Donald Trump and Antifragility
By Steven Yates
December 27, 2023
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors; and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.
“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012)
To my mind, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile is one of the most important of the new millennium so far. Dense and demanding, but rich and encyclopedic, this book is a must read for those wondering how the world of the 21st century could work if allowed to do so — whatever your ideology or perspective.
The basic idea is not especially complicated. If something is fragile, it breaks easily. Think of your average wineglass. My wife accidentally knocked one off our kitchen counter the other day. When it hit the floor, it shattered. That’s fragility.
If something is resilient, it doesn’t break when you drop it. Wood and plastic implements are resilient. I accidentally dropped a burger flipper a couple of weeks ago. I picked it up, cleaned it off, kept using it.
People can develop resilience (informally called “grit”) and weather a lot of personal storms that cause the emotionally fragile to go to pieces.
If something or someone is antifragile, though, it/he/she benefits from opposition, struggle, stress, disorder, unpredictability. In human life, this is a choice we can make, even if most people never make that choice.
Author and latter day Stoic philosopher Ryan Holiday wrote a book a few years ago that I also recommend: The Obstacle Is the Way (2014). Ryan’s basic claim: we’re all going to encounter disappointments, setbacks, obstacles, even failures. We have no control over these, because we don’t control the circumstances that lead to them. What we have control over is our responses. We can allow failures to stop us in our tracks, or we can learn from them and get stronger, more knowledgeable, better.
The most basic Stoic adage is that we can distinguish what we can control from what we can’t control. We get into trouble when we confuse the two.
We cannot control the opinions of others, any more than we can control traffic, the weather, or what the economy is doing. Which is why we shouldn’t worry about them but just let them go. Learn from them if possible; otherwise, forget them.
And then continue with our goals, which we control.
In other words, to be antifragile is not just to survive opposition, but to thrive on it, to get stronger from it, having used it as psychic fuel.
Kind of sounds like Donald Trump’s campaign to recapture the presidency, doesn’t it?
And why, contrary to the official narrative, the Colorado Supreme Court may have just handed him the presidency — a lot of other things being equal, of course.
It’s clear, from Trump’s rising poll numbers and Biden’s falling ones, that if the election were held today, and making the (admittedly tall) assumption it was honest, Trump would win in a landslide!
As Frank Luntz of all people (of CNN) recently conceded, “Donald Trump thrives on negativity…. I’m convinced that his polling numbers are going to go up…. Trump is gaining. The more he is prosecuted, the more he is condemned, the higher his numbers go, as people rally around him.”
That’s antifragility! Trump is antifragile! Intentionally or instinctively!
Consider: when the globalist-leftist alliance controlled FBI raised his house gestapo-style in Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022, his poll numbers went up. When Trump was indicted by the New York City Grand Jury early this year at behest of a corrupt, Soros-backed (Democrat) attorney general, his poll numbers went up further. His prosecution at the hands of more Democrats in Georgia has helped his numbers even more. And finally, despite his prosecution in the Asylum on the Potomac for his supposed involvement in the January 6 “insurrection,” he’s now leading Biden in all but one of the swing states, and as if this writing he’s leading Biden nationally by around 10%!
There is no reason to think this Colorado Supreme Court decision declaring that Trump’s name will be removed from the state’s primary ballot is going to be any different, and so far, it hasn’t been different.
His supporters — the “deplorables,” the “uneducated,” etc., etc. — recognize that every bit of this is political. The New York charge is substanceless. Judge Arthur Engoron, clearly no mathematical genius as shown by his blithe dismissal the other day of an actual expert on how these sorts of finances work, clearly has nothing. He’s unilaterally declared Trump and his organization guilty of fraud without a real trial because somehow, I have to suspect, he knows his case is a nothing-burger.
He is, in a sense, “just following orders”: those with real power want Trump stopped.
The same is true of civil cases like those of E. Jean Carroll, who can’t even remember the year of the alleged “sexual assault.” Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, is one of the most powerful people in the legal profession, however.
Everything they’ve done to date, Trump and his base of support has turned around on them, the result being that Trump has gotten stronger and his likelihood of defeating Biden in any actual free and fair election has only increased.
Trump is now stronger than he’s ever been!
I’ll say it again! That’s antifragility!
Coming to the Colorado Supreme Court decision which has thrown a lot of people because once read carefully and completely, it isn’t really a decision at all!
Four leftist justices unilaterally declared that Trump should not appear on the Colorado primary ballot because he’s an “insurrectionist,” although he’s not been charged, much less convicted, of any such crime.
