Henry Kissinger. You can’t get more establishment than this. You can’t be more suspected by conspiracy theorists of being the ultimate insider who pulls those hidden levers and makes the clandestine plans in closeted meetings of the Bilderberg Club that are hermetically sealed from the prying eyes and unwanted ears of the media and public.
Kissinger, who is decried as a war criminal by lefties around the world for knowing too much about the 1973 coup that removed Marxist Salvador Allende from Chile, was not just secretary of state and national security advisor to President Richard Nixon; he’s been a source of foreign policy expertise and advice for every president since – even Jimmy Carter sought his counsel during the hostage crisis in Iran. He might not have brokered a permanent ceasefire in the Middle East but at least he won a Nobel Peace Prize for fostering enhanced global stability and not inciting a third world war.
He’s in his nineties now and he continues to fascinate as both an individual who never hesitated from expressing an opinion and some who stated with an transcendent air, that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Kissinger wasn’t expressing any sexual wisdom on Sunday but he was a guest on that old mainstream media staple, “Face the Nation,” sounding like a convinced Trump believer. He called the president-elect a “phenomenon,” (wow), a potentially “considerable president” (amazing!) with “extraordinary opportunities” (earth-shaking!).
Kissinger admitted that he hadn’t always carried such an abundance of goodwill for Trump – having dismissed Mr. Republican Upset of 2016 as a billionaire grandstander or a “transitory phenomenon.” Now Kissinger has appraised him as at least a semi-permanent phenomenon.
Which makes you wonder when the rest of the fence-sitters are going to allow Trump the opportunity he apparently won on election night – to be a sitting president of the United States. As the Elect College meets Monday, there are still a sizable number of NeverTrumpers – a fractured but virtually omniscient group that includes a once-brilliant, but now just bitter, political columnist George Will and the shrill feminist observers on The View. They have one political wish – that has become a virtual psychopathic obsession – that the electors will have a sort of Democratic Damascus Experience today as they cast their votes: they will realize that Trump is unqualified, that the voters of their state have been duped by some sort of mass hypnosis, and that they, as electors, have but one palatable choice: to vote for John Kasich!
Besides, faded 1970s television star Mike Farrell, has assured us, in one of the more absurd political ads ever to implode in prime time, that by deserting Trump these courageous electors will earn his respect. Never mind the public opprobrium they will also achieve by recklessly and flagrantly ignoring the will of the people.
Yes, I know President Barack Obama is enjoying another segment of his almost unbroken passage of leisure time – from frequent trips to constant golfing – and he might be a tad more detached than usual from the hurly burly of governance. But it might be more than appropriate for the outgoing president, who after all, appeared so willing to extol hitherto undetected talents and expertise in Trump when the two first met following the election.
Maybe it’s time to tell the Electoral College watchers, the protesters in the streets attempting to reverse history through a willful and often violent contempt for reality and the Clintons themselves that the election is over and decided. Republicans who thought the end was imminent with Obama’s election were willing to respect the decision of the voters and the reality of history eight years ago.
It’s not that much of an expectation that NeverTrumpers should act accordingly today.
Follow David on Twitter @DavidKrayden