Trump and the OK Corral Or Maybe High Noon

We have had a president who played a cowboy in the movies. But Ronald Reagan, despite his love of his horses and his ranch, knew he was no cowboy and knew he wasn't really up for a high noon style pistol duel.

We have had a president in George W Bush, who lived on a ranch in Texas who sent us cowboy-like into wars of choice in the middle East and on the Asian continent. He could fly a plane, but he knew that he couldn't single handedly dive bomb his enemies into submission. And when he retired he took up a less macho hobby and bought a house in the suburbs.

Now we have Trump who went to a military high school, but like many of his generation, dodged the draft. Who could blame him? Vietnam was literally a sucking swamp,destined to fail from day one.  But now this man envisions himself rushing unarmed into a hail of bullets? This man who lies in bed watching only his supporters on Fox News while munching on McDonald's sees himself as an avenging angel who could have halted the killing at Parkland with his bare hands? I find this fantasy hard to swallow. As Stephen Colbert pointed out, it's hard to believe that Trump can run. I mean his favorite sport is golf and no one ever has seen this macho man walk the course like the dudes of old.

Trump is a macho man in his own mind-- a hard-headed deal maker who can bend his opponents to his will with his Spock mind-meld. He uses words and images that convey a love of violence. Most often he says things as if he were tougher than police, soldiers, and even football players. He bullies as if he were the meanest hombre in the field of play whatever that may be. But this self-image is self-serving bluster. He is too old to be the school yard bully. His father is too dead to give his approval. (Yes Trump is still trying to prove himself to his withholding father.)

Sadly he doesn't seem to realize that he is not a great deal-maker, or a brave man. He does not know the difference between his fantasies of toughness and violence and the reality that he is an overweight and out-of- shape senior citizen who would no more run into the line of fire than give up Coke.

But you can't feel sorry for his self delusions or his father issues because, in his lack of real toughness, he encourages others to fight  and do it for his self satisfaction. He wants to arm teachers, toughen them up, harden the school. We have to fight fire with fire. Short of wildfires, when does that work?

The real answer is not Trump's dizzying vision of schools as The OK Corral, but fewer guns no bump-stocks and no weapons of war off a genuine battlefield.  Trump won't be able to go that way because he has confused his macho fantasy with real life.
And Congress won't go that way because it has an irrational fear of the. NRA. (That subject will be addressed in a later post.)

And from the New Yorker magazine: