Category: Policial Science

It’s Good to be Hated: Consider it an honor

It is actually quite a compliment to be hated. Being hated is a very healthy thing. Its one thing to point to a big national figure like Donald Trump and say that people hate him, and for good reason. It’s quite another to look at a new executive in any business who brings in their wake great change and to say that they are hated. But in essence, the hatred is a needed element and is something that should be sought out, not avoided. If everyone loves you, you are doing something wrong, and not pushing the world around you as much as you should be to above the line thinking.

It never made any sense to me why we have taught people in our culture that the most important thing in the world was to seek being liked by our peers. I suppose for me it has taken roughly ten years of writing articles over 1000 words each coupled with many interesting life experiences to hone the issue down to simply Above the Line Thinking and Below the Line Thinking. I had to re-read The Oz Principle for a business need, which is a brilliant book. But after all the personal work that I have done, it really made a lot more sense to me now than it had previously. Its one thing to read a book like that and agree with it. It’s quite another to understand it at a deep philosophical level and be able to use it. Many of our problems in the world do simply come down to below the line thinking and above the line thinking as proposed in The Oz Principle.

But that wasn’t the first time that humans figured out the problem, The Oz Principle is a business take on The Wizard of Oz which was a very empowering story about not being a victim in life, and getting what you need at the end of a hero’s journey. Dorothy and her little dog didn’t do anything to be hated by the Wicked Witch but exist, much like the rest of us. All Dorothy did was get caught in a whirlwind and land on the sister of the Witch with her house. It was an accident, yet Dorothy was made to feel she owed something to the evil spinster. All Dorothy wanted to do was return to Kansas and help people along the way. Nobody in the world should have hated her for it, yet they did. It was unavoidable. It always is for people who are good to be hated by those who are bad.

So what is good and bad, well, simply bad people are below the line thinkers who scheme and plot to get others to join them there. Below the line thinking is victimhood mentality, thinking negatively about things, trying to keep the world suppressed to your weaknesses so that you as a below the line thinker are not outmatched by others. Below the line thinkers love the idea of equality for all because it gets them off the hook to perform. This is why politics is such a below the line activity, and why we instinctively think of it as an evil enterprise. Above the line however is where the good are, they are positive people always looking to improve the world around them. They take personal responsibility for actions and are always advancing intellectually because of it. Judging the good from the bad is simply that easy.

In the corporate world it happens all the time, a consultant is hired or a charismatic new CEO who comes in as an above the line thinker and changes the world of the below the liners, and it is safe to say that those employees hate that new element. They hate above the line thinkers because it demands on them performance, they are too lazy, or too corrupt to compete with. So the dominate emotion is sheer hatred. I grew up with a pretty good understanding of these things before I ever read The Oz Principle, but as I got older I understood the futility of making other people happy really early in my life. Instinctively I understood that if people disliked you, that you were doing something very right. Now in my life I understand that the more people do dislike me or hate me, the better I am doing in the world. If everybody loves you, then you are socializing with too many below the line thinkers and are becoming one of them yourself. Above the line thinkers, good people, are much fewer in number among populations because of the difficulty in being an above the line person. It is much easier to be scarecrows in life using The Wizard of Oz metaphor a bit, just doing our jobs and staying put where people tell us to be, then in going down the yellow brick road to a moment of self-discovery to find out all along we had everything we needed within ourselves. Its much easier to blame others for our problems than to take responsibility for them and to solve them. Most people spend their entire lives like the tin man or the scare crow blaming others for their withering condition when all they really need to do is to follow Dorothy to their own personal freedom. But guess what, they want to keep it that way, because it’s easy to just stand in a field and rot away. It takes a great effort to walk around and change your circumstances and when some above the line leaders crosses your path and evokes you to move along, great resentment and hatred do become the dominating emotions. But so what.

Once you understand that everything essentially comes down to above the line and below the line thinking, everything in the world makes much more sense, especially in politics. If the world believes that Donald Trump is a good president because lots of people love him then merit would be given to his faults due to so many below the line thinkers hating him. But as my way of thinking persists, since lots of people hate him, he is doing a great job as president because he is encouraging them to think above the line and they clearly don’t want to. That isn’t his problem, its theirs.

Everyone should aspire to be an above the line thinker, there is nothing good that comes out of below the line thinking. Forget about political affiliations, gender roles, skin color, nothing matters more than people who are above the line thinkers. Everyone should aspire to be one. Everyone, without exception. But so long as there are below the line people functioning in the world, there will be conflict and hatred. And that conflict is good, it’s needed, and its very healthy. Without above the line thinkers there would never be advancements in human society. And without them there would never be a challenge to evil. The true definition of the battles of good and evil come down to above and below the line thinking. The two are not compatible, they cannot negotiate together, and one must destroy the other. So the hatred that is directed at good, above the line thinkers is one of the greatest compliments that can be given. It means that you are doing it right, and good things do come about as a result—so long as you can teach yourself not to care about their opinions.

Rich Hoffman

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China Can’t Even Afford iPhones: Understanding how the game has been played and will be in the future

I warned everyone, China the big communist country had nothing without the United States. They would have no leverage in trade talks and their inflating economy was purely fictional, created by global efforts to prop them up. I’ve especially pointed this out when box office talks about movie releases have studios paying more attention than they should about the communist country’s ability to make or break a movie. Back when a big movie like E.T. The Extraterrestrial came out in the 1980s nobody cared if anybody in China saw the movie and it was considered a success. So what has changed in the three decades since is purely an internal communist push through American education to give China a seat at the economic table that was entirely made up by political forces trying to change the kind of world we all live in. They wanted to say, “look, China is killing all of us, so we need to be more like them.” And that was how communism was being pushed into western culture. If everyone wanted to compete in the modern economic world, they’d have to get on board with that line of thought. But, as I said from the very beginning, it was all made up crap.

I can see why everyone believes that China is or was going to be the big world power to chase. The Children’s Museum in Indianapolis as in other places as well has a huge dedication to the new China economy tying to prepare young people on how to live in that type of world. By the time I had seen the exhibit it was already aging so it was a little easier for me to see than the millions of visitors who had been there before me. If the topic of economic power and global politics was not the topic of the average family’s dinner table, then most people wouldn’t think much of it. However, in essence, the Chinese economy was never going to be all scary and domineering of all cultures on earth. The way our school systems proposed the problem was a lie from the start, China was never going to dictate the way we live life in American and that smoky reality that they had been trying to create with our young people came to a crashing end with the rise to power of President Trump, who knew better. Anyone who understands markets and money could see the problem but often those types of people are not allowed anywhere near political policy making, that is until one of them managed to get elected into the Executive Branch, which destroyed near six decades of planning by the political insurgents working against American sovereignty in full pursuit of globalism managed by China.

