A Trump Landslide in November?

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina – First, we would like to thank you, dear reader, for your many words of encouragement, sympathy, and pity.

We read the Mailbag every day. [Scroll down for today’s batch.] We’re sorry we cannot respond, but we get ideas… thoughts… suggestions.

Many readers have offered helpful thoughts on how to run the ranch more profitably… or how to get more water… or how to make the electrical system function better.

We can’t implement all these suggestions… but we listen!

Objective Reality

After spending three weeks with objective truth at the ranch, we are now forced to return to the world of myths, delusions, and claptrap.

Yes… we are in Buenos Aires looking at a TV!

And there they are… talking about the world of politics, money, culture… the world of Facebook and CNBC… of Trump and Clinton… of ZIRP and NIRP… and of Game of Thrones.

Some people don’t believe in objective reality. Descartes, for example. “I think, therefore I am,” he said, famously.

But he would have existed whether he thought or not. It wasn’t because he thought that he existed; it was the other way around. At least, we think so.

That is why we like life at the ranch. We don’t have time for Descartes.  Objective reality presses against us like a fearful cow in the manga.

The sun. The wind. The drought. It hardly matters what you think. You have to live with it… adapt to it… and protect yourself from it.

When a bull charges you, or your horse throws you, it doesn’t matter what you think; whether you are a Republican or a Democrat… a Roman Catholic or a Buddhist… a prescriptivist or a descriptivist. You just have to do what you have to do.

But back in the more sophisticated, more civilized, more modern and technologically advanced world… it is all moonshine.

The bull is cut into pieces and sold at the meat counter. What matters is subjective reality. What we think is, often, what we get.

Extravagant Confections

Take the U.S. presidential primaries, for example.

Elections are real. But they wouldn’t exist if we stopped believing in them.

They are features of subjective reality… extravagant confections created by the human mind. Without our collective thoughts, we would have no elections… no candidates… no government… no president… nobody to tell us what to do.

The whole idea of it is monumentally blockheaded. Millions of people stand in line to cast their votes for someone whom almost none of them really knows, whose policies few of them understand, which may or may not be pursued, and with consequences that are usually unknowable.

Then, the person chosen by this process gets to tell us what to do!

The voters elect a man who pledges to keep them out of war; the next thing you know, he’s sending the “doughboys” to Europe.

Then, learning nothing from the experience, they put his son into the White House – a “fiscal conservative” who promises a “humble” foreign policy. A few years later, you turn around and find he’s run up the biggest deficits… and gotten us into the longest and second most expensive war in U.S. history.

The system is so riddled with preposterous hallucinations and outrageous conceits that it needs the “willing suspension of disbelief” on the part of practically every sentient human being in the nation to hold it up.

If they ever caught onto what a scam and a farce it is, the whole thing would fall down in a heap. There is no objective reality to it. It is all “lies, lies, lies,” as Republican frontrunner Donald Trump would say.

Trump Landslide?

“Trump is amazing,” began a conversation with a group of Americans last night.

“I thought the polls showed Hillary winning by a landslide,” we replied, a bit behind the news cycle.

“Want to bet?”

At our table of six Americans, at least four were so sure that Trump would take the White House that they were willing to put money on it.

“Look, a lot of his program is amateurish and silly. But he understands the soul of the American people much better than Hillary. Just wait until he starts going after her.

“Hillary has never had a job. She has a long history of corruption. She has no idea what life is like for ordinary Americans. And those Sanders voters… they’re never going to go for Hillary. Hillary is an insider, through and through. The Sanders voters, like Trump voters, want an outsider.

“And there are now as many millennials as there are baby boomers. The boomers may go for Hillary. She’s safe. She’s practically the definition of the Establishment. She’ll protect Social Security and free pills.

“But the millennials know the system is screwing them. They will have to pay for it… to keep us old f**** living in the style to which we’ve become accustomed.”

Addicted to Illusions

Hillary is the Deep State candidate. Mr. Trump’s relationship to the Deep State has yet to be determined.

All we know for sure is that his recent foreign policy speech must have upset the neo-con empire builders, the beribboned pencil pushers at the Pentagon, the think-tank heroes, and New World Order enforcers.

Mr. Trump said, in effect, he could turn the country’s attention back to its own interests.

“America first,” Trump says, echoing a foreign policy theme not heard for half a century. “After Reagan, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which ended in one foreign policy disaster after another.”

The elite won’t like that. They caused those disasters. They profited from them. They want them to go on.

The elite depend on the illusions of the system – especially, the scammy, credit-backed dollar – for the objective reality of their jobs, their wealth, their reputations and power.

They won’t give up easily.

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for Bonner and Partners

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