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But His Tweets
Via Twitter, a list of Trump accomplishments.
Let me channel the dead-enders: It’s not like he was doing the LBJ routine in the cloakroom, twisting arms. It’s not like he was calling in Congresspeople to request a bill increasing funding for AIDS and Historically Black colleges. He signed what was put before him. A Rubio administration would have done the same.
Yeah, but … first you have to have a Rubio administration.
Yes, but if we’d had a Rubio administration, we would have all those good things, without the loss of international standing and the rise of Bad Vibes among demographics conservatives need to court.
Yes. But. International-standing-wise, here is your sack of sand and a hammer; enjoy your workout. As for the unpopularity amongst the youth and suburban women who were once well-disposed to the GOP but now give socialism a fresh look because they don’t like Trump’s character — the Youth would have always peeled off to the Left because that’s what you do when the slack sails of inexperience fill with the gusts of egalitarian blather. As for the suburban women, that’s a different post.
Point is, the media is transfixed by who Trump is, but what matters is the end result of his occupancy of the office. By the metrics of the left — bills passed, money spent — he ought to be seen as a best-case GOP president. If they could conceive of such a thing.
Published in General
I, for one, am not yet tired of all the winning.
While President is unquestionably the most conservative President of the 21st Century, I am almost willing to include the latter half of the 20th Century.
Nonetheless, having a President who is unswayed (though not uninfluenced) by the arguments of the left is a real blessing.
I know this is a straw dog, er, man, but I’ve heard this type of “argument”, too. Not sure how we gained international standing by essentially falling to our knees and apologizing, giving away pallets of millions, and taking blame for everything from the Crusades to Geritol.
Tweets, schmeets. If anything, taking the presidency down a notch or two, where the rest of us live, might be one of the better things to happen to the country in a while. Because we had 8 years of this clown, who, aside from an Obamacare bill that he “just signed”, which was really Pelosicare, he did almost nothing of consequence, but he certainly reveled in the “international standing” that seems so important to those ready to throw Trump out with the bathwater.
I keep telling people that Trump is by any objective standard the most politically moderate president in my entire natural life, and the vaguely socially liberal fiscal moderate that democrats have been wishing republicans would nominate forever.
He is a dick true, but we have a proud political tradition of famous dicks as president including Truman and LBJ.
The only thing I hold against Trump is signing all these huge spending bills. Other than that, let’s hope the winning doesn’t stop for another four years. I hope there is a Republican candidate in 2024 who’s also not tired of winning . . .
Instant update: The one phrase I don’t want any Republican candidate to utter is, “I will reach across the aisle.”
I don’t like it either, Stad, however, since every other Republican would have done that too, I don’t hold it against Trump. It is like moving them Embassy. I would not have held keeping it where it was against him, since my expectation was it would never move. Then boom! The most pro-Israel president in history moves it!
Good point. Turns out that guy nominates some great judges.
I might also say, this is very conservative. Trump has done more to limit the power of the Exeuctive than any POTUS in my lifetime. Wiping out regulations gives power back to Congress. Power that Congress should wield, not pawn off on the Executive.
That was the deal. Conservatives got judges, and trump got to modernize our foreign policy and fix (one is free to insert scare quotes here) our trade deals.
I will head up the “Anti-” movement on the first one (and every one) that utters any version of “… a kinder, gentler…” twaddle. But don`t be surprised when those sentiments are in the party platform…probably in the title.
Regarding the spending, I think they have to run a deficit to prop up the economy so they get past the next election. Elections are about bubble management, now, one way or another.
Republicans that want a more conservative fiscal prudence, I ask you what decade did you want to start? It’s all nonsense. The debt to GDP started going bad under Ronald Reagan and we’ve never looked back. No one is going to do anything about the unfunded liabilities.
Yes but they believe most of these things are what make a worst-cast GOP president. The rest is overridden by their TDS or just plain old Republican = BAD syndrome.
I think most of us would agree that President Trump would have been more than willing to “reach across the aisle” and give the Democrats some of the things they wanted. I think many of us who voted for him were worried about that.
Lucky for us, Democrats went full-blown koo-koo pants about Donald Trump, promising to impeach him from Day 1. And that put an end to any chances of the President working with them.
Thank you, Democrats, for being idiots.
I think the left hates Trump because he is a clownish and ridiculous figure, whatever his accomplishments might or might not be. I voted for him because, clownish or not, he was definitely preferable to Hillary.
The left is the party of ever-expanding government. Their promise is that if we turn our money and freedom over to them, they will make everyone’s life better because they are such empathetic, smart and good people. Obama was the embodiment of this, and made a point of cultivating a public persona you could take comfort in, like a wise and just emperor.
Trump is the opposite of Obama. Brash, impulsive, combative, without any of Obama’s “dignity” or sense of decorum. Yet he made a fool of the left in the last election, and keeps making fools of them since, even goading Elizabeth Warren into volunteering the evidence that she is a fake Indian. Well, if someone as ridiculous as Trump can make public fools of them for all to see, how is anyone to take seriously their claim that they are so wise and super-competent that they should be in charge of everything? Trump, in his clownishness, is a standing rebuke to the left and their grandiose pretensions. He sits on what they think of as their throne, tooting his horn and blowing his slide whistle, daring them to do anything about it, and it drives them crazy.
A FAN after my own heart…
No. They hate him for the same reason they hate all of us: he rejects the multi-culti, progressive nonsense.
Yeah, pretty short sighted on their parts. Frankly, same goes for the Republicans.
Exactly right. We’re now running deficits as large as Obama’s ever were, with no political opposition of any significance. The Tea Party is long dead and buried. We’re going to continue spending and increasing debt until the whole thing implodes.