Personally, I love Apple products, my wife just bought the latest iPhone from them. They are an American company that has been pushing great technically innovations. They are too liberal for me, and I don’t think Tim Cook is a very good CEO, but the company itself is a good one as it was created by Steve Jobs. And I get it, there are only so many Americans who can buy iPhones, so the billions of people in China is a lucrative market, just as movie companies have fallen into that trap, but the entire industry is built as a sand castle meant to look impressive long enough to trick the world into accepting communism before the real waves of economic power came along and washed it all away. Thank goodness that happened much earlier than projected with the election of President Trump. Due to the continuing trade war the Chinese people just aren’t riding the wave of extra money that had been fueling a fifth of all iPhone sales pushing Apple stocks down 5.1% for the week as investors had to brace for the loss in projections. When people don’t have the expendable income to buy an iPhone it is an excellent measure of their economic health so there is no way that the “state” of China can hide the problem because the sales are published by an American company.

Of course, Apple’s not happy about it, they feel they need to have a rate of growth that can continue to support their trillion-dollar evaluation and in order to do that they literally need to touch everyone on planet earth in some way or another, so it’s a tough gig. Apple can’t afford to have too many political opinions and to divide up their bases. They trust that conservatives will buy their product because what they have is the best, so they do lean left. And like Google, all the big tech companies had been thinking that China was the way the world was going so they started kissing up to them over a decade ago. But Apple should have never counted on a fifth of their entire market to come from that region of the world. Apple phones are too expensive for a country that relies on its economic power to be stolen from other places and given to them through politics, which is exactly what has happened. American companies were penalized with burdensome regulation so they fled to Asia and took those jobs to those economies. But the origin market was North America where the goods were really purchased. The only big difference was that instead of products being made in America and then being sold back to America, the products were made in other parts of the world and sold back to America. Trump fixed that problem by stopping the cause, over regulation and tax incentives which is why over 300,000 jobs were created in December with a GDP rate of nearly 4% to finish out the year. Meanwhile, China can’t even afford to buy iPhones.

There were a lot of villains in on the game but that’s not important now. China has to steal intellectual property because their communist system does not spawn creativity just as it doesn’t elsewhere in the world. Great thinkers and dreamers like to get paid for their unique visions. They don’t do it for free which is why China has a major creativity problem. All things in business come from creativity, so a society that isn’t very creative is not going to have a strong economy. China could never steal enough intellectual property to stay relevant in an economy now led by the United States again. They are going to gradually fall further and further behind because all their economic gains were created by stifling America with policy and regulation and giving that opportunity cost to China so that the chess board of the world could change. But it was all built on phony values and now Trump has played the card everyone was afraid he would, and China is falling apart.

China always depended on the American economy for its sustenance. What they had was not real value but stolen. And that’s what everyone is having a hard time coming to terms with. China was not a superior culture dominating economics, they were just a third world country artificially made first world with looted wealth from the west so that the idea of communism would be accepted by all global markets. Apple knew it, so does Google, and now they are paying the price for hedging their bets. If Tim Cook were a good CEO he would have started backing off expectations the moment that Trump entered office because anybody aware of the situation knew what was going to happen. Now its time to pay, and likely time to get a new CEO.

Rich Hoffman

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The Loser Rashida Tiaib Attempts at Impeachment: Obviuosly, she hasn’t thought things through

News flash, what does Rashida Tiaib think is going to happen if her brand of socialist radicals impeach President Trump and take over all three branches of government with their insurgents? They are going to be destroyed. It’s not going to be allowed to happen, violence will erupt and many people will die. This idea that liberals have about taking over government by force, intimidation and ANTIFA radicalism hasn’t been thought through very well. There is a reason Donald Trump was elected president. It’s not his fault, it’s the people who put him there who Rashida Tiaib should be concerned about, and calling them a bunch of white racists isn’t going to help make a case for civility either. When push comes to shove, bodies will be lying around in the streets and any fantasy of a socialist takeover will end rather fast. It’s one thing to have an ANTIFA protest on a college campus or a very liberal town full of welfare recipients who have no passions in the matter. But it’s quite another to stroll into Deadwood South Dakota and demand socialism. Uhhhh, before the mob moved one city block I’d predict about 90,000 bullet holes and some of them coming unofficially from the sheriff’s office. Any attempt to impeach President Trump, let me just say—will start a war that Rashida Tiaib isn’t prepared for—or any Democrat for that matter.

I’m at a place in my life where I want to address this problem more deeply that it just being a liberal against conservative problem. As Mitt Romney proved, and even some local people in my own town have clearly demonstrated, they are just as much losers as Democrats are. So I am thinking more these days about a more appropriate and universal understanding of the problem, designating winners and losers instead of Republicans and Democrats and here is the reason, and again I’ll refer back to The Oz Principle, everything really comes down to above the line and below the line thinking. Winners think above the line, losers think below the line. Pretty simple, right? So let’s look at this Rashida Tiaib phenomena through the lens of being a loser or a winner. Obviously, her intentions for wanting to impeach Trump is to bring victory to her party’s ambitions to take control of government. But because she is a severe case of below the line thinking she hasn’t even conceived what it might look like if that reality were to manifest—how the American people in the real world would react to it. And that is the classic problem with all below the line thinkers.

Below the line thinking essentially consists of victim hood, in explaining why someone can’t advance themselves in life. Racism under any definition is classic below the line thinking and any government that supports it, is contributing severely to a loser mindset. In any business that is trying to improve its cultural footprint organizationally, the challenge is to get more people thinking above the line than below, and that is how you essentially start getting a winning mindset across the entire organization. To put it in crayon so that everyone can understand it, this is precisely the purpose of sports within our capitalist country. We watch teams bring in certain players who are supposed to excel in whatever position they play in a particular sport and we cheer on their efforts to win more games than other cities. It’s a fun game for all of us, but the real essence of it is to find that magic combination of winners and leaders who can inspire victory. Nobody has much tolerance for a sports player who is hurt all the time or underperforms. It doesn’t matter if the fans are liberals or conservatives, most people have an open disdain for a sport figure that is not living up to the expectations that the fan base has for wins and losses.

For a lot of reasons, we have allowed as a culture way too many people who are below the line thinkers to get government jobs and to shape that employment culture in a very negative way. The government labor unions are another victimhood-based organization, full of below the line thinkers and they actually incentivize that type of culture making most government workers the type of people who are extremely inefficient. Unlike most business environments which are performance based and are always trying to look for ways to keep below the line thinking from hindering a winning culture, government looks for more below the line thinking to justify their loser attitude about everything, and to satisfy that trend they want to always grow, because that’s what losers do, they love to hide their faults in the masses so their errors aren’t so obvious.

