George Rebane
Regarding the content and direction of his message to voters, President Trump can learn a thing or two from Alan Turing, who is considered by many to be a sanctified founder of computer science and machine intelligence. Turing was also credited for being the technical head of the British team at Bletchley Park that broke the back of Hitler’s Enigma crypto-communications system. But few people know that Turing also did the RAF a strategic service when in 1941 he was asked to recommend the placement of armor on the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes which were suffering unacceptable losses at the hands of the Luftwaffe and while flying through German flak.
Turing asked to see the data on the damage to the returning RAF aircraft, and also the existing plans to place armor on the fighters. The prevailing RAF wisdom called for armoring the parts of the airplane that suffered more hits. After some thought and a bit of analysis Turing recommended placing additional armor under the skin where seldom was found a penetration on the returning fighters. Astonished, the RAF mavens demanded an explanation for such an outlandish recommendation. Turing’s answer was simple. The hits on the aircraft would be pretty much evenly distributed from their air combats and AA barrages. On the returning fighters there was a consistency in the areas seldom hit. So Turing reasoned, correctly, that those planes which suffered damage in the seldom hit areas were the most likely to go down; ergo put the extra armor there. The RAF’s resulting epiphany had them do exactly that, and the survival rate of the Spitfires and Hurricanes improved markedly and immediately.
What’s the connection to Trump? Well, in his public and campaign pronouncement the president continues armor plating his monologues where he least needs them. His core supporters are not fragile and brittle, threatening to abandon him at the first hint of his reducing their daily allotment of red meat. They are exactly the opposite; his core is extremely resilient and strong; they have no Plan B save Trump, they have nowhere else to go. So Trump doesn’t need to spend all his valuable air time bolstering his core, at this point they are bullet-proof.
What is required of him is to armor plate the sides of his ideological corpus with appeals to the cohorts of voters he still needs to attract. And they require a totally different kind of message that does not recount the history of progressive atrocities so pleasing to his core. He needs to tell those he seeks to attract of his plan forward.
The armor plate there will be made up of a description of Trump 2.0 with plans for the next stage of tax reforms, of a new list of judges and justices, of new term limits initiatives, of block grants to states for food stamps, Medicaid, housing, etc, of new initiatives to continue draining the swamp, of bipartisan justice reform to eliminate “over criminalization” and asset forfeiture, of new infrastructure projects, of school choice for parents, of solving the ideological train wreck in higher education, of outlining his existing plans to expand STEM education and vocational training programs. This list goes on. There’s so much that he can say to attract the undecideds from all sides, and put on the needed armor to deflect the barrage of slings and arrows against these initiatives from his enemies who have nothing more to offer than their frenetic ‘Never Trump!’ exhortations.
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