Any conservative that praises Trump always qualifies his words with comments about his character. Matching Joe Biden's abortion plans for American babies against Trump's plans to allow them to live and prosper for me is hardly a character match. Trump always wins.
Mark Alexander, January 27, 2021, Patriot Post:
“What follows is a compilation of observations and references regarding the election, administration, and unfortunately the defeat of Donald J. Trump after one tumultuous term as president by the corrupt socialist Democrat Party regime.
Astoundingly, Trump was displaced by a dullard baked potato, Joe Biden, who has accomplished virtually nothing to make America a better place for those he ostensibly has represented over the course of his almost five decades as a Beltway politician. But as I have argued, the Biden ticket is actually headed by the leftist who will soon replace him, Kamala Harris.
I have divided my observations into several categories in order to be as concise as possible about Trump’s four years as president.
TRUMP THE CANDIDATE:
A quick review of my early columns about primary candidate Donald Trump reveals that my greatest concern was that of his character — it was not comparable in the least to George Washington or Ronald Reagan. Full disclosure: I was firmly in the Ted Cruz camp, with Marco Rubio as a running mate.
Soon after Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016, I contacted a longtime friend who had security responsibilities for Trump and his family, and I asked him what I needed to know about his boss. He said that Trump’s personal interactions with people, be they friends or his employees, are totally different from his public persona — that there was a deep shared respect and loyalty among those who knew him best.
Ahead of the election, I wrote about why I was voting for Trump — as if I would’ve ever considered an ounce of support for Hillary Clinton. I responded to inquiries from conservatives that I was confident that Mike Pence, whom I first met decades earlier, would not have joined Trump’s ticket if he were not confident that Trump would take the country in the right direction. And I was totally confident that Trump would follow through on his commitment to nominate constructionist jurists to the Supreme Court.
Within a month of Trump’s shocking Electoral College victory over Clinton, it became clear that his administration was shaping up to be the most conservative and consequential in decades, what I called a “Reagan revival.” But even so, I still had concern about his “New York values” and wondered whether his presidency would be hamstrung by his brash bravado.
But we praised his administration’s policies, if not his character, from day one. Ironically, in the years that followed, we regularly and simultaneously took fire from those claiming we were either “too pro-Trump” or “too anti-Trump.” I guess that’s indicative of being devoted, first and foremost, to American Liberty above any politician or party affiliation.
TRUMP THE PRESIDENT:
Perhaps Trump’s most obvious leadership “style” was that he was a bomb dropper. As I wrote shortly after he took office in 2017: “The day he arrived in DC, he dropped a bomb on the status quo in Congress and its special interests. He dropped a bomb on the regulatory behemoths and their bureaucratic bottlenecks. He dropped a bomb on the trade and national security institutions and alliances that failed miserably over the previous eight years. And he dropped a bomb on all the pundits and mainstream media outlets.”
The net results of Trump’s take-no-prisoners style is that he left office with an extraordinary list of accomplishments eclipsing those of any president since Reagan.
TRUMP THE TARGET:
No president has ever been more relentlessly assailed by the enemies of Liberty than Donald Trump. The deep-state coup against Trump was not broad but it was certainly deep.
Orchestrated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, whose fingerprints are all over the coup crime scene, in collusion with Hillary Clinton and her co-conspirators who fabricated the “Russian Collusion” charade, the effort to undermine the Trump administration from within was staggering in its callous defiance of the law.
While the cutouts in this operation have been exposed, it is former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan who should be indicted for their roles in setting up the fake FISA warrants that seeded the entire conspiracy.
I’ve taken some shots in regard to my consistent use of “deep state” and “coup,” but the fact is this was a deep-state coup, as the most recent evidence about the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, the early layup for taking down Trump, reveals.
When Robert Mueller’s investigation fell flat, it led to Coup d'État 2.0, the phony effort to impeach President Trump for what Joe Biden actually did in Ukraine. Of course, that effort also failed.
Of course, the Demos’ agenda received 24/7/365 assistance from their Leftmedia propagandists and their Big Tech silencers. Mainstream and social media platforms are the primary propagators of “fake news,” such adulteration being the “true enemy of the people.” And with Biden/Harris in office, now herds of so-called “journalists” are promoting the suppression of free speech, when it is speech that does not comport with their political or social views.
As I have often pondered, consider what the American political landscape would look like if the mainstream and social media platforms were actually politically neutral, or if they actually affirmed the First Amendment.
TRUMP THE MISCOMMUNICATOR:
(Warning: If you are among the small number of Trump supporters who are not capable of reading well-reasoned criticism without emotionally decompensating, skip this section…)
President Ronald Reagan was described by friend and foe as “the great communicator.” However, he disclaimed that attribute, saying in typical humility, “I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation – from our experience, our wisdom and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries.”
Unfortunately Donald Trump was unable to comprehend or exhibit an ounce of the humility which earned President Reagan the great communicator accolade.
Trump’s communications proliferated an unmitigated arrogance never before witnessed in a president. He made all things politically divisive all the time, and he was omnipresent — he never gave his social media accounts a much-needed rest. The Democrats and Leftmedia had Trump’s number; they knew how to trigger him, and they mastered it.
Soon after his inauguration, seeing the communication catastrophe around the bend, I wrote, “Memo to POTUS: Stop Swapping Stupid With Jackasses.” The point was that Trump’s endless cycle of inane insults was a significant obstacle to his agenda, and he can be his own worst enemy and was engendering a meteoric rise in those who hated him.
It was as if he thrived on the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” his social media posts triggered. But the result would ultimately prove to be his most prominent “Achilles Heel.”
While many of his supporters rightly reveled in his blistering attacks against Democrats and Leftmedia talkingheads, too often Trump’s relentless attacks drifted into fratricide, which served only to undermine his leadership. He would have benefited from a broader application of President Reagan’s wise counsel — his “Eleventh Commandment” against fratricidal attacks: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”
The brashness and brawn that made President Trump an effective bomb dropper dominated his social media bombs and fomented enormous division and hate. With a modicum of self-restraint, he could have gained much more ground with a broader constituency, while still keeping his base fired up. But he never exercised restraint.
As for Trump’s relentless and unmitigated self-aggrandizement, I’m reminded of Aslan’s wise advice to Prince Caspian in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia: “If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been proof that you were not.”
But what hurt Trump most was his erratic communications during the course of the ChiCom Virus pandemic this past year. In April I warned, “Mr. President, Don’t Be the Poster Child for CV19 Misery,” but his self-destruction was evident, and the corrupt mainstream media was only too happy to oblige. The media helped Demos hang COVID-19 around Trump’s neck like an albatross.
To that end, a wise friend and a very astute political observer, Cal Thomas, offered this observation: “Last August, Trump was questioned at a White House press briefing about polls showing his popularity was declining. Asked to explain, he responded, ‘Nobody likes me. It can only be my personality. That’s all.’ It was a rare moment of transparency for him.”
Cal continued: “There is still a remnant of old-fashioned values my grandparents’ generation embraced and tried to instill in their descendants. One was not to belittle, demean, talk down to, or call other people names. Trump has consistently ignored that advice. While a large number of Americans still support him and the number who voted for him far outpaced any other Republican presidential candidate, or incumbent president, it wasn’t enough. The reason can only be his personality. Most Americans expect a certain amount of dignity emanating from one who temporarily holds our highest office. Could Trump have achieved all he has without the name-calling? I think so.”
Rarely do I agree with WaPo political analyst Charles Lane, but I agree with every word of this recent assessment: “I was just reminded by how much more his celebrators might have to celebrate if the president had managed to modulate his behavior and behave decently, and speak in a civil tongue even in the face of a lot of criticism — much of which was, inevitably, unfair. He might have been reelected if he had been able to manage his impulses and personality. … Those who are disappointed that he has been defeated ought to consider how much he has been his own worst enemy over the last four years.
If then-President Trump could have mastered a degree of consistency and humility in his ubiquitous communications, I believe he would be in his second presidential term. It was Donald Trump’s election to lose, and he did. He did not lose because of something he did this year, but because of what he did not do over the last four years: listen to wise voices about moderating his caustic and chaotic communications. He would not have lost a single core voter over that moderation, but he did manage to incite a massive groundswell of opposition that cost him — and all of us who have backed him over the last four years — the continuation of his administration’s policies, which have in virtually every area served our whole nation well.
Elections are almost all about personality, 90% the person and 10% the policy. Trump did not understand that his efforts to rally supporters rallied far more adversaries.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment