Donald J. Trump: Thunder in the Sky!

Immediately after the Republican Primary Election debate on Tuesday, 15 December, 2015 I wrote and published my first article here on Semeiotic: “Why (and how) Trump is Going to Win.” In it I said: “Trump is going to win. He’s going to win the Republican nomination. He’s going to win the general election in November 2016. And he’s going to win by a lot.”

Trump won the Republican primaries and got the nomination just as I predicted he would. We will soon know if the rest of my December 16, 2015 prediction is correct. I am confident that it will be – and for precisely the reasons I spelled out last December when I wrote:

He is also not the least bit crazy, erratic, impulsive, or reckless. His ‘crazy’ is entirely as in “crazy like a fox”. It is deliberate, conscious, carefully crafted, and used as an instrument (or, when necessary, weapon) to get the results he aims to get. Whether he has ever read it or not, he embodies the practical wisdom described in Thomas Cleary’s “Thunder in the Sky: Secrets on the Acquisition and Exercise of Power”, a brilliant translation of two Chinese Taoist classics: “The Master of Demon Valley” and “The Master of the Hidden Storehouse.” (We’ll have more to say about that in a later article.)

The article you are now reading is the “later article” to which I referred, in advance, nearly eleven months ago. There will be more to follow. But for now, we will just begin to explore, in a bit more depth and detail, the way Trump has used the wisdom expressed in these ancient Chinese documents to bring his campaign to the brink of victory and to his election as the 45th President of the United States of America.

The first secret key to understanding this is openly displayed for all to see (well, for all who have eyes to see, at any rate) in the excellent introduction to Cleary’s “Thunder in the Sky” written by Asian Marketing Consultant Inc. President Chin-Ning Chu. There she writes:

In today’s demanding business world the fierce game of competition has literally evolved into bloodless warfare. The result is, as the Chinese say, “Shang chang ru zhan chang,” or “The marketplace is the battlefield.” Although this militaristic view of business may seem novel, it isn’t news to Asians, whose leaders for centuries have drawn from ancient art-of-war treatises to help them achieve and maintain power. The Asian people view success in the business world as tantamount to victory in battle, with both directly affecting the survival and well being of their nation. Since they perceive that the true nature of business competition is that of war, they act accordingly.”

The details of the ways in which Trump’s campaign has employed the wisdom embodied in ancient Chinese books like “Thunder in the Sky,” “The Art of War,” and “The Book of Leadership and Strategy” will require a book-length discussion to examine in full. For now, however, we will begin by noting just one, but one very important, aspect of the matter: Trump’s long-range but initially very secret strategy built on strong support from the military, intelligence, and law-enforcement communities to bring Clinton Inc. to justice.

Far from the bumbling bull-in-a-China-shop naive buffoon that the mainstream media have (and still do) try (increasingly desperately) to portray him to be, Trump has from the start had a very well-designed secret strategy that is only now coming into view. This as yet relatively little noticed video by Steve Pieczenik is one example of that:

There will be more to come. Stay tuned . . .