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The Road Back
Last Sunday The Free Press published Douglas Murray’s latest Things Worth Remembering column. It was about Vaclav Havel and a speech he made. However, in the concluding paragraphs, Murray compared Havel to Donald Trump. For me, that was a kind of window into an image of Trump that had long evaded my understanding. I wrote a comment under that column which several people suggested I should give a wider audience. With that being my goal, I will reproduce my comment here with a few corrections to the original text.
I have always been skeptical of men or women who sought leadership positions. My experience of such is that ambition and intelligence occurred in inverse proportions. As such, I was very skeptical of Donald Trump. I think, though, that I was wrong about him. He is not a man who seeks to lead. Rather, he is a fixer, a man who sees problems and develops solutions for them.
He and I grew up in the same part of New York at the same time, a period of great American patriotism following the Second World War. It was a time when we celebrated Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, not with sales, but with parades and pledges of loyalty to our flag and country.
The years that followed in the ’60s were much less so. Viet Nam soured many and gave inroads for the left to infiltrate our schools and colleges with dissent and division.
I never grew to hate our country, just some of our politicians. I think that Trump, as well, believed as I did that this country was still the greatest in human history despite its failings. Perhaps it was his rise to fame that gave him the sense that he could make a meaningful change in what was happening, where for my part I just grew cynical and totally distrustful of anyone running for office. Trump, on the other hand, saw a way to bring things back into alignment with how they had been in our youth. Where for a long time I held him in suspicion, I am beginning to see him as a kind of naive warrior who still can hold the dream of changing things for the better. That he has surrounded himself with other such dreamers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, and a host of others strikes me as a real return to Camelot, and, possibly, a rebirth of the American dream. It is certainly nice to think in those terms for the first time in many, many years. He is an imperfect man, as are we all, but his heart is good, and, unlike his successor/predecessor, he has no ulterior motives.
Published in General
I believe you are correct. He sees problems, and he wants to fix them. Isn’t that what the Progressives call “Toxic Masculinity?” Far better to wallow in the muck for the Left and make things worse than to take a single step backwards to decency.
The comparison with Havel is not spot on, but apt if you look at the last 60+ years as a degrading of liberty and ascension of the bureaucratic state. If I recall, the point was that Havel delivered on his promises of transparency and returning the government to its people, and Murray likens that to what we’re currently seeing as Team Trump assault and dislodge entrenched interests and officials.
A playwright and a real estate developer, they might have nothing else in common but love of country, and a vision for the restoration of their countries.
The problems Trump is working to solve have been building for more than a century and over the last sixty years have been incorporating measures making things worse by not solving problems but creating new ones. America’s founding provided a structure within which every individual can pursue their on interests and desire within a limited framework of responsibility focused on not harming other humans in the process. The Left pursues power and control over the people that is unacceptable. Trump has done well in selecting his help.
I think it was during the Tea Party period, early 2010s, that extensive work was done by a number of people developing thoughts about how our system for raising federal revenues should be revamped. But we never developed quite the impetus to actually do that in a significant way.
Maybe now is the time to restart efforts to get real tax reform.
Well done, Eugene! You really captured well who he is and what he’s trying to do!
I think that’s something he shares with Musk – Musk isn’t selling solutions in search of problems. He sees a problem and if he can fix it he does. No waiting. There are makers and problem solvers and they think and act differently to people who wait and see what should or needs to be done. They are also survivors in catastrophe- they don’t wait to get going to do something to survive. No waiting.
He is also not one to just side on the sideline and watch our country go to s**t . . .
The biggest problem with the federal government is it wants to get involved everything in daily life (and doing so very poorly) and forget to be good at the limited responsibilities that was designed to do.
You hit upon what makes him a leader although he doesn’t necessarily seek to lead, he’s a fixer who sees problems and pursues solutions with just the fix in mind. Real leaders are about purpose, that gives those around them direction other than the leader himself. And in his case, he does not aim toward anything but being the best, the very best with that solution. That is his ideology, not politics.
I’m dealing now with an example of this. I’m retired from federal employment and I had family health insurance coverage with a single company in the Federal Employees Health Insurance Program (FEHIP) during my entire working career and continued it in my subsequent retirement period with no interruptions. The process going on now between health insurance programs and Medicare has resulted in these participants acting as if they do not have the information to determine if I and my wife should be exempted from the penalties with not being on Medicare Part D since we went on Medicare. The FEHIP that we have been on all this time meets all the requirements for exemptions. The participating health insurance companies(the principal one of which has all my information since well before either of us was on Medicare) already have access to this information but they are requiring certifications from my wife and I now as separate medicare recipients with short deadlines for compliance, as if we are just sitting at home waiting to respond to federal government requirements.
The moves by the FEHIP did not require any responsive action on my part, it was automatic, but what I’ve described to avoid the penalty was not. We missed the deadlines for responses so now we are in the morass of confusion.
Classic central government outcome, huh?
“It was a time when we celebrated Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, not with sales, but with parades and pledges of loyalty to our flag and country.”
I’m wistfully sad that those days are past and gone–and they are, for the most part.
Jan 6 prosecutions have given people a bad feeling about the risks of “parading.”
Come to Indy on Memorial Day Weekend. Hear 350,000 people go silent for “Taps.”
The world you see on the internet is not real. The corresponding image on the news equally so. A disproportionate voice is given to those who would do away with such things. Faith.