"Sinner though he may be, Donald Trump is this generation's incarnation of John Bunyan's pilgrim, writes David P. Goldman. Like a character from Sinclair Lewis or Frank Capra, he stands as a lone wolf ready to avenge the injustices of globalization"
The protagonists of American popular culture are outsiders with scant patience for authority. The Western heroes invented by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour and portrayed by William S. Hart or John Wayne, and their urban cousins – the private detectives of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler – play loose with the law and play dirty with the opposition, but they have an inviolable inner code. They don’t betray their friends and they don’t exploit the weak. They don’t aspire to entry into the elites, and they don’t apologize for their vulgarity. They come in comic form, for example Huckleberry Finn, or nastily serious, like William Munny in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, or a bit of both in Hammett’s wise-cracking angel of vengeance, the Continental Op." . . .
. . . A three-star general who won’t be bullied by his superiors into lying
for political reasons is a moral and intellectual giant next to the
mandarins of the Central Intelligence Agency, who got virtually
everything wrong during the past twenty years. Give Gen. Flynn time
to settle into his job. He has brought some very bright people into
senior staff positions, and in my prediction will be far more effective
than Condoleezza Rice during the Bush 43 administration – not to
mention the miserable Susan Rice, whose appointment as National
Security Advisor was a bad joke." . . .
