There was a day—Ah yes! Those were the days!—when, dear reader, yours truly, c’est moi, the brash and dashing owner and publisher of the country’s newest broadsheet at the time—Yes, you would’ve heard of me or, at least, your parents would have, ask them when next you gather around the family table for the weekly repast—I could pen a barbéd editorial aimed directly at the scurrilous heart of liberalism, copy edit the slovenly submissions of a baker’s dozen cub reporters, lunch with advertising executives to secure premium page placement for their wares whilst leaving them holding the tab, fire off another op-ed for the afternoon edition and still be at the club for a six p.m. dinner and the requisite re-enactment of Churchill in the Paddock which followed.

And be right back hard at it, the following morning, at my desk in the magnificent but daunting corner office, by ten a.m., ten-fifteen at the latest.

Alas,

those days are no more.

Time comes for everyone, it is said, and while I’ve staved off the worst of his demands, the inevitable encroachment of his shadow, I am, admittedly, not the man I used to be. While I can still get my dander up with the best of them, truth be told, I no longer occupy that corner office, so to speak. Ripostes are mounted less frequently. My energies sapped with every dispatch, and longer the mental recuperation takes. The ‘brain drain’, my good wife refers to it as, bless her (younger) soul.

So imagine my surprise, surprise and delight, to be sitting here, quill in hand, so soon after leveling a devastating broadside to the nattering and skreiching of the dismal scientists and their wastrel followers, caterwauling for the reasoning behind the tariff barrage from the President of the United States, Donald F. Trump, against the entirety of the planet, penguins included—HaHa! A masterstroke of burlesque authority—last week. Just last week it was! As if it were yesterday.

And here I am at it again the Monday next, 1987 revisited, reborn, barely three days gone by, parry, parry, thrust! Turning back the clock, once more the young lion of yore, hear me roar. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

As if arbitrary and capricious executive rule revives me to tumescence.

Take a moment to read my invective of Thursday last, if you haven’t done so already. Even if you have, re-read it, get lost in it, wallow, refresh yourself in the sparkling words and the dancing way they interact, marvel at the devastating light touch I employ. Get educated, as the kids say, while I hydrate and medicate as one does upon reaching this ripe old age, shore up these old bones for another pugilistic round of verbal fisticuffs.

.  .  .

Ready then, are we?

I shall pick up from where I left off.

Unless you’re soft-pated or Ivy League educated (whose jurisdiction will soon be rightly placed under the Executive Branch as a necessary step in purging the entire educational edifice of its post-modern/Marxist leanings), you could not possibly be surprised by the President’s whiplash inducing reversal of the tariff package he introduced on Wednesday. Nay, not reversal. Postponement, for a ninety-day period, to allow all the countries of the world time to put together their concession packages for the mighty White House’s consideration.

A LOSS OF FACE!, you crow?

Only if you see the world through the eyes of the terminally subjugated. The Defeatists. The second raters. The Globalists and International Order types. The sympathizers of the perfidious cosmopolitan elites. Nosegays and Poppinjays.

You know who you are.

If consistency is the hobgoblin of foolish minds, as the otherwise dangerous revolutionary, Rousseau said, said in French, dit en français, ‘Si la cohérence est le hobgoblin des esprits stupides’, ipso facto, inconsistency is most certainly the masterpiece of mental acuity.

‘Hit it where they ain’t’, spoke the delightfully colloquial Yogi Barrett.

Why signal to your enemies the true intentions of your actions?

Keep them off-balance. Keep them on their toes. Keep them guessing.

Occupy the attention of your adversaries on What Ifs and What Might Bes, all possible future states, and they will be incapable of focusing their attention on the here and now, what you’re, in fact, doing right under their nose. The magician’s Art of Distraction is the beating heart of President Donald J. Trump’s Art of the Deal.

Or, as another great warrior and best-selling author, Sun Tzu, stated in his opus, The Art of War: ‘Let them set fire upon the ship at sail; it is the ship at port that poses the greatest danger’.

让他们放火烧掉航行中的船;港口的船只才是真正的危险

Art is merely short for ‘artifice’.

Believe at your peril.

Understanding is for chumps.

If you have to ask for a rational explanation, your weakness has already been exposed.

Tariffs are yesterday’s news while, at the same time, remaining a future threat. Ninety days come at you fast. And who knows? Maybe it won’t even be ninety days. Maybe forty. Maybe a month. Maybe a week. Maybe Thursday.

The true Trumpian genius comes from the fact that the rest of you spend the entirety of your wretched lives desperately trying to live in the moment, the present. Like Janus and his laughing/crying masks, 45-47 sees both forward and backward, the beginning and the end. The initial jab to the final knockout blow. The adept assassin always, you’ll never know what hit you and the last word on your lips will be ‘Why’?

Alas,

I could go on, truly I could, but where the spirit is willing, the flesh has grown weak. The quill is dry. The inkwell empty. And the defense of Trump is exhausting for even men half the age of I.