Covfefe may be to politics what Zui Quan is to martial arts. Zui Quan means Drunken Fist. It’s also called Drunken Kung Fu. It’s a martial art style created by Shaolin monks over a thousand years ago. It imitates a drunken behavior to confuse one’s opponent.
"The main body method is called sloshing, which refers to the Hollow Body, Wine Belly concept, as though the body is hollow and the lower abdomen is filled with wine", Wikipedia says. "Drunken body style seems peculiar and off-balance, but it is actually in balance."
In other words, your opponent thinks you’re behaving erratically but in reality you’re not. Zui Quan is a very effective and quite deadly martial art technique.
Now let’s look at Donald Trump. Everything in his behavior indicates he’s a man-child, and not a bright one for that matter: he sung and bobbed like a 3-year old when he should have been standing still on Memorial Day at the Arlington cemetery; he pushed away a leader from another country to be first on the group photo at the NATO summit; he wrote the most ridiculous and appalling note during his visit to the Holocaust memorial – something a teen would write after a week in boot camp.
These are only a few examples among hundreds, if not thousands of Trump’s peculiar brat-like conduct. The man never disappoints. Every day, there’s something new. A new gaffe, a new dumb move, a new silly tweet. But if we look closely, despite his apparent erratic behavior, Donald Trump is applying the "America first" program that got him elected, step by step, with almost clockwork precision.
He said if he got elected, the United States would no longer pursue an imperialist agenda. He’d no longer be the "leader of the free world", as US president are commonly called, but the man in charge of a big country that needs serious fixing. And he’s doing just that.
At the NATO summit, he told off the other members of the alliance for not paying their dues and said he’ll no longer pay for everyone, de facto giving up his role as NATO’s true leader. German chancellor, Angela Merkel, got the message loud and clear. She said: "the era in which we (Europeans) can rely on others (the US) is gone."
He also withdrew from the Paris climate accord because, as he said: "I was elected to represent Pittsburgh not Paris." One can’t be any clearer than that.
The same thing happened in Saudi Arabia. During his speech, he clearly stated: "the nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them. The nations of the Middle East will have to decide what kind of future they want for themselves (…) and it is a choice America cannot make for you."
Furthermore, he told all Muslim world leaders present in the Saudi capital that they needed to "drive out the terrorists and extremists. Drive them out of your places of worship. Drive them out of your communities. Drive them out of your holy land." That’s a fist for a US president, and that’s exactly what he said he’d do.
On top of that, when in Saudi Arabia, he didn’t mention Syrian president Assad’s removal from power as his predecessor did on every occasion. As he said he would, he seems to have abandoned the regime change doctrine set by Harry Truman as the end of WWII, a doctrine rebranded the New Middle East by the neocons.
Obviously, he did have some harsh words about Iran, but that was expected. If Iran were not such a threatening devil, how could he have sold weapons for several hundred billion dollars to Saudis? Demonizing Iran was just good business and a very effective deal-closing argument.
As martial artists use Drunken Kung Fu to confuse their opponent, it looks very much as if Donald Trump is using covert feint fencing or covfefe, the secret political deception technique that gets you to act like a buffoon so your adversaries spend their time mocking you instead of fighting your policies. So far, it has proven very successful.
In light of that, Trump’s infamous and rather mysterious tweet suddenly makes sense: "Despite the constant negative press covfefe". In other words: Badmouth me as much you like, I’m a covfefe master, I know what I’m doing and I’m fooling you all.
He must have written it in hasty defiance, after a heavy Trump-bashing day, but soon realized that he inadvertently revealed his secret and deleted the tweet.
© Claude El Khal, 2017