Trump's Road To Damascus Moment

This is a bragging post, how I was right all along in numerous venues, if not in a full-blown post, about what would happen to the US-Russia relations if Trump was elected.  I said repeatedly that Trump's naive admiration for Putin would get disappointed at some point, and when that happened he could flip to the other extreme and become very anti-Putin anti-Russia.  It now seems that this has happened, ironically over Syria.  However, the title of this post refers to Saint Paul and how he went from persecuting Christians to being their biggest leader after a dramatic moment on the road to Damascus, literally the road to Damascus from Jerusalem.  So, for whatever reason, the Syrian chemical weapons attack seems to have provided that Road to Damascus moment for Trump, who only a week earlier had been declaring that we were just fine with Assad staying in power.

Having made my point, I am going to call out all those foolish people who loudly declared that Trump would be better than Hillary because she was this awful neocon who would drag us into a war with Russia, especially in Syria. I always granted that she looked more hawkish than Obama, whose policy looked not to unreasonable despite all the terrible things that have happened in Syria (sorry, but I see no policy that would have substantially changed that).  But at least with her we knew where she stood, and it was pretty clear that Putin and Assad would not view her as some sort of patsy whom they could start pulling all sorts of stunts like using chemical weapons around.  Indeed, with her hawkis rep she might even have been able to pull a Nixon Goes to China sort of deal, although maybe not.  I never said that would necessarily happen.  But I also always thought that we would not have some foolish sudden flip to being super anti-Putin.  She knew him and he knew her, and they did not like each other.  But there would be no fooling around.

Anyway, there were an awful lot of people in the econoblogosphere, "ilsm" stands out in particular, who sometimes comments here but more often at Economists View and Angry Bear, who focused on this particular issue to either not support HRC or to outright support Trump, which was the case with ilsm repeatedly, and who was still praising Trump for some time after his inauguration, although he seems to have gone somewhat quiet recently.  In any case, if you reading this were among those people who spouted this nonsense, especially if you outright supported Trump, you should be ashamed of yourselves.  You were wrong, wrong, wrong, and I said you would be many times.

Barkley Rosser