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‘Everything Trump Touches Dies’
ETTD. You’ve seen it here and undoubtedly encountered it elsewhere. Everything Trump Touches Dies.
The great thing about slogans is that they’re catchy, memorable, and spare you the heavy lifting of actually thinking critically about things. “Bush Lied, People Died” is a classic. “No Blood for Oil” is another, as are “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” Repeat them often enough and the ideas for which they’re lazy shorthand seem self-evidently true, and such simplicity is comforting in a disturbingly complicated and nuanced world.
“Everything Trump Touches Dies” obviously isn’t intended to be taken literally. There’s a darkly humorous idea out there that this might have been literally true of one of the candidates in 2016, but it wasn’t Trump. No, what it is intended to suggest is that everything Trump involves himself with becomes tainted, corrupted, diminished, broken — fails, in some way.
Trump has touched a lot of things (ahem), most of which don’t interest me much. He’s a serial entrepreneur, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he might not have been a particularly honest one. Risk-takers often have a string of failures behind them; self-promoting risk-takers who talk fast and paint rosy pictures often lose other people’s money.
Since becoming president, however, Trump has had what I think is a very positive influence on several things. He’s curbed regulations, removed us from silly climate pacts, improved relations with our closest allies, effectively responded to (rather than appeased) our adversaries, drawn attention to the looming challenge of China, strengthened our military, reduced our taxes, improved border security, made strides toward removing corruption from our federal law enforcement agencies, transformed the judiciary in a pro-Constitutional way, exposed the press as the biased and petty institution it appears to be, ended preposterous gender-identity diktats, and encouraged a pro-business climate in America with, I think, impressive results.
So, whatever Trump has figuratively-speaking killed, a lot of things I care about aren’t among them. Quite the contrary, he seems to be contributing to a lot of healing and renewal in places where I think we needed it.
Spouting this particular slogan strikes me as about as vacuous as all the other stupid and dishonest activist ditties. Anyone who thinks Trump is either an unalloyed success or an unalloyed failure is, I think, expressing a silly and indefensible view. We can debate whether the preponderance of Trump’s activities in any particular domain has led to positive or negative consequences. I think, when the domain is his role as President of the United States, we have more positive than negative. There are probably other domains in which I wouldn’t make that case, but his role as President is really the only one that I consider critical in my evaluation of the man and in deciding to vote for him (again) in 2020.
Published in Politics
I like the ETTD sloganeering because it’s ipso facto proof of a degree of derangement. It’s not possible for Trump haters to go with AFTTTD (a few things Trump touches die) or even a more aggressive STTTD (some things Trump touches die). Such is the need for irrationality in critiques of Trump that it’s necessary to go with EVERYTHING TTD. And we’re supposed to buy that while watching the transformation of the federal judiciary, the stock market, the job numbers, the reduction in border crossings, the evolution of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the maturation of Ivanka Trump . . . So everything?
Well said. He has some issues with style, but I feel on balance he has done excellent things with regulation, defense, and our standing in the world.
I am not tired of winning. I want a lot more winning to make up for decades of losing.
It is vacuous and will get us nowhere because Trump supporters know his flaws, see the chaos he engenders and yet support him anyway. How many times have you had a mutual friend or family member whom one person cannot stand and the other loves them anyway? It’s the same person with their attendant vices and flaws. Yes, and virtues. But in one case someone cannot overlook the negative and the positives are not enough; to the other, it’s the opposite. Sic semper Trump.
When I will pay attention is when Trump starts to lose his base, not when people keep recycling sayings as if they tell us something we don’t know already.
A great post but I must comment on the use of this little device and the false impression of balance (or neutrality) is pushes on the reader. In anything resembling serious circles, the former is so rare as to be almost verifiable as nothing but a mythical creature. The latter is legion in proper media and comment sections from sea to shining sea. Neither side is pure but one side is primarily and continuously “silly and indefensible.” One side is primarily and continuously antithetical to both history and truth. One side is “dead dogma” and “fake news. Oh, and the other is the target of sophomoric sloganeering.
I like my side.
By the way, I just love this bit of writing:
Best lines on Ricochet since Dave Carter’s “unblemished by…serious thought” line.
A lot of us, who were questioning Trump initially and who voted against Hillary, have been very pleasantly surprised. I still cannot watch him give a speech and some of his mannerism are annoying but we have had liars and fools running this country for 70 years. The last president who I support unequivocally is Coolidge. If you want to know why, you can read my posts at Chicagoboyz where I did a study of his life.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/category/coolidge
The remaining NeverTrumpers, here and elsewhere, are pitiful losers.
Henry,
Me too. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a stupid and dishonest activist ditty which doesn’t strike me as vacuous.
Good article, all the rest of it being even better than the above sentence.
Thank you, Mark. For a moment, I wondered if perhaps there was a valid editorial critique tucked away in your comment. But I thought about it and decided not.
