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1) The world is divided into winners and losers. It's more fun to be a winner. In order for you to be a winner, somebody else has to be a loser. The more other people are losers, the more of a winner you are.
2) The appearance of being a winner or loser is self-fulfilling: calling yourself a winner and acting like a winner makes you a winner, and calling other people losers makes them losers.
3) Winners have the power to make what they say go. Whatever a winner says is (in practice) right.
4) Winner and loser status are not guaranteed to last: today's winner can be tomorrow's loser, and vice versa.
5) As a corollary, truth, morality, and justice are transient conditions: what's true or right today may be false or wrong tomorrow, when somebody different is on top.
6) Some people object loudly to that notion. This can be for two reasons: either they're making a hypocritical show of "objecting on principle" because they lost and you won, or they're so naive they don't understand how the real world works.
7) Since "rules" and "principles" are just whatever the guy currently on top says, they obviously don't apply to the guy on top. In choosing people to help you, it would be silly to choose them by their past adherence to somebody else's rules, because you can change those rules anyway; if you're on top, the most important criterion is their personal loyalty to you.
Some of this isn't specific to Donald Trump, but applies more broadly to Republicans (and neoconservative Democrats) in general: the notion that "it's a tough, dog-eat-dog world out there, and it calls for a tough man, not hobbled by rules and principles that nobody really believes in anyway."
See the recent Times op-ed, In Praise of Hypocrisy.
2) The appearance of being a winner or loser is self-fulfilling: calling yourself a winner and acting like a winner makes you a winner, and calling other people losers makes them losers.
3) Winners have the power to make what they say go. Whatever a winner says is (in practice) right.
4) Winner and loser status are not guaranteed to last: today's winner can be tomorrow's loser, and vice versa.
5) As a corollary, truth, morality, and justice are transient conditions: what's true or right today may be false or wrong tomorrow, when somebody different is on top.
6) Some people object loudly to that notion. This can be for two reasons: either they're making a hypocritical show of "objecting on principle" because they lost and you won, or they're so naive they don't understand how the real world works.
7) Since "rules" and "principles" are just whatever the guy currently on top says, they obviously don't apply to the guy on top. In choosing people to help you, it would be silly to choose them by their past adherence to somebody else's rules, because you can change those rules anyway; if you're on top, the most important criterion is their personal loyalty to you.
Some of this isn't specific to Donald Trump, but applies more broadly to Republicans (and neoconservative Democrats) in general: the notion that "it's a tough, dog-eat-dog world out there, and it calls for a tough man, not hobbled by rules and principles that nobody really believes in anyway."
See the recent Times op-ed, In Praise of Hypocrisy.
