Losers will generally remain losers.
As I write, Donald Trump is on his 14-hour trip to Beijing. The president never comes empty-handed. Flying with him are his top political associates, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Additionally, Donald Trump has with him the cream of the American CEO crop. Think about the conversations at 30,000 feet between Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. If they have to circle once before landing, the circling time might have had a trillion dollars' worth of value for the US economy.
If a father wanted to point to Donald Trump or Elon Musk as examples of success, his son might argue that these guys were born lucky. Both are very smart and have been very successful in their respective fields of endeavor. And while the boy’s argument would be true, he would miss a couple of key points. Firstly, both Trump and Musk have had very public setbacks. Donald Trump had years of write-downs from his real estate business, while Elon Musk watched rocket after rocket explode before SpaceX became the orbital powerhouse it is today. Additionally, neither man sat around and felt sorry for himself. Donald Trump picked himself up, added to his fortune and became president of the United States twice. Musk kept sending up rockets until he got them going up and landing upright upon return. Both could have quit. Both could have blamed others or bad luck. Neither did.
Winners like Trump, Musk or say Michael Jordan definitely have brains and abilities. But, as importantly, they have a drive that never lets them assume the mantle of victimhood. They never wallowed in self-pity. Donald Trump took the strange 2020 election outcome and his indictments and spun them around into a 2024 victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. Michael Jordan was famously sick as could be in one NBA Finals game and went out and put up 38 points. Winners win, and even when they lose, they plot how to win again. Losers do the opposite. They see themselves as victims and even when they are doing well or others help them, their mentality of victimhood keeps them in the loser category forever.
The can-do American attitude, before the country became an ATM for anyone who claimed he was owed some benefit, was the special sauce that built the country. Hoover Dam? No problem. Build an atomic bomb? We got this. Going to the moon? When do you want to get there? But as America became stronger and wealthier, a new spirit entered: victimhood. Entire “Studies” departments came into being to canonize victim status for blacks, women, Hispanics, gays, and, of course, Arabs and Palestinians. Victims are always owed. Victims can do no wrong. Victims have no responsibility to others. Everything that was true of the American can-do ethos was vaporized with the mentality of “I am a victim! You owe me.” We see it with Black Lives Matter, which couldn't care less about black-on-black violence or a community without fathers. “You whites owe us! Make checks payable to our Cayman Islands bank account.” The Palestinians are never chided for raping and murdering Israeli women or killing families whole. “The Israelis made us victims! We are blameless! Give us all of the land because we can never be held responsible for mass murder!”
I had a professor at Harvard who told the story of his college days at Northeastern U. There was a large race rally on Boston Commons. He said that there was a young white speaker talking about the future when they take over. An older black man got up to leave. Those around him asked why he was heading out, as the speaker was offering a vision of a better future for him. “That fellow wants to keep me comfortably poor,” was the answer. And this has been the approach, certainly from the left, for blacks and illegals. Instead of demanding that they pull their weight or follow the law, they are told how unfortunate they are, how we all owe them so much and that we are the guilty ones. And the result is a pampered idle class. Look at those at the “Let’s kill the Jews” protests. They have nice clothes, the latest iPhones and arrive in pretty decent cars. Yet they see themselves and the Palestinian terrorists as victims. They will never reach the heights of an Elon Musk or Donald Trump as long as they believe that they are owed. Losers remain losers because they can’t break their losing thinking. The best and most successful don’t ask for handouts or make excuses. They win, and even if they lose, they plot how they will win again.
The professional jerk Nick Kristof put out a piece in the NY Times claiming that Israelis—and their dogs, mind you—are raping Palestinian prisoners. He released his screed the day before a comprehensive report on sexual violence by Hamas against Israelis on October 7, 2023, came out. Eyewitnesses saw the rapes — that continued even after women were shot dead. Kristof uses Israel-haters as his sources and the whole report is one big lie in order to a) make Israel look bad and b) give the Palestinians one more pass for being victims/failures. The claims of rape are ridiculous, but why pray tell are the Palestinians in jail in the first place? Did they not participate in the Hamas pogrom that led to 1,200 dead, 250 abducted, and thousands more injured? Did Kristof waste an ounce of ink to denounce the Palestinians for their violence against civilians and their demented mass murder of innocent Israelis? And really, dogs trained to rape? What did the Israelis train the cats to do?
Once a person assumes a victim mentality, he generally has no room for escape. Jews, Koreans, and others arrived in the US and, within one or two generations, were out of the city and into the suburbs. I had a cousin who called me the day after I got into Harvard early and implored me to go: “You’ll be the first one in the family to go there!” Blacks have been in the inner cities for generations and when the Left told them that they are unfortunates and that the government would help with welfare and other goodies, it was guaranteed that they would remain there forever. There are those who get out of bad neighborhoods and gangs, but only because they reject playing the victim. They realize that they have the brains and abilities to succeed and set out to do so. If one is a victim, he puts his hands up and says that he gives up. If one is a winner, he doesn’t care what the situation is because he knows that success is just around the corner—if he makes the effort to get to that corner. Michael Jordan and Tom Brady were blessed with incredible talent; they won multiple championships and are remembered as the best because they took that talent and maximized its use over and over again. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves or blame others. They went out to win and they did so much more often than they lost. Look at all of the other great athletes who never win the big one: they have plenty of talent, but they often lack that extra mental gear to win it all.
The Palestinians will never go anywhere because they have a national mentality of failure and victimhood. They would rather be stateless and live off foreign donations than make peace with the Jews and live alongside a thriving Israel. The UAE built a modern country out of a barren desert and is smart enough to work with Israel for its benefit. Once losers, generally always losers.