I haven’t written about it here at The American Spectator, at least that I can remember, but I’m becoming a subscriber to the theory that Donald Trump is the kryptonite to Saul Alinsky’s Superman.
What I mean by that is the Alinskyite Left, which encompasses basically the whole of today’s Democrat Party ever since Barack Obama took it over in the mid-2000s, is built on a definite roster of political tactics and principles, and those tactics and principles are calibrated to defeat a certain type of opponent. (RELATED: Hillary and Obama Out-McCarthied McCarthy)
Specifically, the corporatist Bush Republican blue-blood types who would buckle in the face of an impolite opposition and, most of all, spend their time cowering in a defensive position. Against folks like that, whether in a labor negotiation, political campaign, or a legislative setting, Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals work like a charm.
Of course they do.
When your opponent can’t stomach the idea of having mean things said about him, the threat of saying mean things — and that’s better than half of the essence of Alinskyism — is potent indeed.
Along comes Trump, who not only is unmoved at the idea he might be defamed by community organizers and others of their ilk but actively seeks their reprobation so that he can expose them for the radicals they are, and the entire edifice upon which the modern Democrat Party is built begins to collapse.
We can examine this in multiple contexts. Sending in federal law enforcement officers and the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and thus illuminating just how simple it actually is to bring law and order to cities Democrats have intentionally kept lawless for decades would be one example, and it would be a good one. From Brandon Johnson to Rashida Tlaib to Tim Walz to Karen Bass, the Democrats have utterly beclowned themselves over the prospect that Trump might expand the sudden outbreak of law and order beyond the nation’s capital.
But for sheer entertainment, Trump making a household name out of the comically corrupt and utterly ridiculous Lisa Cook by openly demanding her removal from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and then touching off a firestorm of attention on Cook when she fought her ouster, is an incandescent example of his out-Alinskying the Alinskyites. (RELATED: Yes, President Trump Has the Authority to Fire Lisa Cook)
After all, we all remember Rules For Radicals Number 13, right?
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
We know that Lisa Cook was a DEI hire, and she’s a perfect example of personalizing that issue in a way favorable to Trump’s stated purpose of scrubbing DEI out of government.
And I don’t say she was a DEI hire because she’s a black woman. She’s a DEI hire because she’s a clear incompetent lacking skills who only advanced because of over-the-top affirmative action hiring. Lisa Cook was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board during the Biden administration, supposedly because she was a distinguished economist from Cal-Berkeley who’d taught at Michigan, Harvard, and Stanford, but the truth of her scholarship turns out to be… different. As Scott Johnson noted at Power Line…
Meanwhile, another question, not directly at issue in the Cook lawsuit, is: what in the world was Lisa Cook doing on the Fed’s Board of Governors? To say that she was lightly qualified is an understatement. Apart from the mortgage fraud, plagiarism has been alleged in her academic work. And worse, incompetence:
The quality of her scholarship has also received criticism. Her most heralded work, 2014’s “Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940,” examined the number of patents by black inventors in the past, concluding that the number plummeted in 1900 because of lynchings and discrimination. Other researchers soon discovered that the reason for the sudden drop in 1900 was that one of the databases Cook relied on stopped collecting data in that year. The true number of black patents, one subsequent study found, might be as much as 70 times greater than Cook’s figure, effectively debunking the study’s premise.
Of course, the idea that “lynchings and discrimination” began suddenly in 1900 is absurd on its face. Cook was evidently a DEI hire, and this kind of politicized “scholarship” is typical of what we see today from left-wing academics.
It’s hard not to laugh. “Claudine Gay, hold my beer.”
Johnson noted that when they fire you, particularly when they do it for cause, typically you leave — and if you disagree with their allegations of cause, you sue for damages.
That isn’t what Lisa Cook is doing. She’s challenging the firing and refusing to leave. And in so doing, she’s fulfilling another of Trump’s arguments, which is that bad eggs in the federal government are there to serve themselves rather than the people.
Of course, the cause for which she’s being fired is absolutely brilliant in how entertaining it is.
Lisa Cook took out a bunch of mortgages on properties she alleged were primary or secondary residences and then proceeded to rent them out to others, which essentially makes her a star pupil at the Letitia James School of Real Estate Investing. That Trump gets to bedevil the existence of the faculty and staff of that imaginary institution, particularly after what James put him through before he was president over a disagreement over the valuation of Mar-A-Lago that the bank underwriters had no problem with, is a political gift that keeps on giving.
It gave us this, after all…
Fed Gov. Lisa Cook’s Ann Arbor Pad Is a Rental, Too
The recently fired financial sophisticate has been playing by different rules than the rest of usBy Charlie LeDuff (@Charlieleduff)
Ann Arbor — Lisa Cook’s financial house is on fire. Naturally, there is a Michigan angle to… pic.twitter.com/i7mEDXDa4y
— Michigan Enjoyer (@mich_enjoyer) September 2, 2025
This really gets worse and worse, doesn’t it?
Lisa Cook is being Rule 13’ed about as badly as anybody on the Left ever managed to Rule 13 Trump or anyone else, because a sane political movement would have run screaming from her a while ago.
After all, her predominant sin isn’t the mortgage fraud or the academic buffoonery the woke universities allowed her to get away with. It’s her joining in on the refusal to budge on interest rates which costs the federal government billions upon billions of dollars in additional debt service, not to mention making it considerably more difficult for regular Americans to buy a house… when Lisa Cook is out there lying on mortgage applications so she can acquire rental properties those regular Americans would otherwise be in the market to purchase.
Ouch.
It always seemed like Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals were properly a two-way street, but the Right simply was too timid to use them. Along comes Trump, and whether he’s applying the playbook as written or simply going with his gut and achieving the textbook results, we can see that the radicals are just as susceptible as the silk-tie crowd to being hoisted on the same petard.
Cook won’t be the only example. She just might be the most entertaining current one. And it’s only a matter of time before her erstwhile defenders abandon her to her professional doom and the vagaries of the justice system.
Or if not, then they’ll sink with her. And that’s just fine, too.
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