If I were working in government as a TSA agent, or a National Park Ranger, I would make sure human resources had my number correct and would tell them to call me when funding had been restored, if ever. I would never sit around waiting for somebody else to do something so that I could pay more rent or a mortgage. I would get a second job, or even a third job and I would take care of my financial obligations. That is an example of above the line thinking, and it’s the way more people need to start thinking if we really want America to remain such a great country. Lucky for us, in the rural parts of the nation that type of thinking is quite common—particularly among farmers. When they hit a drought, or the get a flat tire on a tractor they don’t sit around crying about racism or how unfair God is to them that day, they fix the tire. And they do their best with the drought. They survive. I can say that I am an above the line thinker with the employment status example because I’ve done that before several times, went to get second and third jobs to cover my expenses. Sometimes I didn’t even have a second car, I had to ride a bicycle to work just to get there and I never bitched about it. To me that was the kind of thinking that was needed. I don’t feel sorry for a single government worker not getting a paycheck during the government shutdown. I say to them, get another job, pay your bills, and stop complaining. The airlines themselves covered their own security costs before there was ever a unionized TSA organization and it wouldn’t be hard to get back to that mode of thinking.

The fight that Rashida Tiaib is really advocating is essentially for the right to use victimhood as a calling card to the masses who are also functioning below the line to rise up and take over government. But the attitude is a loser one, you could hear it in her voice when she spoke at the bar and in the people cheering. Those weren’t people trying to win at life, those were people cheering for an excuse to remain a loser. Their hatred of Trump isn’t that he’s a bad president, but a good one that is all about setting standards and building value. But losers don’t ever think of the next steps, they only view the world below the line where they seek to join other like-minded losers to justify their lack of ambition by pointing at numbers of similar losers and declaring they are the majority and thus the pace setters for civilization. However, that is not how people think, they want to be winners even if they don’t have the personal courage and below the line thinking only destroys society, it doesn’t build it, and should Rashida ever get what she really desires in an impeachment of President Trump, she will learn rather violently how badly people love winners and hate losers.

Rich Hoffman

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We Should Terminate all 800,000 Government Workers from the Shutdown: All federal labor unions should be illegal

One of the things I’m not going to do anymore is provide an equal argument to the inefficiencies of government, to ponder why they are so slow, inefficient and corrupt when we all know why. So why waste the time? The important elements are in identifying the problem, teaching people why its unacceptable, and correcting the situation for real in the future. And the government shutdown is one of those things that happen from time to time when reality meets the fantasy of government, and no legitimate business person in the world could look at the proposals of government and even suggest sanity. The assumptions made that people care about a government shutdown are preposterous. The rate of pay is also preposterous, many of the 800,000 jobs who are not receiving a pay check over the government shutdown would be eliminated in the private sector due to business needs anyway. Much of the demand is artificial. When I hear Democrats trying to pull on our heart-strings that those 800,000 workers are not able to pay their mortgage or their car payments and that we should be willing to toss away billions of dollars and re-open the government just so they can do so, I hear the efforts at lunacy only. It’s an insane proposal that they are making. The government shouldn’t be opening to accommodate those 800,000 jobs, those jobs should be eliminated. They should seek new jobs in the growing economy and in the private sector. That is the real issue, yet nobody has come close to addressing it.

For so many years on this site I have provided instances where government workers make a lot more than private sector workers, on average. Where CEOs do make millions on occasion, average government workers functioning under a socialist labor union are artificially inflated by their wage rate. True market conditions do not have a say in the matter because the money is stolen from the tax payers and distributed insanely to their work force, who often are extremely inefficient. In private business there is a kind of subculture of what we call “fix it men and women” who go into an organization and straighten them out in all matters of production, and the companies thrive as a result. The current replacement for General Mattis as Defense Secretary is Patrick Shanahan who was a “fix it man” at Boeing. The assumption was that General Mattis, or “Mad Dog” as they were calling him was a far superior candidate because of his military service while Shanahan wouldn’t know what he was doing. In reality the situation is quite the opposite. Private industry experiences where lean manufacturing techniques are applied to increase the efficiency of an enterprise are far better than a military general who learns authority driven process controls and constant yielding to authority, for which politics often is the typical holder of power.

The problem with Mattis turned out that he was a “mad dog” as in he turned out to be a Democrat. You don’t always know this about people until you get to know them but that left leaning political philosophy comes with it inefficiency and apathy by the nature of their existence. It’s easy to talk a good game about how to remove troops from the Middle East or the perpetual war in Afghanistan, but after a few years of no results and asking why, that is when the Democrat side of people come out, such as with terms like “compassion,” “troop strength,” and “we’ll solve the problem next year.” Only government can get away with such below the line thinking, in fact government was entirely constructed to give below the line people a means to make livings and compete in the world. In all my years of doing lots of things with government I seldom find above the line people working among their below the line ranks. OF course, by using such terms I’m referring to The Oz Principle, which is a fairly famous book on business management and the types of people who contribute to productive enterprise, and those who must be overcome.

For days now regarding the government shutdown and the replacement of Mattis as the Secretary of Defense and putting the private industry guru Shanahan in charge, Democrats have continued to insist that we all had an obligation to the inefficiencies of the past, that we shouldn’t even ask if the 800,000 workers missing out on a paycheck during the shutdown were even needed. Of course, they aren’t, we could discharge them tomorrow and nobody would even notice. So why do we have them, just to pay them a pay check? And why are there any government unions attached to these workers saying anything about anything? All government labor unions should be made illegal, immediately. They only drive up the costs to tax payers without any added benefit. A lot of times “fix it” people in private practice have to go into a union shop and break up the command that “the people” have over management and to reinvigorate management to engage with employees in ways that offset the benefits they get from a labor union. It can be tricky business, but the job gets done and organizations most often live happily ever after. But in government no such thing ever occurs. The unions run everything and there is no real management of anything. If there was one thing that people in Washington D.C. really hated about Trump it’s that he is a manager functioning from the White House. Government workers don’t want management or any expectation of success, they just want their overly high paycheck and to use it to live a life of unrewarded excess, meaning they live large, but they didn’t earn that right. Which is how they end up corrupt.