It fits an official narrative, though, and this should indicate how important official narratives are.
Can you now be punished for a crime you’ve not even been charged with, much less convicted of, because it fits a narrative?
Apparently, in the New Normal, if your name is Donald Trump, you can!
So much for the much-vaunted rule of law.
The Colorado Supreme Court went on, however, to stay their decision until January 4 of next year, giving the U.S. Supreme Court the opportunity to weigh in on the matter. In other words, Trump’s name is still on the Colorado primary ballot. The ruling means nothing until the U.S. Supreme Court acts on it.
The leftist Democrats behind this ruling understood that Trump’s legal team was going to appeal immediately.
It’s as if they see this whole thing as theater, and themselves as bit players.
Does anyone really believe the Supreme Court is going to let this decision stand?
If they did, leaving the matter of whether to retain Trump on their primary ballots or remove him, other “blue” states would quickly follow Colorado’s lead. Something like 14 states are considering such moves, although they’ve been rejected in Minnesota and in Michigan. The most likely result would be a totally unprecedented state of affairs where some states would have Trump on their primary ballots and others wouldn’t.
That would precipitate chaos! Even liberals ought to be able to see that!
Or the Supremes could also declare Trump an “insurrectionist” in the manner of Colorado — Because We Say So — despite the absence of any actual conviction in any court of law (conviction corporate media never used to count). That would kick him off every primary ballot in every state, on 14th Amendment grounds.
This would mean two things.
No one is reading the 14th Amendment completely, as I’ve explained elsewhere (see also here).
But beyond that, any such decision would end any and all remaining pretenses that the U.S. is really a democracy. Permanently.
I’ve contended, also elsewhere (numerous places), that the U.S. is more of a plutocratic oligarchy than a democracy, but never mind that now. The pretense exists that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” and that keeping him off ballots therefore “secures democracy.”
When every other gambit has failed, said elites (or, more exactly, their visible servants) would have ended the right of the (probably) 90 million or so people ready to cast ballots for Trump to do so.
Does a real democracy do that?
No, of course not! As is typical of our New Normal, the truth is exactly the reverse of the official narrative, as should be clear from the application of simple logic. You do not preserve democracy by denying people the right to vote for the candidate of their choice.
Reading well-heeled corporate mainstream media, from The Washington Post to The Atlantic Monthly, it’s clear how fearful its owners are of Trump 2.0.
Why?
Because whatever his faults which I don’t deny, Trump is the person presently feared the most by GloboCorp, the Establishment, the ruling globalist elites, as well as their many leftist on-the-ground foot soldiers in government, media, academia, and elsewhere.
He is the biggest existential threat to their plans for total global domination to emerge in our lifetimes.
The vast support Trump has out in the hinterlands is an indicator of the degree to which the ruling elites are despised.
He is feared all the more because he’s unquestionably a lot less naïve now than he was back in 2017. Back then, he didn’t know who to appoint. Some of his appointees turned out to be worthless, or worse: they sold him down the river.
Were he to win in 2024, he’d refuse to appoint people he doesn’t know well, whom he isn’t sure are on board with his policies, and who might therefore work to undermine him. One of his first acts, which he’s already promised, will be to end the disastrous open borders policy that characterizes the Bidenista era. He is also just liable to end the equally disastrous sending of billions to that cesspool of corruption on Russia’s border, meaning that the war there will be ended in days, not months or even weeks. This will save lives on both sides. Trump will recognize that Putin’s motive, all along, has been to promote the interests of Russia, and of ethnic Russians, not to dominate the world. The future of NATO, a Cold War era alliance that has outlived its usefulness, will be in doubt.
This, among other policies of a Trump Administration 2.0, will end everything the globalist-leftist alliance wants, including the authoritarianism which they’ve projected onto everyone who has worked against them.
GloboCorp is increasingly up against a wall. Could it prevent the scenario above?
Yes, but not without giving away the game.
Frankly, I think this the globalist-leftist alliance very dangerous!
Because even antifragility has limits!
When 2024 gets here in a few days, we enter probably the most dangerous period any of us have seen in our lives. Whatever happens with some of the scenarios I’ve sketched, the country and possibly the world are going to look very different a year from now than they do today. I don’t believe the ruling elites want to assassinate Trump. But only because that could cause repercussions they’d have a very hard time controlling, and by doing so, they’d give away their game all that much faster. They might decide that they are close enough to their goal of global dominance — technocratic world government serving their corporations, and a fully digital currency operated through their central banks — that they might just say, in effect, “The h*** with it!”
At that point, all bets are off!
Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
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