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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
Here are some things that don’t exist; the alt-right, the TEA party, the Tea Party, the feminists, the Left, the BLM…the list goes on.
TEA Party, (taxed enough already) was initially just about lowering taxes but was later associated by the media with conservative religious interests…and then defined by the media as ‘dangerous’. Because we all know that religion is dangerous. There are people convinced that VP Pence hopes to institute a theocracy.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Was the alt-right a collection of racists? Is it now? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
But I do know this; there are decent people who oppose tearing down Civil War statues.
There will be an ongoing cost if that is rendered unspeakable.
Stop helping.
Exactly what I was thinking as I read the Petty comment. Personal responsibility would be to resign and allow yourself to be replaced by someone who supports the candidate that got you elected. The Petty concept of responsibility is that the delegate and similarly congresspeople know better than the voters, therefore requiring them to negate the voters’ will. Isn’t this called elitism?
Actually Trump refuses to believe that Elitists and Democrats are the authority on what is and is not racism. Therefore he doesn’t hand those folks, maybe folks like you, the upper hand in moral decisions. He has full confidence in his own morality. He doesn’t need your approval. Nor do I. To the contrary, Trump shows complete respect for his own base and for his supporters’ ideals and way of life. That is why he fights for that way of life every single day, despite all the forces arraigned against him. And that’s why his “base” continues to cheer for him. As do I. MAGA…KAG!
In the old days, we would have called that “character”. Standing up and saying, “I won’t stab you in the back, but I can’t in good conscience do what you want. I’m resigning.” I would respect someone like that, while thinking his opinion is wrong.
It’s called republicanism, as opposed to pure democracy. It’s why the founders wrote the Constitution, because pure democracy was degenerating into anarchy.
Do you feel the state electors sent to the Electoral College proved their lack of character by not resigning or throwing the election to Hillary, who won 3 million more votes?
Actually, I feel just the opposite. The Electors did their job, obeyed the law under which they were elected, and voted for Trump. THAT’S called Republicanism. Stomping one’s feet and yelling NO, is called something else.
Agreed. As I understand the process, electors are sent specifically to cast their first votes for the candidate for whom they were selected. They should perform that duty, since that is the expectation of the people who sent them.
The purpose of a political convention is to advance the party’s interests and values. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump received approximately the same percentage of votes in their primary contests. Debbie Wasserman Schultz played hardball with the tools she had available to to spike Bernie’s candidacy in favor of the mainstream consensus of her party, Rence Prebus went Vichy and took the opposite path. The rules allowed for a vote of conscience if the majority of delegates felt it was needed. It was not violating the rules, it would have been applying the rules to the circumstances. Winning 22% of the vote and then claiming you are stabbed in the back for not receiving 100% of the delegates does not pull at my heartstrings for your injustice.
Just out of curiosity, do we have some reason to believe that the majority of delegates felt a vote of conscience was appropriate in this case?
I’m quite happy with the president we got, the one I voted for. I think a lot of people are. I’m glad the electors did what they were sent there to do.
Trump hired Manafort, supposedly an expert on convention procedure, as his campaign manager to block it in the rules committee. The selection of Pence over Christie for VP was part of the dealmaking to block the possibility, It was definitely a plausible outcome if the party apparatus had been evenhanded. I think you would be much happier with a different president, but that’s hard to communicate when everyone has retreated to their bunkers.
That’s not responsive to my question. I don’t believe that most delegates wanted to vote other than for the person for whom they were sent to vote. Do we have some evidence that they did?
The only proof I have is the extent that Trump’s team went to foreclose the opportunity. There was some reporting that said there were enough votes to deny a first ballot win which would have released all delegates to look at other candidates. I think you’re forgetting how disliked Trump was back then. I don’t know of a single person on Ricochet that wanted him to be the nominee at that time. If NBC had dropped the Access Hollywood tape in the middle of a convention fight Trump might have been put out by the convention delegates.
If they did they were flying under false colors. I have been to state conventions. The delegates you elect for national conventions are supposed to support the candidate the state primary and state convention delegate elect them to represent. Anything else is fraud. Pretending otherwise on the basis of “nobility” of the cause is also a fraud.
Then those delegates were disgusting scoundrels who got their appointments by lying. No fuzz on that.
So, no. The delegates voted for the man they were sent to vote for, Trump won the nomination, then Trump won the election. I am good with that.