In a book store you can find countless books on how to make business work better, but not a single book on how to make a government job more efficient. That’s because we have allowed the government worker to become insulated from reality. And since they have no competition, they actually think they can stand in front of us and declare how important they are when 800,000 workers are suddenly out of a paycheck and demanding to reopen the government. I would say to them, consider those jobs gone. Those 800,000 should be getting private sector jobs and moving on in life instead of waiting around for the government to reopen. If we really wanted to solve the problem of government inefficiency, we would start behaving in such a way and get rid of these ridiculous labor unions which only exist because the tax payers are forced to fund them due to no other options available. Its like being forced to buy a car from General Motors while the quality is terrible because the employees are smoking pot on every break and don’t care about the product. We have government workers who are just as bad and they are in that 800,000 number, and technically they shouldn’t have a job. Their labor unions have made management of their positions impossible and made them too expensive for what we get in services. And this government shutdown finally reveals the truth of how little we really need them. Which is why Trump needs to hold out for his border wall money. People need to know that all these government positions weren’t really needed to begin with. And instead of reopening the government just so they can get a paycheck, we should eliminate their positions all together. And this is one way to do it.

Rich Hoffman

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No, the Government can Stay Closed: Trump needs to build the wall

It is astonishing how stupid people can be. That they actually thought the Democrat led House would magically wave a wand and all of a sudden, the government would reopen, and the wall debate would be wiped away. That people are that dumb, because some did believe it, should concern us all. Also, one of the big government labor unions is suing President Trump for not getting paid during the shutdown as illegal. So according to the union the only legal option is to always pay government workers even if there is no money? Seriously? Where do these people come from? Where did they go to school? Because they act like they landed here from some other place not understanding how civilization works, the assumptions they make are based on a childlike understanding of the world. In reality the government can shut down forever, and the border wall is a must. Trump can’t and won’t budge on it because it is something that has to be done. And the Democrats don’t have nor will they ever have leverage on the matter. Nobody cares about government workers. They make too much money anyway.

Commentator after commentator on all networks pondered what President Trump was up to in regard to border wall negotiations. It was unfathomable to them that he would actually hold out on reopening the government to get the money from congress. Likely the issue is that they are millennials largely who are used to quick fixes to everything. The idea of a month or six-month budget fight just isn’t in their vocabulary. Then of course many of them also are part of the new borderless world concept which is a trend started by globalists to inspire a one world government of no countries only people in regions. Of course that is a not so clever fantasy of communism where values between different people are ignored and they all serve a central authority, such as the United Nations. In other places in the world it’s not so obvious the difference between one country and another, but on the Mexican/American border the contradictions are bold and obvious. You can’t have a society in need desperately the way Mexico is and put them next to a society of plenty, like America and not expect major problems. It’s not that America wants to deny the people of Mexico the advantages of capitalism. But what matters is that Mexico needs to adopt that philosophy for themselves, not expect a spillover from America for even their most basic needs.

The border wall is basically about showing that difference so that the values are separated. Open looting is not a permissible strategy, yet it is the only strategy of the Mexican government. They can only hope to openly assimilate with the United States because their Marxist revolution has been a dismal failure, so they want open borders to prevent that obvious fact to remain concealed. It’s also about fueling the illegal drug trade to bring American money south and to poison the minds of the American people so that they can be easily conquered. Make no mistake about it, Nancy Pelosi and her open border supporters want the poisoning of American youth to continue through drugs from Mexico. She and they want to fuel that market to growth, not contraction. A border wall would make that effort much harder. Drugs would still get into the country, but not at the level it is presently. Drugs are a major problem in American society, everything from alcohol to cocaine, and the Mexican government delights in seeing so many Americans hooked on a product they produce so that avenues to hide their failed Marxism can remain. To understand the situation, you have to understand the game.

There is absolutely no reason for Trump to compromise with Nancy Pelosi on the border wall funding. The minute this issue is off the table, and the government reopens, the Democrats in the House will launch a barrage of investigations into Trump intended to hammer him out of office by 2020. They don’t care about the government, the border, or the national debt. They only care about trying to get a president in the White House in 2020, so everything they do is to that end. Trump could hold out reopening the government for the next two years hanging it on the Democrats and he’d be just fine. But Nancy and the gang won’t be. Their base of support are all mushy short-term thinkers who expect easy victories. When they see that those victories don’t come, and that people really don’t care about their issues, they will find themselves in a bad position. It is they who have the obligation to negotiate, not President Trump.

It’s one thing to know that people aren’t very smart, or to have watched over time the decline of western civilization as more people have accepted Marxism and communism over time, especially in our university system. Without question we are a fragmented nation in North America. But that’s not a bad thing. We are a republic, not a democracy for this very reason. In America logical thought is given the ability to prevail over the ambitions of the mob and at the essence of it, that is what the border fight is all about. Nancy Pelosi is functioning form a mob mentality hoping to apply peer pressure on President Trump to score an early victory for her House members and to launch their ambitions for 2020 elections. But Trump has all the power in the world to stop that desire. So why wouldn’t he? That is obviously a consideration that none of the pundits on television had been thinking about. Their assumption as it always is was that Trump had the obligation to yield as good Republicans usually do, and to feed the power of mob rule as proposed by Democrats.

There is actually a lot to be revealed by Mitt Romney’s quick challenge to President Trump, trying immediately to put pressure on him to negotiate with the House and to drop the border wall funding issue. That is because Romney wants another crack at running for president and if Trump wins again, he won’t get another chance. But more than that, he is philosophically more aligned with Nancy Pelosi than with President Trump’s GOP. The idea of a borderless world is appealing to them for many reasons. But more than anything, continuing to allow Mexico to loot value off of America gives them power in allowing it. The only people seeking to go from America to Mexico are criminals and tourists looking for some excitement they can’t get in America. You don’t see them crossing the border under machine gun fire. But in Mexico you do, they will go to great measures to get into America. Why? Because what is in America is valuable to them. So why can’t they have those opportunities in Mexico? Because Marxism has ruined their economy and the borderless world advocates want to hide that reality from everyone, and the best way to do that is to mix everyone together before anybody really notices. And that is exactly why there is a border wall fight, and Trump has all the time in the world to hold to it. Because he has the high ground and he’d be crazy to relinquish it. Yet Nancy Pelosi has no time to make her case, the pressure to reopen the government is complete on her, and as the heat cranks up, she won’t be able to handle it. Watch and see!

