The Imprecise Umbrella Man

Imprecise bravado is very topical to our times

Bravado refers to a display of boldness or confidence, often to impress others or mask vulnerability. It can be seen as reckless or exaggerated courage. Where being truly, courageous brave or wise, bravado is the go to “drug” to try and appear fearless in a challenging situation. It has its origins in hubris which is an overwhelming conceitedness erasing common sense and probity.

Bravado is a performative art to hide vulnerabilities, seek validation, and too often no more than swagger. It rhymes with bullying, brinkmanship and bellicosity.

Bravado aims at projecting a sense of knowing everything and being all-powerful. It is used to create an exaggerated image of oneself as all-knowing or unstoppable, even when policies are transparently ill-conceived, unjust and unwise. The performance becomes about convincing others—and themselves— they are beyond reproach or limitation. Ultimately their exercise of raw power and contempt for democratic process become a train wreck of imprecision.

It seeks adulation and ruthlessly suppresses, rationalism, objective truth, sacred social norms and inalienable rights.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/03/22/under-fog-of-trumpist-bravado-imprecise-contours-of-new-us-strategy/

When Mauricio Metri wrote his article, as titled and linked above, it raises a lot of very pertinent issues. Both the “bravado” of Donald Trump, and the “precision” of his new strategy deserve further discussion and debate.

Metri provides us with an overview of the world as it is today and the chaos and dangers we face. He provokes the question has Trump got a “strategy” or is he desperately leading the West into a very dark future according to the dictates of his warped ego. He is a "revanchist" — as “someone who advocates for a policy of revanche, which is a political policy designed to recover lost territory or status, often with a sense of seeking revenge for a previous defeat or grievance.”

In doing so he goes even further in scapegoating Russia and China, as if to blame them for America’s falling fortunes, when many of the failures are self-inflicted and it exists as an falling empire exhausted and broke, spent by too many wars and corruptions— all of which are documented by its dissidents and historians — as matters of public record.

President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877) was arrested for speeding in a horse and buggy and fined $20. Trump though is the first ever US president to be a convicted felon. As we are seeing now Trump has a cavalier attitude toward breaking the law and rules by some perverted form of Divine Right. He is the first president to qualify as a demagogue as Congress, it appear, has gone to sleep.

It seems only a minor concern that Trump has returned 5 years later with even more power and privilege. which might be seen an indicator of the state of politics in the US. Similar concerns haunt most other Western democracies as politicians become a self-demoting declasse catering service to the wars and predatory capitalism of the vested interests controlling them.

Five years ago novelist Francine Prose wrote a timely article in The Guardian: “Trump's macho bravado is an embarrassment. Yet it puts us all in danger. She said it then and some how it still applies today, only more so.”

“I like to imagine a future in which people see a “macho man” like Donald Trump the way we see Oliver Hardy: the pompous, posturing, clueless member of the comedy team Laurel and Hardy. A figure of fun. Though in this case, our comedian president has done more than amuse us with his faux-macho blowhard bluster. He’s put real children in real cages. He mishandled a deadly pandemic. He’s endangered our democracy and made our lives so much worse.”— Francine Prose, The Guardian, October 15th, 2020

Oliver Hardy, “the straight man”(1892-1957)

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