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Notes -
Trump is really going for the hat trick in his first year. I'm ambivalent on the long-term wisdom of the military operations, time will tell. But, at least in the short term, this stuff looks very good for Trump, and Hegseth, despite being panned as a lightweight, is at least delegating like an absolute champ. The first and second Iran operations and Venezuela are some of the wildest operations to be successfully pulled off by any world power, ever. And they're all in the first year.
My theory is that Trump does things that everyone else does, just louder, and more obvious. This dispels the illusions in some ways, makes the machinery of superpower status too plain. Who knows what the long term effects will be?
Trump is one of those guys Dan Carlin talks about having a "reality distortion field" around them. Historical figures who warped their societies and history itself around their ideas and goals. Ironically, it worked best on Carlin himself.
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