Man­ners may “maketh the man”, but words dis­tin­guish leadership.
A few hours before the U.S. raid into Venezuela, I watched “The Dark­est Hour”, which ends with Sir Win­ston Churchill’s speech, that  Edward R. Mur­row encap­su­lat­ed as: “He mobi­lized the Eng­lish lan­guage and sent it into battle.”

The speech is best known for its clar­i­on call: “We shall fight on the beaches….we shall nev­er surrender…”
Churchill “… pre­sent­ed a fac­tu­al and rea­soned case, pro­vid­ed the pub­lic with new infor­ma­tion and, cru­cial­ly, pro­vid­ed them with the con­text nec­es­sary to under­stand it.”
Don­ald Trump’s ver­sion of that was to describe the Venezuela oper­a­tion as “…one of the most stun­ning, effec­tive and pow­er­ful dis­plays of Amer­i­can mil­i­tary might and com­pe­tence in Amer­i­can history”
On one lev­el, that’s fair com­ment. It did, after all, require: B‑1B Lancer bombers; F‑22 Rap­tors, F‑35 Light­ing II, and F/A‑18 Super Hor­net fight­ers, EA-18 Growler elec­tron­ic attack planes, E‑2 Hawk­eye ear­ly warn­ing air­craft, var­i­ous intel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance  air­craft, drones, an air­craft car­ri­er and sundry oth­er war­ships to kid­nap a man (and his wife) whose own armed forces were either so inef­fec­tu­al or sus­pect that he employed Cuban body­guards.Trump described it as “…like I was watch­ing it on a tele­vi­sion  And if you would have seen the speed, the vio­lence. You know that they say the speed, the vio­lence.” and added that Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro had been “bum rushed” to a wait­ing helicopter.
At the risk of sound­ing churl­ish, that’s videogame-ising, as opposed to mobil­is­ing the Eng­lish language.
His lat­er agree­ment of  “kid­napped”  as an apt descrip­tion of it, puts Trump in inter­est­ing com­pa­ny: Latin Amer­i­can and Hait­ian gangs, Sicil­ian ban­dits and Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ist groups in Nige­ria, the ones he threat­ened to go after with “guns blaz­ing” to erad­i­cate and save “our beloved Chris­tians”  (pre­sum­ably the ones who bought his Bibles).
Blaz­ing guns turned out to be more than 16 Tom­a­hawk mis­siles on tar­gets in Soko­to State, on the oppo­site side of the coun­try from the mil­i­tant group in Nige­ria with the best- doc­u­ment­ed links to the Islam­ic State .
A few days lat­er in anoth­er state uniden­ti­fied gun­men abduct­ed civil­ians and stu­dents from a Catholic school.

                         TAKEOVERS-R-US

The recur­ring theme in Trump’s clar­i­fi­ca­tions of the Venezuela TV show is telling and dubi­ous at the same time. “We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have tak­en back a long time ago.”
The oil being under Venezue­lan soil, by any eth­i­cal mea­sure, “take back” is a euphemism for steal.
The thought process­es that don’t recog­nise that are con­sis­tent with what pass­es for ora­to­ry in MAG­A­land; incom­plete ideas expos­tu­lat­ed in inco­her­ent sen­tences, punc­tu­at­ed by lies enveloped in a vapour of anger and resentment.
The lat­ter char­ac­teris­es even those in his orbit who do speak actu­al Eng­lish. The weird­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of empa­thy defi­cien­cy in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is White House Deputy Chief of Staff (or per­haps more accu­rate­ly, Trump Manip­u­la­tor in Chief) Stephen Miller, who told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is gov­erned by strength, that is gov­erned by force, that is gov­erned by power.”
Thus did Miller offi­cial­ly add the U.S. to the “We-Have-a-Right-to-Rule-What­ev­er-We-Say-We-Have-a-Right-To” axis:  Chi­na (Tai­wan), Rus­sia (Ukraine), and  Israel (Gaza and the Occu­pied West Bank) .
Trump’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for his actions and cov­ets are as inchoate as his rhetoric.
Hav­ing pro­claimed that the U.S. Navy had Venezuela “sur­round­ed”, he told reporters on Air Force One: “Green­land is cov­ered with Russ­ian and Chi­nese ships all over the place.”
Actu­al­ly, 80 per­cent of Green­land is cov­ered with  ice, which makes it the sec­ond largest ice mass in the world, after  Antarctica.
Trump’s patent igno­rance of both Green­land and its peo­ple is evi­dent in Miller’s sim­plis­tic, to say noth­ing of hubris­tic remark that “the for­mal posi­tion of the US gov­ern­ment is that Green­land should be part of the US.” 

For what it’s worth, my per­cep­tion of Green­land can be found by click­ing here.
Noth­ing in Greenland’s his­to­ry sug­gests bul­ly­ing or threats will induce its inhab­i­tants to meek­ly hand over sov­er­eign­ty of a place they have lived in, against all the odds of Nature, for millennia.
Win­ston Churchill is uni­ver­sal­ly hailed as one of history’s great­est ora­tors, not least because of his abil­i­ty to use words to inspire and moti­vate people.
Obfus­ca­tion, igno­rance, inco­her­ence, self-aggran­dis­e­ment and videogame-speak aren’t even com­pet­i­tive when it comes to earn­ing respect, or even comprehension.
It  would be more than unfair to expect Don­ald Trump, or any oth­er politi­cian to come close to emu­lat­ing Churchill.
But it should be clear by now that when it comes to main­tain­ing allies,  and respect, Churchillian rhetoric trumps Trumpian.

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