 A couple of videos ago I described how Trump hijacked everybody, the media, the GOP liberals, he brought in fringe elements, who spun up the liberals, and it drives us straight to the question of was he lucky or was he skillful. And it's easy to say that maybe Trump is a lucky idiot, it may be a little harder to say that Trump is an evil genius, but maybe there's room for something better, and that's something I'd like to actually explore. So let me propose a 2x2 matrix, actually just a space within which he might behave, where one axis is is he lucky or smart, but the other axis is does he have evil intentions of self-aggrandizement and bringing wealth on himself and his family, or might there be some slightly no-blur ambitions here. And I put Adolf Hitler on here because Godwin's Law, and because it just seems appropriate these days, and I don't think Hitler was as smart as he could have been, otherwise we would all be living in the high tower right now, but certainly far beyond lucky. In some sense, he was lucky to be born when he was born, and what had happened to Germany and his experiences all fed into his moment, and I've talked about that a little bit in previous videos. But let's put Hitler down there, and let's put Gandhi in the upper right-hand corner. I think he was really smart to use nonviolent action. He had to train a continent to do that. He invented a variety of things like the Salt March and spinning cotton and wearing dotes that he had made himself. All those kinds of things really say that Gandhi was really quite smart, and I think his ambitions were pretty noble, and there's probably a couple of dark corners in Gandhi's biography. But on the whole, Martin Luther King learned from him, he's been an inspiration for many, many people afterward. Dr. Evil isn't all that smart, clearly, but he's not also that evil, or he would hang around and wait for Austin Powers to actually die. So he's kind of predictably slightly dumb and clearly not noble, and forgive me for adding a little humor here in putting Hitler and Dr. Evil on the same chart, but I just want to open the space up a little bit and limber our minds for it. It's easy to see Trump as the lucky Satan, that somehow he was right for the moment and somehow he tapped something, and somehow he made it through. I actually think it's a lot easier to think of Trump as the clever Satan, or some less than noble aspirations, but that he was really quite clever in what he did. In fact, if you look at his quest as a long-term quest, it gets super interesting. What I want to do is open up a space for a potential Trump legacy that is nobler than it seems like he's headed toward this very moment. And I'll add, and I'll come back to this, that it looks like all of his early actions do not head toward some noble legacy. I want to leave that door open just a little bit. Certainly he has a personal history of 30 plus, let's say, 70 years of bigotry misogyny. It's been recorded, it showed up during the campaign. As I mentioned earlier, he in fact turned this liability into a big asset because he could just poke the other side and provoke them and keep them off balance through the whole campaign, which looks kind of an intelligent way to take your worst possible thing and make it your asset. And if you look at the apprentice, and the celebrity apprentice, his reality TV series, if you look at them from the long-term perspective of how to become president, and that one of the things you needed to drum into everybody's head was that you were the best businessman, the apprentice looks like genius. I hate to say that. So what are the odds that Trump is going to change? And mind you, I think the odds are quite small, because most of his early actions really don't bode well. A lot of his early appointments are, in fact, the lobbyists he said he would never appoint because he complained about the revolving door, et cetera. They are all sorts of people who are from the old establishment. But remember that he has to throw troops the red meat right up front. He has to do things that are fulfilling the pledges to the awful corners of the campaign that he brought in. But then he seems to be pretty good at playing one group against the other. And here I'll point to the nominations for Secretary of State, which originally were John Bolton of Infamy from back in the W administration versus Rudy Giuliani. And either one of those, from my perspective, would just bode ill for world affairs. And yet what's happened right now is that we're talking Giuliani versus who? Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney, the fellow who disavowed Trump, would have nothing to do with him, tried to throw his body in front of the Trump train early on and got rolled over like he was a road bump. And all of a sudden Mitt Romney, who would not be a terrible Secretary of State, is in the running. So it's very interesting watching Trump as he's doing this. And I'm trying to sit back and read the politics and not take every action at face value, which is difficult and troubling. But Trump is, if nothing else, flexible. He has, in fact, made himself a position by elbowing and punching and sort of kicking around the envelope and preventing people from pigeonholing him. He's made himself a position where he can be flexible and it's very hard to hold his feet to the fire. After all, facts don't matter. He's reversed himself all the time. He's said things that were obviously untrue over and over again. He's got a long history of this. That makes him kind of flexible. He can move a bit, which is quite interesting. Now it seems like one of the things he really wants, other than power, money and all that, is respect. He's the kid from Long Island whose father gave him some wealth who wanted to take over New York, who then built a couple big buildings in New York, then tried his hand at a whole bunch of other things, most of which failed. And I think he knows that now that he's put his lance through the Golden Ring that he's at least earned the respect that people have to salute the title that he's just apparently won. But I think he also is self-aware enough to know that they do so with disdain and hatred in many cases. In a lot of cases, maybe even in most cases, even on the side of the Republicans, some of whom are backing him because they see how this could play out. And who wants to be Joseph Goebbels in this scenario? Not a lot of people. So who knows where this is going? So the question is, how self-aware is Donald Trump? In particular, as he starts thinking about his legacy and what this might turn into over time, how might he shift? So I want to leave the foot in the door for this potential Trump legacy. I point as an example to the Moe Ibrahim Prize, which is given annually, although there doesn't have to be a recipient and for many years since 2007 there hasn't been. But this prize is basically a $5 million retirement account for any African president or prime minister of a nation who retires peacefully after a couple of terms as a dutifully elected president, which means they might not see the need to bank, to pilfer their country and bank a lot of money in a Swiss bank account, et cetera, et cetera. It's an interesting gesture to try to make transitions in African governments a little better and to reduce the looting and corruption that happens in too many countries, not just in Africa, but around the world. But it's a very interesting concept. So what might motivate Trump to not spiral down into the right? Which is, I think, or down to the middle, wherever you think he is on the lucky to smart axis. I think most of us don't want him spiraling downward. We'd like him to spiral a little upward. So what if he can actually be seen as pretty clever to have gotten where he is and then to have done creative destruction on the economy and on the kinds of institutions that needed changing, of which there are plenty. I just have no instinct or there's no evidence that Trump is going to do that many things that are good in this perspective. My name is Jerry McCalsky. This is part of a series of videos on Trump won now what? I am not an historian or political theorist. In fact, you can find an explanation to the rest of these bullets on the intro video. If you click on that Prezi link, you will go to the whole Prezi that contains all the videos and you can play them through. Thank you for listening and thinking with me. Please react, subscribe, et cetera.