Rich Hoffman

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Disney Should make another Han Solo Movie: The executives messed up the profit distribution, but the fans liked the film–especially 2 year olds

It’s a shame that Disney mishandled the Star Wars film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, because it’s a pretty good science fiction movie. I have a 2-and-a-half-year-old grandson that loves the movie and wants to watch it over and over again. As a movie it does what its supposed to, it inspires young people to think about complicated engineering and physics problems while they are still conceptual kids framing their entire lives in front of them. Big colorful movies like that particular Star Wars film are great as change agents in our culture for positive outlooks. The movie is by far one of the best Star Wars films in general but unfortunately it looks like it will be the last one. By reading the many articles on a year in review for 2018 Solo: A Star Wars Story was considered a financial bomb by current analytical standards but what I see is a huge campaign by a bunch of screwy Disney executives to save their jobs because it was they who screwed up the movie in the short run. But in the context of history Solo: A Star Wars Story will be one of the better ones and will be remembered for many years to come. Disney if they were smart would make more of them while they can still get the actors.

Problem number one is that movies now are based on international box office results, which means many communist and socialist countries have a say in whether movies do well or not. I would argue that none of the original Star Wars movies or Indiana Jones films for that matter would have done well in a market that considered international box office as a driver of success. To do that a film has to represent all the people of the world in some way, and that isn’t easy to do. It’s an unrealistic expectation for a company like Disney to do it over and over again. In their titles that are directed specifically to children, all children of the world want the same kinds of things, so billion-dollar money makers are more obtainable. But a Star Wars film with mature content in them is a different story. I think the world would have eventually accepted Solo: A Star Wars Story but the ideas of Han Solo are not universally global, they are specifically American—so international markets have a difficult time relating. Disney should have had a longer view of what Solo was and not expected it to perform well on a first run in international markets.

The other thing is that Disney screwed up the Star Wars fan base. First they put out the new films not consistent with the books that fans grew up with—which was a real problem. Then they released The Last Jedi before Solo: A Star Wars Story. If they were going to mess with the formula of Star Wars, they should have given fans the traditional Star Wars story before changing the game on them with The Last Jedi. When Solo: A Star Wars Story came out 6 months after The Last Jedi people were still very angry at the trilogy film that embarked on the further journeys of Rey, Finn and Kylo Ryn. The direction of that film was too drastic, unsatisfying, and way too politically progressive. Not even my two-year-old grandson likes that movie. I have tried to show it to him, but its slow, the action scenes aren’t often enough, and it just has a heavy hand thematically. It’s not light on its feet the way Star Wars movies are supposed to be and it hurts the film. I personally think it’s a pretty good movie with ambitious ideas, but these movies have to realize that it is children who are their target audience, and to stick with it.

A huge mistake that was made in connection to the sequencing of releases was that Disney should not have tried to rush Solo: A Star Wars Story to theaters for a summer release. They should have waited until Christmas. Disney for whatever reason thought that a Mary Poppins sequel was going to be really successful. But as of the turn of the year the film has only made around $100 million domestically. Around $170 million internationally. Those are actually really bad numbers considering Disney wanted to clear the slate for Mary Poppins to do well over the holiday season. Auquaman didn’t do much better which was the other big release. These films aren’t exactly lighting it up at the box office and these are the best that studios are putting out. Disney should have put Solo out over Christmas and the numbers would have been much better. They needed time to repair the Star Wars brand after The Last Jedi and to take away the summer competition which had a lot of really good films to compete with including an Avengers film which soaked up the box office in the previous weekends then had another Jurassic World film hitting a few weeks after Solo. Too many movies and not enough dollars to spend on them all. In a world of such tight competition, people weren’t sure they were ready to see someone besides Harrison Ford play Han Solo, so they went to see other films instead. But that people weren’t ready doesn’t mean the movie was bad, it was just going to take some time to get used to.

I know there are some high-level Disney execs who read here and are curious as to what happened to them in 2018. I tried to tell you guys—don’t make movies at the back of the train, get to the front. Solo was a good movie and you should do more of them. Cut the budget to half what you had in the first film and just let the movies do their thing. Movies like that are change agents which set the industry standards. They don’t always have it built-in where they can make a market splash within two weeks on their way toward a billion dollars. Sometimes it takes people time to figure out that they love a movie and those are the ones that stick around. If you are going to make Star Wars movies look to change the rules of box office acquisition, don’t try to follow them. While we wait for more Star Wars films, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have more movies with Han and Chewie to fill story gaps that will still be fun to watch thirty years from now. Just don’t spend a fortune on them and keep them lean on the business end and let them do their thing. I think Disney would find them to be enormously successful. Just don’t listen to the media critics, they don’t know what they are talking about. Show the films to 2-year olds and if they want to watch them over and over again, then you can know you have a good Star Wars movie. It’s not really any more complicated than that. So don’t make it that way. But you should do it quickly because those actors are getting old, and there are still some great fun stories about Han Chewie and the Millennium Falcon that need to be told.

Rich Hoffman

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Two Bits of Advice in the New Year: The nature of leadership and political parties

I haven’t had a chance yet in a while but I plan to attend a West Chester Township Trustee meeting to confront a lap top loser who has been going around and trying to paint me as some kind of caricature of detriment to the Butler County GOP. This loser actually had some rationalization to indicate that I was the cause of embarrassment to a political party, which is to say a club of people who lend support to each other for elections and the ability to manage local affairs. In truth, anybody would be lucky to know me and unless someone is outperforming me in some manner of life, anything they say is fear-based illusions which brings us to a greater issue which will become a theme for me. Because to really solve problems it’s not enough to just point out where the errors are, you have to change the circumstances that cause those errors and that is something I do at many levels. And the byproduct of that change is usually anger. People thriving off a present system of chaos do not want to change and when someone comes along that represents change of any kind, deep resentments and hostilities always follow. There is nothing new there. If something I’m doing causes consternation among those happy with the way things are there’s usually a good reason. But my personal policy is not to let things go unsettled, and I certainly won’t when challenged by some loser who wants a political party to remain like it has been in the past when its clear improvements are needed in the future.

Whether in politics or business there are many people when groups of activity are considered who function below the line of positive thought and they are the causes of a need for change. It is baffling for instance that anybody would hate Donald Trump as much as they do for president. I had to get gas on New Year’s Eve ahead of 2019 and saw prices had dropped to $1,88. That by itself should be enough for people to love the President, but good performance is not what losers in the world want. Losers in this case are below the line thinkers, people functioning from perpetual negativity. What they fear most in the world is that some motivated person will come along and change everything for them, forcing the bar to be raised in expectations. So good people, since people, smart people, any people who by their very nature force others to improve themselves by default are hated. There is nothing they can do to change that reality because it goes against all the nature of human behavior.

