The president’s personal pilot is on the administration's short list to head the Federal Aviation Administration. Trump has told a host of administration officials and associates that he wants John Dunkin — his longtime personal pilot, who flew him around the country on Trump Force One during the campaign — to helm the agency, which has a budget in the billions and which oversees all civil aviation in the United States.Staffing the government with relatives, cronies, and unqualified subordinates is what happens in banana republics, of course. But there's another factor at work here:
Dunkin has told people that when he used to fly Trump around on his private Boeing 757, they'd often find themselves stuck on the tarmac with delays. He'd tell Trump that none of this would happen if a pilot ran the FAA.Trump loves this sort of thing. He thinks everything that's bad in America can be corrected by a really smart guy like him who sees (or is made aware of) a simple, obvious solution all the supposed "experts" miss. Solving problems doesn't require knowledge or hard work -- you just have to pick up on the one detail thagt the people who've been in charge for years haven't noticed, and then all difficulties will magically vanish.
We can see this in another Trump brainstorm we learned about last night:
In Singapore, the death penalty is mandatory for drug trafficking offenses. And President Trump loves it. He’s been telling friends for months that the country’s policy to execute drug traffickers is the reason its drug consumption rates are so low.Okay, this solution came from a fellow head of state. But it's classic Trump: it's simple, it's crude, and Trump believes it's the magic bullet that will eliminate America's drug problem.
"He says that a lot," said a source who's spoken to Trump at length about the subject. "He says, 'When I ask the prime minister of Singapore do they have a drug problem [the prime minister replies,] 'No. Death penalty'." ...
* He tells friends and associates the government has got to teach children that they'll die if they take drugs and they've got to make drug dealers fear for their lives.
* Trump has said he would love to have a law to execute all drug dealers here in America, though he's privately admitted it would probably be impossible to get a law this harsh passed under the American system.
And there's also this:
I never said “give teachers guns” like was stated on Fake News @CNN & @NBC. What I said was to look at the possibility of giving “concealed guns to gun adept teachers with military or special training experience - only the best. 20% of teachers, a lot, would now be able to
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018
....immediatel
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018
fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!
Trump went on to use the phrase "gun-adept teachers" in his speech at CPAC. He loves this idea. "Gun-adept teachers" will kill 100% of the bad guys in their classrooms, because they're gun-adept and they're teachers. They'll never hit an innocent bystander. They'll always be able to outgun shooters, even if the shooters have more powerful weapons already drawn and they're just concealed-carrying a pistol. No complex thinking needed -- ATTACKS WOULD END!
Trump is often compared to Jerzy Kozinski's Chauncey Gardiner in Being There, but I often think of him as the title character of the 1980 film Simon, written and directed by Marshall Brickmann, who collaborated with Woody Allen on the screenplays of Annie Hall and Manhattan. In Simon, an evil think tank brainwashes a man into believing that he's an alien from another planet. He goes on to become a messiah figure of sorts, making many pronouncements about how modern life can be made better.
Trump is a right-wing version of that guy.
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