington Post editorial staff jointly were elected to be President? Remember?  Neither do I.

The Seedier Media never have negotiated life and death, not corporate life and death, and not human life and death.  They think they know how to negotiate, but they do not.  They go to a college, are told by peers that they are smart, get some good grades, proceed to a graduate degree in journalism, and get hired as analysts. Now at age 30 they’re expert, ready to take on Putin and the Iranian Ayatollahs. That’s not the road to expertise in tough dealing. The alternate road is that, along the way, maybe you get forced into some street fights. Sometimes the other guy wins, and sometimes you beat the intestines out of him.  Then you deal with grown-ups as you mature, and you learn that people can be nasty, often after they smile and speak softly. You get cheated a few times, played.  And you learn. 
 
Maybe you become an attorney litigating multi-million-dollar case matters …those years can teach a great deal.  They can teach how to transition from sweet, gentle, diplomatic negotiating to tough negotiating.  At some point, with enough tough-nosed experience, you figure out Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” yourself.

Trump’s voters get him because not only is he we, but we are he.  We were not snowflaked-for-life by effete professors who themselves never had negotiated tough life-or-death serious deals. Instead we live in the real world, and we know how that works.  Not based on social science theories, not based on “conceptual negotiating models.” We learned from experiences how to deal with real life. We won’t have John Kerry soothe us by having James Taylor sing “You Have a Friend” carols. All to the daily praise of a media who now attack President Trump every minute of every day; so let us understand a few things:

Negotiating with NATO: NATO is our friend.  They also rip off America.  They’ve been ripping us off forever.  America saved their necks — before there even was a NATO:

1. in World War I they messed up and 116,456 Americans died to save their necks.
2. they messed up again for the next two decades because West Europeans are effete and so obsessed with their class manners and their rules of savoir faire and their socialist welfare states and their early retirements that they did not have the character to stand up to Hitler in the 1930s.  Peace in our time. So they messed up, and America had to save their necks again when another 405,399 Americans died for them during Word War II.  
3. And then America had to rebuild them stationed our boys in Germany and all over their blood-stained continent.
4. Yet they still rip us off.  We pay 4% of our gigantic gross domestic product to protect them and they will not pay a lousy 2% of their GDP towards their own defense.  They expect America to pay for their NATO defense even a century later. 
5. they cheat us further in trade - long before Trump, they set up tariffs aganst us for so many things.  If the average American knew how badly Europe has been ripping us off we’d say, as a matter of self-respect and personal pride, “I no longer will buy anything but American, no matter what it costs.” 

Every American President has complained about the cheating and imbalance —Even Obama complained about it. They all did it so gently, so diplomatically.  They would deliver the sermon, just as the pastor predictably tells the church-goers on Sunday morning that he is against sin – and the congregation goes to sleep.

So Trump did what any effective negotiator would do:  he took note of past approaches to NATO and their failures, and correctly determined that the only way to get these penny-pinchers to pay their own freight would be to bulldoze right into their faces, stare them right in their glazed eyes with cameras rolling, and tell them point-blank the equivalent of: “You are the cheapest, penny-pinching, miserly skinflints ever.  And it is going to stop on my watch.” And you know what you read in the Fake News: Trump is crazy!  … out of control! So, lemme see. I know: We will go to trade war! How do you like that?  Maybe we even will pull all our troops out of Europe.  They don’t know if he just might be crazy enough to go to trade war and to pull American boys home. They knew that Clinton and Bush x 2 and Kerry and Hillary and Nobel Laureate Obama never would do it.

Trump knows who America’s friends are, and he wants to maintain and strengthen those friendships.  It is no different from a parent telling a 35-year-old son: “I have been supporting you for thirty-five years.  I put you through college by signing four years and $100,000 in Parent Loans. You graduated college fifteen years ago.  For fifteen years I have been asking you nicely to look for a job and to start contributing.  Instead, you sit home all day playing video games, texting your friends on a smartphone I pay for, and picking little fuzz balls out of your navel.  So, look, I love you.  You are my flesh and blood.  But if you are not employed and earning a paycheck — and contributing to the cost of this household — in six months, we are throwing you out of the house.”

That boy is NATO. Trump is Dad. And all of us have been signing for the Parent Loans.

Negotiating with Putin: Putin is a bad guy.  A really bad guy.  He is better than Lenin; better than Stalin, Khruschev, Brezhnev, Pol Pot, Mao; but he is a really bad guy. Putin is a dictator.  He answers to no one.  He does whatever he wants. Trump knows this and if you insult Putin in public, like by telling the news media just before or after meeting with him that he is the Butcher of Crimea, and he messed with our elections, and is an overall jerk — then you will get nothing behind closed doors from Putin.  Putin will get even, will take intense personal revenge, even if it’s bad for Russia -- even if it’s bad for Putin; because there’re no institutional reins on him. But if you go in public and tell everyone that Putin is a nice guy (y’know, just like Kim Jong Un) and that Putin intensely maintains that he did not mess with elections – using diplomacy …  You can proceed to remind Putin what you told him privately: that this garbage has to stop — or else.  That if he messes in Syria, we will do “X.”  If he messes with our Iran boycott, we will do “Y.” We will generate so much oil from hydraulic fracturing and from ANWR and from all our sources that we will glut the market — [..snip]

If Trump sweet-talks Putin in public … then everyone is set to believe that Putin is getting whatever he wants, that Trump understands nothing.  So, in that setting, Putin can make concessions and still save face. Diplomacy!

Meanwhile, Trump has expelled 60 Russians from America, reversed Obama policy, sent lethal weapons to the Ukraine and is severely pressuring Germany on its pipeline project with Russia.

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The Bottom Line: At the end of the day, Donald Trump is over seventy years old.  He has made many mistakes in his life.  He still makes some.  He is human. But Trump likewise has spent three score and a dozen years learning.  He has seen some of his businesses go bankrupt, and he has learned from those experiences to be a billionaire and not let it happen again.  No doubt that he has been fooled, outsmarted in years past.  And he has learned from life. He is a tough and smart negotiator.  He sizes up his opponent, and he knows that the approach that works best for one is not the same as for another. It does not matter what he says publicly about his negotiating opponent.  What matters is what results months later. 

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Soft answer and wrath. Proverbs 15:1

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*Excerpted and adapted full original report from Rabbi Dov Fischer, adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. His writings have appeared in The Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine.

​ Full report Here