It gives contemporary politics an air of unreality and I find it difficult to pay attention anymore. I suspect the politicians actually have an idea of what is happening, but since there isn’t anything anyone can do about it at this point, they don’t talk about it to avoid frightening the horses. Probably they are quietly putting things in place to make sure they come out whole on the far side of the collapse.
And another thing . . . (because you knew I’d have another thing) . . . the President may not be eloquent and may use language that makes us cringe, but he also is able to connect with and communicate with the citizens in a way few politicians can. When I see him speaking at events, pulling people up on stage to have them say a few words, interacting with regular Americans, I feel like he actually likes us.
I mean, sure Rubio might have signed all the same bills, but could he connect with people the way President Trump does?
Sure, he’s lost the youth vote they tell us. Did we even have that? Suburban women? Weren’t “soccer moms” one of Bill Clinton’s big constituencies? Sounds like a fickle demographic, there. Meanwhile, have you seen his numbers among Black Americans? Not sure how lasting it’ll be, but if he brings Black Americans into the party in a significant number, that’s something the party should be praising him for. Could Jeb! have done that?
As the OP points out, when it comes to policy, he’s a pretty moderate Republican, at least as moderate as Marco Rubio. The left wouldn’t be trying to impeach Rubio or some other moderate Republican they way they are Trump. Trump has a particular way of driving them crazy that I don’t think is entirely reducible to policy.
I think Rubio may have been able to, in a different way perhaps. Not so sure about the others who were on that debate stage. Cruz, definitely not. Kasich, no. Bush, no. Fiorina, no. I can’t remember all 20,000 candidates…
I think it’s interesting that the oh-so-smooth and word-parsing Clinton was followed by Mr. Malaprop Bush with his “strategery” and other mangled words, and now Obama, known for eloquence (even though without a teleprompter he turned into a blithering stammering idiot), is followed by Trump. Among other things, I think that after 8 years of shallow oration, people yearned for some plain speaking with no filter.
Trump is, for many reasons, exactly what the people wanted and needed right now.
That is a problem that is self correcting.
Part of it is prevalence of poor definitions. eg Poverty. Poverty as defined today doesn’t measure actual privation, it is just a roundabout way of calculating the lower 1/3 of the lower tail of total income distribution in the US. Spending on poverty will never fix the current definition of poverty, because you can never alleviate the face that some people will always have less income than anyone else.
So what I would like to see and a change in the poverty narrative on the Conservative side from “we lost the war on poverty” to “we won the war on poverty, now lets re-purpose our spending priorities”
He tried to give Nancy the Dreamers and she slapped his hand away.
Actually, the Bush-Frist era ended any illusion otherwise.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere about the slow, managed decline we are riding. Of course they all know exactly what is happening (but the reckoning will come on someone else’s watch). We are just along for the ride…or are we. In my deeper depressions I have also argued for the merits of pushing this thing over the cliff now. The sooner we start to rebuild from the rubble the better…!…?
Better look that one up.
I consider Trump to be the most effective President for advancing conservatism in history. He’s not a ‘conservative’ himself, but put anyone with a modicum of common sense against the left-wingers in Congress and he/she will emerge looking like a conservative. Actually that’s what a modern conservative is. Someone who thwarts the left and makes them lose ground, politically, culturally, and ideologically. Because if you can’t stop your mortal enemy from taking over completely, whatever ideas or plans you might have for conservative utopia are as meaningless as last weeks copy of The Dispatch.
None of the other Republicans would have, or could have, moved conservatism so far. They would have been subsumed by the media. Rubio would have been a hostage.
Central to the left’s strength is their propaganda outlets across giant corporate media platforms. This was their Luftwaffe. You can’t win a ground war when they can bomb you from above at will.
The issue is much bigger than this price of legislation or that. We are witnessing the exposure of the corrupt media and elements of a highly corrupt intelligence state.
The media stands exposed, and that paves the way for continued conservative victories which would never have happened without Trumps heroic ability to take them on without fear.
But I also take issue with the OP omitting several key areas where Trump departed from Republican ( but not conservative) orthodoxy on trade, immigration, foreign interventions, and restructuring the tax code to reward the middle class.
Rubio would have done none of those things.
He would be embroiled in some scandal just like any other Republican and unable to defend himself. We would probably have troops in Syria. We’d still have NAFTA and TPP and still in the Paris Climate accords, and still enriching China. Who knows what our situation with NK would be.
I think Rubio would have preemptively surrendered on most things also. And he would have lost to Hillary by being too deferential and then compounding the problem by one day trying to make fun of her.
Well there is something they can do, at least to slow down the train if not turn it around, but many of them would be booted from office if they tried (that’s actually not a bad result). There also would be some economic downside, for a while, since many sectors of the economy are too dependent on the Federal handouts they get.
They (the Left as well as most remaining NeverTrumpers) also hate him for refusing to throw strategic segments of Republican voters to the wolves in order to court the culturally progressive suburban soccer moms.
There’s probably a way to defend and not betray demonized Republican voters without alienating culturally progressive moderates…..but most ‘respectable’ Republicans aren’t willing to try.
I disagree.
Yeah, when was the last Republican President they didn’t claim had committed various impeachable offenses? They tried to impeachment for Reagan for the Iran/Contra affair, they tried to impeach George H.W. Bush twice for starting the Gulf War. (They also tried to impeach him when he was V.P. for his part in Iran/Contra.) They had quite a laundry list of offenses for George W. They even tried to impeach Dick Cheney. Not even Vice Presidents are safe from the rampaging Democrat impeachment horde.