We were all taught incorrectly in our government schools that we should spend a certain amount of time nurturing our relationships with other people no matter how dysfunctional they may be. For most the basic skills they learn in those formative years stay with them the rest of their lives. When there is a problem, they don’t first think how to solve the problem, instead they turn toward the social peer groups for support and whatever needs to be fixed languishes in purgatory waiting for leadership to come along and change the circumstances. But that never happens because leadership is not a group created attribute. Leadership can be channeled through people but it is not created by groups of people. It doesn’t come from the masses, it certainly doesn’t come from political parties. When political parties get together to raise money for a candidate or to strategically put up challengers for an upcoming election, the people participating could be said to be managing their objectives. Leadership happens when someone gives a motivating speech which pulls the objectives of everyone together for a common cause, it doesn’t happen as a default condition of group activity.

But like any group association where the members know the rules and have made sacrifices to their lives to live within them, the last thing they want to hear is that all those rules don’t matter and that some change in the form of leadership is challenging the order they have come to trust as a reality. They fall in love with the rules of conduct in group behaviors not because that conduct is good, but because they have come out on the plus side of it. In elements of the Republican party such as this loser I mention, they want a nice structured political group where the characters at play are controlled, the policies keep a progressive lean to them which has been there since the 1960s in America and any challenge to those assumptions are to be destroyed. For a normal person the value of the relationships in the group are their reason for being a part of the larger organization. But in my case, I just want things to work. So I could care less who says hi to me or who invites me to this or that. I go to things sometimes when invited if there is a good reason to go, but typically I don’t have the time. From my view, the relationships are irrelevant, they don’t do anything for me because I like to see good things happen and that usually means stepping over bad people who are in the way of something, so making friends never is my objective. Surprisingly, such a position makes far more friends than enemies because people like above the line people on an individual basis, but they find them repulsive in regards to group objectives.

As we step into yet another year, I have decided I’m not going to sugar coat little things like the criticisms that come from losers functioning from faulty positions when change is needed from a current approach. Regarding the GOP in Butler County I have watched many positive changes occur over the last decade and the results have made it better. Not just better for me, but better as a tactical political party. It doesn’t matter to me who gets mad in the process because making friends is not the objective, being successful is, and if losers think they can continue to contaminate success, they are living in a world that will be crashing down around them.

I gave two bits of advice to people on New Year’s Eve that are helpful to any general readership, the first is that no I’m not planning to run for office when there are lots of fun things to do in business at my particular age. Politics is something I consider serving the business world, so why would I do something in the service industry, because that’s what politics is. They certainly are rulers who give power to the office holders, and all too often that is how politicians view themselves, and would like to continue. But that’s not how it is. The other thing I said was that if you are the best at something you should never have to look over your back at those seeking an opportunity to ankle bite you out of existence. If you are the best who cares what other people are doing? If you really want to be successful you should never pay attention to what other people are doing. The moment you do care, is the moment that losers start controlling your life, and there are a lot of them. They were the ones who invented many of the problems of our modern age, because they have hidden the solution to problems within the limits of peer pressure. But if you are a person who excels in the things you do, there is nothing good that can come out of such a relationships. So why yield to it. The answer is, you don’t.

Rich Hoffman

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The Buccaneers Fired Dirk Koetter and the Bengals Finally Fired Marvin Lewis: To win you have to get rid of a problem, especially in areas of management

One of the reasons I am still a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan after many seasons of losing is because the organization as ran by the Glazer family is always on a quest to find the right combination of coaching to match with the players they have on the field to be victorious. If they fall short, they do not hesitate to fire their coaches such as they did Sunday afternoon at the end of their season after losing to the Atlanta Falcons. Dirk Koetter had been with the team for three years but it was obvious with all the weapons the Bucs had on the field to use that the coaches just didn’t have an approach, and they ended the season with just five wins, most of them coming at the beginning. I thought Dirk Koetter was a pretty good guy, not the worst coach in the world, but even after victories after he’d hand out game balls to star players, there was something not quite right about him, and that surely turned up on the field. The Bucs organization is quick to determine that someone is working out and they fire them when its apparent that things just aren’t going to change which is precisely why I continue to love the Tampa Bay Buccaneer organization as a whole. They may not win every game, but at least they try to.

That is why the Bengals in Cincinnati should have terminated their relationship with Marvin Lewis years ago. The guy just doesn’t get it. They have stuck with him for 16 lackluster seasons and the results have never been good. He should have been fired many years ago because it was disrespectful to the Bengals fans who pay premium money for the NFL experience to expect them to put up with Marginal Marvin for so long. The resentment was obvious at the stadium even under the best of circumstances. I had gone to the game this year with good club seat tickets to watch Tampa Bay play the Bengals in Cincinnati on a beautiful October day just before Halloween. It was an absolutely perfect day for the NFL experience in a big city with real playoff implications, because at the time both teams were in the hunt. And the Bengals won that day so everyone should have been happy. But virtually everyone from the vendors selling beer to the men in the restroom talking to each other about the game across urinals were talking about how they were surprised that Marvin Lewis hadn’t found a way to blow the game. Any kind of respect for Marvin Lewis had left Cincinnati a long time ago, yet Mike Brown had stuck with him perpetually with no end in sight.

In any kind of successful organization, you can’t be trigger happy either. You have to give a new coach time to implement a change culture of winning from losing, and that should take a year or two. But in the NFL fans are the ones paying the bills, its unrealistic to expect them to put up with a bad team for more than a few years and still retain their season ticket packages. A lot of people say that Mike Brown doesn’t care about such things so long as he has a profitable television contract which I find hard to believe. As a businessman of any kind it is stupid to leave any money on the table and you don’t get to be as rich as the Brown family is by being stupid. I just don’t think they know what they are doing as football people. The father Paul Brown did understand, but his family didn’t and it shows.

The Bengals have been living in the past, they have had a couple of Superbowl appearances in the 1980s but nothing since and they are hanging their hat on that one achievement. Meanwhile the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Superbowl back in 2003 for a great 2002 season which had been many years in the making. But that was then, the world we live in is very much a what have you done for me lately reality. While at that Bengals game I wore my 2002 Superbowl victory hat for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and people kept saying to me that it was silly to wear that hat because it was a long time ago. I would then say to them with friendly banter that I would be happy to wear the Bengals Superbowl victory hat if they could get me one. Of course, that was when laughter from both sides exploded at the absurdity of it. But why should it be absurd?

The NFL is designed to give every city with an NFL team a shot at victory. I view much of the NFL structure as an entirely socialist enterprise where winners are penalized, and losers are boosted up, particularly in regard to draft picks. But this is because the goal of the NFL is to sell tickets and merchandise and if a team doesn’t make it to the big dance at least once a decade their fan base cools it in regard to spending. People generally support their home town team, but they don’t necessarily dream of a new football jersey for Christmas for a losing team. They want to at least thing that there is a chance at victory. Those are the basics of business. Yet in Cincinnati we have been asked to put up with losing as a reality and that goes against so many raw emotions for which the NFL experience depends. To stick with a coach like Marvin Lewis for so long because he’s a nice guy, which he is, or because he’s a progressive employment option that earns street credibility with the very progressive NFL isn’t enough to justify what they have asked fans to endure. You don’t keep a coach because of being nice or black, but because they win. That is the only objective in playing professional football—winning.

I would love to cheer on the Cincinnati Bengals. But I will always love the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and will spend quite a lot of money flying down to a game or two from time to time to blow many thousands of dollars on the Tampa economy because the Glazer family are always trying to do what they have to do to win. If the Bucs don’t win a single game in the whole season, I will still cheer them on. It didn’t surprise me at all that just a few hours after losing to Atlanta that Dirk Koetter was terminated as the head coach. It would have surprised me if he hadn’t been fired. But after the Bengals lost against the dreaded Steelers, YET AGAIN, it wouldn’t have surprised me if the Bengals had signed Lewis to a 150 year contract extension—but under tremendous public pressure, they finally fired Marvin Lewis. Because the Bengals have become synonymous to losers, and that is a terrible thing to bestow on a city that has supported that team through many years of lackluster performance. It’s a terrible disrespect to a community that doesn’t deserve it and I do feel sorry for Bengal fans. At least for me I can look forward to positive changes in the Buccaneer organization which gives me hope for an upcoming season of victory. That season may be over by the upcoming October, but at least they are trying. The Bengals are like drunken gamblers who have lost their life savings at a slot machine. They just keep pulling the lever and hoping for a new car. But all they ever get are lemons. Hopefully their next coach will be a real one.

Rich Hoffman

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What Trump has in Common with ‘The Shape of Water’: learning the nature of villians and the hopes of the good

What we are seeing isn’t specific to a particular political party or even a specific point in time. I can say that it’s always been something I have been keenly aware of. I remember as a little kid staying up way too late to watch the Academy Awards in 1983 to see if E.T. The Extraterrestrial would win Best Picture and feeling terribly deflated when Gandhi won instead. That’s when I learned the hard way that institutions are not in pursuit of goodness, but the status quo in almost every category because it allows the people working within those organizational frameworks to live modest, safe lives seldom challenged by any exceptional expectations. I was actually blown away and physically sick that E.T. failed to win Best Picture. Clearly there wasn’t any justice in the world as at that time I only ever wanted to be a film director when I grew up. In the year prior, I had gone through the same ceremonial castigation, Raiders of the Lost Ark was poised to win Best Picture and lost to the film Chariots of Fire. Something was very wrong and now almost 40 years later I sat watching the Academy Awards knowing full well there was a major liberal spin to the whole show, which is why I wasn’t a film director and no longer had a desire to be, when The Shape of Water won best picture essentially because it featured a female hero, she had nude scenes in it including masturbation, but in most other respects was a modern update to E.T. It was a stunning revelation that remained consistently bad, and points to a much deeper, darker problem.

And in so many ways, even in the serious world of politics, we are seeing the same thing that went on with E.T. at the Academy Awards in 1982 and 1983, happening now with the FBI and Justice Departments of the Obama Administration playing the same role. Even though I would argue that The Shape of Water could have easily have been made without the sex and nudity, or the F words in a film that children would have benefited from seeing in the theaters, the government agent in the film was wonderfully representative of the kind of parasitic order for which those modern institutions function. Richard Strickland in that film epitomized the ambitions of institutional control and in maintaining an order where the exceptional are locked away and tortured so that the stagnant expectations of below the line thinking could remain unchallenged. In that way The Trump administration under the direction of the FBI and DOJ were treated as the amphibious creature from The Shape of Water, tortured just for being there and seeking to be destroyed because the potential for life changing inspiration was something that institutions couldn’t allow to happen otherwise, they’d all be expected to increase their expectations for their own lives by default.

The crimes against not only Trump but against his supporters, most of whom are just as innocent as my 13-year-old self-staying up on a school night to hope beyond hope that justice would give the movie E.T. The Extraterrestrial the Best Picture award, are profound. There is so much more to the story than just the sad attempts at using the law as a weapon to beat down inspiring change, but in the abundant mechanisms for which all institutions function to preserve their salty ambitions anchored to the ground well below any above the line expectations. The corruption in society as a whole was deeper than any ocean on earth and the hopes and dreams of all mankind had been tossed to the bottom and kept their by the hostile depths too hard to dive by any mechanical means, or even the yearnings of the superhuman efforts, because sharks of every kind protect that bar from ever being raised to a level where the masses might ever be expected to perform from the merits of goodness.

A world where an Academy Award is given to a film that features a woman masturbating in a bathtub “a lot” is the same world castigating Trump for wanting to build a border wall, to create a dividing line between value and a lack of value, between a capitalist culture that has expectations of performance and a socialist one that informs people to not stick their heads up too high otherwise they will be beat down in response. That same world looks at Melania Trump and endlessly criticizes everything she wears and how she wears it but when Michelle Obama wears boots on national television that would make the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz blush, she is hailed as an expert on fashion. The reason is that the static order doesn’t want little girls to grow up to be like Melania, a woman who is as close to a perfect “10” as anybody might find in our current culture. But to be like Michelle Obama, an average looking woman filled with personality flaws and genetic mutations. Melania is attacked because she is too good, she as a change agent has raised the level of expectation among the voting population and the institutions are not happy about it.

Many years later I realized that instead of trying to make things work as a film director in a liberal town that certainly didn’t want to deal with a midwestern conservative that I’d turn toward business. When I was paid a salary instead of an hourly wage to officially announce that I was no longer just a floor worker, the expectations were quite severe on me to work within the parameters of a static order. I typically had always worked 12 hours a day or more but now that I was working with as a salaried member of management—and this was many years ago—but I was supposed to assume a certain order of conduct understanding that I work only what I was paid for. And salary people were only paid for 8.5 hours of their work day. So at precisely 5 PM I was expected to drop everything and go home. But when I didn’t do that and instead continued to work as I always had, until 7 PM or even 8 PM the other salaried staff were very angry with me. They would watch closely what time I clocked in and when I clocked out and eventually built up the courage to ask me why I was trying to make them look bad. My answer of course that I wasn’t, and that if they looked bad it’s because they weren’t willing to fulfill the parameters of expectation for which production required. Well, those were fighting words and long rivalries filled with animosity percolated from that time on, yet I never changed my behavior because I was simply not going to surrender my capability to the Academies out there that would pick Gandhi over E.T. or the FBI over President Trump. Those were simply not options.