The thing about slogans is they often have kernels of truth in them. Take “Everything Trump Touches Dies.” In some senses it is true. As president he killed:
Seems like a pretty good record to me.
Some things need to die. I mean think about it. If you were a dentist and you did not kill tooth decay you would be a pretty shoddy dentist. Trump kills things that need killing.
Of course, I am from Texas, and there is a tradition here that “he done deserved killin'” is an adequate defense in a murder charge. (You do have to prove the “done deserved killin'” part, though.)
The biggest surprise for me in with the Trump win is the exposure of the massive criminal corruption in the government. I knew there was grift, but the wanton disregard for Constitutional rights and law enforcement is a amazing.
Don’t forget ISIS and their wannabe Caliph, where Trump unleashed Mad Dog Mattis on them, and they died like flies.
I’d also say a lot of people in the old neo-conservative wing basically self-destructed and changed their positions to be the opposite of Trump, no matter what. I think if Trump wished for Jen Rubin to have a happy productive life, she would commit suicide out of spite.
I like stupid and dishonest activist ditties, especially when they give me something to put on a t-shirt or bumper sticker.
So much winning.
Me too, but I will trade away pretty much any amount of style for good, solid substance any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit!”
“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
Obama stole that one from the manager of Washington State’s road department in the 1930s-40s. Originally it was a response to doubts about the design of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge. “If you like your span you can keep your span.”
The FBI is still hiding the second agent who interviewed Flynn. They have defied Senator Grassley who demanded an interview in 2018.
It’s easy to think everything Trump does is bad because you only have to think one thing.
I’ll make comment then unfollow the post. Because I’m a happy chap, and got no time for no bad news.
The phrase is used to belittle, to inflame, and to troll. There is not thinking behind it. People that use it deserve to be ignored. Not you, Henry. You aren’t using it, just talking about. You know what I mean.
Sage advice. (Feeding the trolls makes us all look bad. I’m on step seven of a twelve step program to stop doing it myself.)
It sure makes me wonder about and experience some self-doubt, all those NT Neo-cons were simpatico with my views a dozen years ago. You see many of the former GWB administrators on MSNBC and CNN and CBS… all the alphabet news apparatus and editorial pages. They have nothing positive to say about Trump or anything he does. ETTD is rampant in their thought processes.
This is an example of the Trump some hate and some love:
LOLing out loud!
Me too. I loved it! Trump says what people are thinking. What person anywhere actually believed that the best behavior for a President, who has a murderous terrorist in his sights, would have been to first notify Adam Schiff or Nancy Pelosi? I couldn’t find the snippet right before that where Trump asks the crowd, “How long do you think it would take Schiff to leak to the Fake News (as he points to the back of the room). Exactly what I thought. I’ll take the under on an over/under 30 seconds bet.
The subject of John F Kennedy’s assassination came up in a discussion I was having. I had my comments about the timing (I was 6 and ¾ years old living in Europe at the time, meaning it was around 7pm European time when it occurred; and a Friday as well; I was in bed or close to it at the time, and in any case my parents were at a party and I was being baby sat; meaning I didn’t hear about it until the next day, a Saturday).
During this discussion one person lamented that if this were to happen today we would not see the unity we would today. This person is a never Trumper.
We both know our positions on Trump, and observe a truce when talking politics. So what I didn’t say was:
I don’t remember who said this, but during one of the podcasts I listen to, someone said that the election of Trump was the equivalent of the nation swallowing syrup of ipecac, and now the nation is vomiting all over itself.
People that are mostly neutral are now seeing how messed up the left really is, after listening to them over the years claim how messed up our side is (racist, racist, racist). Trump has provided a useful lesson for them.
You should have mentioned all the hate / Celebration would be from her side as well as the assassin.
Excellent points.
It’s almost useless to even attempt a reasoned discussion on Trump. Mention his name and you will be buried in epithets before the word “Trump” is out of your mouth. For the last week I have heard Democrat after Democrat mouthing the same idiocy, “Well, of course, Soleimani was an evil man and yes we know that he was responsible for the deaths and maiming of hundreds of Americans but what Trump did was wrong and…yada, yada, yada.”
Well, just what was the proper course of action then? Permit him to kill and maim more Americans? Should Trump have issued a “strongly worded protest”? Should we have waited until Soleimani slipped on a banana peel or walked under a collapsing building?
On January 20, 2017, we passed through the looking glass. I’m normally a glass-half-full type of person but I wonder if we’ll ever be able to turn around.
Don’t mistake the voices on the left for the people on the left. (That goes for the right as well, though less so.)
We hear from a tiny slice of vocal activists, whether on television or in the press or on Twitter. We’re a nation of 330 million people, give or take — and the vast majority of us are normal.
The left will jump the shark, eventually. I think we’re seeing the beginning of that, as apparent progressive wins plant the seeds of their eventual defeat. A prime example is the idiocy of the gender-identity / trans movement; general anti-Americanism is close behind.