Lee Smith's seminal The Strong Horse: Politics, Power and the Clash of Arab Civilizations  (2010) explains how the Arab world typically follows the leader with the most strength and power, i. e. the strong horse.

This proclivity for the powerful does not restrict itself to the Middle East, however.  Xi Jinping these days is a pretty strong horse.  Nor does it even restrict itself to dictators.  Winston Churchill may have been the strongest horse of the last hundred years, having led the allies from the brink of defeat to victory in World War II, sometimes through sheer force of will.

Now it's Donald Trump's turn.

Russia, China, Syria, Iran, North Korea, among other countries and non-state actors, not to mention a whole host of domestic foes, have all aligned themselves against him (and consequently America) in various degrees.

At the same time, an investigation into his inner circle threatens to sweep up virtually everyone from his personal lawyer to his son while his adversaries chortle.

But these adversaries, ambitious and vengeful as they are, have little idea of the chaos that will ensue in this country should Trump fall, the ruptures that will occur.

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What helped elect Trump was a collective weariness with demands put on a country $20 trillion in debt. America is currently running a $57 billion a month trade deficit.

The poverty of inner-city Detroit, or rural Central California, or West Virginia does not suggest an endlessly opulent nation, at least as a visitor might conclude from visiting Manhattan, Chevy Chase, or Presidio Heights.

Universities and colleges have taken for granted that they can count on massive federal student loan subsidies to increase vastly the number of administrators, pay for an expanding apparat of politicized and nonteaching staff, increase tuition beyond the rate of inflation and not dare to be held accountable for dismal graduation rates, poorly educated graduates, or ossified systems of tenure.

For all this and so very much more, what cannot go on won’t.  We have reached the limits of our patience.

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Obama owns the disaster in Syria in a way that no one else does. Three of his policies intersected to cause the bloodshed, devastation and horrors there.

1. The Iraq Withdrawal
2. The Arab Spring
3. The Iran Deal

Obama’s Iraq withdrawal turned the country over to Iran and ISIS. The tensions between the Shiite puppet regime in Baghdad (which Obama insisted on backing) and the Sunni population created a cycle of violence that reduced the country to a bloody civil war between Shiite militias and Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The collapse of the multicultural Iraqi army allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq to seize huge swathes of territory. And ISIS and Iran began carving up Iraq into their own ethnically cleansed dominions.

Iraq’s civil war spread to Syria. Initially Obama backed the Sunni Brotherhood militias. These groups represented themselves as free, secular and democratic. They were actually nothing of the kind.

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Russia’s economy was smaller than that of Texas even before the latest and most lethal sanctions imposed by Washington.

It has diminished further to Benelux proportions after the ruble’s 10% crash this week, the steepest fall since the late Nineties.

Upon this slender economic base, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is posing as a world-class superpower, the new master of the Middle East, insisting on its ‘droit de regard’ over the old Tsarist realms as if by natural right.

What is extraordinary is than anybody should believe in such geostrategic posturing.

The harsher truth is that Mr. Putin squandered the windfall wealth of the commodity supercycle and hollowed out what remained of the Soviet industrial and engineering base, leaving Russia’s Potemkin economy in a futureless cul de sac.

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Mike Ryan is filling in for Jack Wheeler this week.

Control and use of information technology and the intellectual property behind it has been a significant factor in recent events. The so-called trade war with China and the tariffs on basic materials are really about the future of intellectual property rights.

President Trump is using solid commodities such as steel and aluminum to work towards more favorable intellectual property rights expectations and legalities.

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Google returned their self-driving cars to the road. They are perfecting information technology that has the potential to impact the 2020 election powerfully.

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Iranians appear to be on their way towards regime change, using information technology that the Mullahs are having difficulty controlling.

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At the same time, Facebook’s Zuckerburg proposes turning over access to messaging technology to the US Government in exchange for more favorable press.

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President Trump’s tweets turned around a horde of migrants, and Hillary still can’t accept that her AI driven election tools were fooled by President Trump. What do these all have in common? Artificially intelligent systems.

Read about all these in this week's HFR! ...

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Who said this?

“The EPA is one of the most toxic places in the federal government to work. If you don’t get rid of the toxicity of the employees at the EPA, we are doing a great disservice to this country. I have serious questions about [the EPA administrator’s] ability to actually administrate.”

No, those remarks aren’t from one of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s many critics on the Left.

They’re the words of former House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who held several congressional hearings in 2016 to investigate egregious cases of misconduct and mismanagement under the leadership of Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s last EPA chief.

Since official Washington is consumed with Pruitt’s every move, perhaps it’s time to take a little trip down pre-Trump Memory Lane—when all was right in the world, according to incurious elite media—and jolt the faulty memories of these hyperventilating talking heads and editorial boards who insist Pruitt should be fired for spending 50 bucks a night to rent a D.C. condo.

Gina McCarthy should share a place of ignominy in the Obama Hall of Shame, right alongside IRS commissioner John Koskinen, FBI Director James Comey, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is impossibly corrupt – and here are the examples.

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The FBI, bluntly, is a mess. The level of incompetence mixed with bias is stunning. If the FBI were a private corporation, it would either be in Chapter 11 or fighting off stockholder rebellion or both.

Unfortunately, however, it's our most important law enforcement agency,

Its litany of incompetence is extraordinary -- completely missing the Boston Marathon and Pulse night club terror murderers when they were staring them in the face, grotesquely overlooking the Parkland schools mass killer when his violent psychosis should have been apparent to anyone with a 3-digit IQ,  are but three recent catastrophes on their watch.

As for the bias part, well, that is what is being uncovered.  The extent of it, it is easy to predict, will be great.  It already is.

We have already seen how dishonest the organization is, how desperately they are hiding facts from the public. Documents have to be pried out with a crowbar. The stonewalling is endless, the numbers of self-serving redactions myriad and seemingly rote.  It is anti-democratic in the extreme.

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