The case against Trump isn’t about justice, or even politics—its about expectation. Trump as a change agent is being attacked to preserve the right of below the line thinking that has defined Washington D.C. culture in general and politics specifically. Much the way the sea creature in The Shape of Water was tortured and abused just for existing, Trump represents a raising of the bar for all future expectation, and the static order has demanded his destruction with all the animated ambition as Richard Strickland. The world cannot hold both characters, and traditionally the good have been beat down so that the bad do not have to rise to any occasions. And that is a dark little secret that continues to permeate all our lives, and the yearning to change it is certainly there. Even the Academy of Arts and Sciences can be touched by such hopes even if the medicine to make it go down are sex scenes and nudity. But the showdown between Trump and the FBI is not about legalisms, it’s about the hopes and dreams of all mankind, and that battle is happening right now. And for the first time in history, hope is winning out over stagnation, and that is very interesting to watch for me. I am rooting for hope and increased expectations, perhaps this time the villains won’t win.

Rich Hoffman

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The Great Visionary President Trump: Causing his enemies to continue throwing themselves against rocks and over cliffs

It is time to have this discussion, most of our political order in the United States has been defined by idiots, everything from the lowly school board member to the President of the United States. Dumb, inefficient people have been inserted into these jobs by fools who don’t really know what they are doing. That is why it is totally ridiculous that these same people are trying to define what a successful president looks like in modern times, and that Trump to them is some kind of buffoon. Let me make something quite clear about Trump and other CEO types who come from private business and have been previously very successful as branding change agents from their own organizations, their genius is not in what they physically do, its in how they can take complex topics and bring them down to one- or two-line vision statements. In that regard President Trump will go down in history as the greatest president the United States ever experienced. Vision statements for a lot of people are one of the most difficult things to do because they lack the intelligence and imagination to do them, but Trump is great at them and that is precisely why he can do so much more with less.

Much of the world is very confused about the nature of leadership, they foolishly confuse it with management which is to say that processes are what inspire people. That is why critics of President Trump believe that a Chief of Staff or a Secretary of State are such important characters in an administration. Yet the White House is the people’s house and if its occupant can take complicated matters and communicate them to the people who really are supposed to run the government, the voters, then all that management formality is for nothing. Trump and his Tweets are the best thing to come from the modern age because it has allowed a great leader and communicator in Trump to articulate directly to voters the matters of great complication which normally befuddle most people, and it unifies the vision productively for the country.

The enemies of these methods are those of course who benefit from the current system of chaos. They like the old management structure because somewhere in their past they were taught by institutions that such things were flowed through processes of bureaucracy not through the raw leadership of simplicity. They were taught that to be successful you make lots of paperwork and coordinate lots of people through procedural interpretation rather than to rally behind the abilities of a great leader to break down complicated matters into a few sentences of vision. This is a common trait of all visionaries from Walt Disney to George Lucas, Donald Trump whether or not people like him is a great visionary and that is why the Trump Organization is such a good one. The value in Trump is not whether or not he has had affairs with women as a billionaire playboy, or whether he was a great WWE promoter at his casinos, what matters is that he was and continues to be a great leader who can simplify messaging to the masses with relative ease. If you took Trump out of the White House and put him in charge of General Motors, or Microsoft, he would be instantly successful in those companies because he can produce effective visions to all the employees involved. Most successful people have these traits, but they are rather uncommon among our population because the ability is not something that is taught well in our scholastic environments, but is an innate ability nurtured through unique character traits.

If you went to all the modern top companies, from Amazon to Pixar Entertainment you’d find similar traits among their leadership, the ability to provide vision statements to their employees which unify the efforts of the organization. In private practice we see such examples of leadership emerge out of market necessity. But in politics we have allowed and in some cases insisted on some old broken European model of aristocracy among political leaders that is not conducive to reality. Such as in Nancy Pelosi leaving Washington D.C. during a government shut down and taking a vacation in Hawaii. She is apparently clueless as to how the optics of such a thing is providing a very negative vision statement to her own party and their ability to negotiate with Trump over the border wall. She’s not even playing in the same league as Trump who stayed in Washington D.C. and continued to work through the Holiday season gaining the high ground in the matter and providing vision statements to the public that no Democrat will be able to overcome. Nancy Pelosi and her new congress will return with their standardized agenda driven by process and discover that they have no answer for the leadership Trump has already provided and they’ll stay on their heels for most of 2019 before crushing themselves under the weight of their own stupidity once they start throwing candidates for the 2020 run for presidency in the mix. They will all fail because they do not have Trump’s ability to create vision statements.

When you have raw leadership ability you do not have to have read the most books in the room, you don’t even need to be the smartest person. Intelligence contrary to popular opinion does not increase by the amount of people added to the decision-making process. The ability to create a good one liner in the form of a vision statement is far more valuable to team building than a whole room of Harvard MBAs working on a problem. All the Harvard people may be smart, but they lack leadership in its raw form. A bunch of smart people are useless if they can’t communicate what they need to do to the masses clearly so others can follow. In the rock, paper, scissors game of management hierarchy, the ability to produce vision statements is far more important than the ability to manage 10,000 people through procedural implementation. A president who can do such a thing doesn’t need a Chief of Staff or other traditional positions because he can do a lot more with less just because of the raw leadership ability of providing clear vision statements to his followers.

That is specifically why Trump is succeeding and his political enemies are just fumbling over themselves like the coyote in a classic Road Runner cartoon, or Bugs Bunny confronting the villainy of the Tasmanian Devil. Trump has the unique ability to make complex matters seem digestible and that is why he has been successful and why no matter what he does, success is there for him. It’s not luck or some magic power given from the gods, it’s just raw leadership ability in the form of powerful vision statements, such as “if you’re going to be thinking, it might as well be big.” In the role of a Commander and Chief it is obvious that the hope of the Founding Fathers was always to have someone from American society filling the presidential role like Donald Trump, but so far very few have made it through the political process to arrive at such a lofty height untouched by procedural corruption. But Trump did make it, and we should all be thankful. Because of his ability America is really thriving and there isn’t anything his political enemies can do about it. The harder they try, the more spectacularly they fail. Road Runner would be proud of Donald Trump, he is making all his enemies look as dumb as the Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons. And the funny thing is, they keep doing it to themselves over and over again, because they don’t understand why President Trump is so successful. That is precisely why they keep launching themselves into a cliff face, or crushing themselves with a giant rock. Because they lack the natural leadership ability of a visionary, and they have nobody even close who call themselves Democrats. And that is truly funny.

Rich Hoffman

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