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If Trump Is So Incompetent, Why Do Democrats Fear Him So Much?
Democrats portray President Trump as an incompetent fool and an evil genius and a political ignoramus who doesn’t understand Washington and a political powerhouse who must be impeached because he’s unbeatable in an election. All at the same time. This seems odd. But not as odd as their apoplectic reaction to his election.
Hillary was not that popular, even among the Democrats that she had not cheated to get the nomination. Why were Democrats openly planning his impeachment even before he was inaugurated? He was a lifelong Democrat from New York City, for Pete’s sake. Did they really expect him to govern as a conservative? So much of this has been beyond my grasp from the beginning.
Clarice Feldman attempts to explain this in a fascinating article on American Thinker called “Trump is Toto.” Please read her well-thought-out article rather than my hurried summary, but she thinks Trump’s approach to the Middle East is emblematic of what Democratic leadership understood about him from day one:
The actual problem that the left sees more clearly than the right is Trump’s complex idiosyncrasies and style conceal a simple truth; declare the left’s shibboleths so much bull$#!% masquerading as fairy dust and their mystique and, more importantly, their political advantage goes poof!
She uses Trump’s recent approach to diplomacy with Iran to illustrate her point, comparing the way President Trump handled Iranian General Soleimani to the way President Carter handled the Iranians taking over our embassy and holding 52 hostages for 444 days in 1979 (Ms. Feldman’s comments are in italics, with extensive quotes from a piece by Caroline Glick):
If President Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the “students” weren’t students, but soldiers of Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Khomeini, the US would be compelled to fight back. And Carter and his advisers didn’t want to do that.
So rather than admit the truth, Carter accepted the absurd fiction spun by the regime that Khomeini was an innocent bystander who, try as he might, couldn’t get a bunch of “students” in central Tehran to free the hostages.
Hoping that Iran would be satisfied, they left Khomeini alone.
Khomeini and his “Death to America” shouting followers got the message. They understood that Washington had given them a green light to attack Americans in moderate and, as Smith put it, “plausibly deniable” doses. it. For the next 40 years, Iran maintained its aggression against America. And from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, every president since Carter accepted and kept faith with Carter’s decision not to hold the Iranian regime responsible for the acts of aggression and war it carried out against America through proxies.
Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani along with Muhandis destroyed the Carter administration’s Iran narrative.
By killing Soleimani, Trump made clear that the blank check for aggression the previous six presidents gave Tehran is now canceled. From now on, the regime will be held responsible for its actions. From now on US policy towards Iran will be based on reality and not on escapism.
* End quote *
I view Donald Trump as our first independent president. He wasn’t developed in the party system of either party, so he had no friends in the system, and no one knew or trusted him. I blamed his isolation and independence for Washington’s rejection of him from the day he showed up.
But I think Ms. Feldman’s theory makes more sense. So much of the Democrat message is based on baloney, and they know it. They say they can show strength in foreign policy by projecting weakness. They say we can tax our way into prosperity. They say that capital punishment is unconstitutional but abortion is a constitutionally protected civil right. They call Republicans childish and they worship Greta Thunburg. I could go on and on, and so could you.
The only way such nonsense can withstand scrutiny is by avoiding scrutiny. With academia and the media on their side, they face very little scrutiny.
But then Donald Trump shows up and simply disregards their policies as complete baloney.
Democrats: “But Mr. Trump, that’s just not how things are done in Washington.”
Trump: “I don’t care.”
This an existential threat to leftism in general, and the Democrat party in particular. And they know it.
Ms. Feldman quotes the article from Ms. Glick, in which she compares Donald Trump to Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz. The dog destroyed the wizard, not with forceful debate or escalating violence – it just pulled back the curtain, and exposed the wizard as a fraud, whose only strength was deception. As Ms. Glick said,
Trump isn’t Mussolini or Hitler. Neither is he Abe Lincoln or Daniel come to judgment. Donald Trump is Toto.
The Democrats may wish Trump was Hitler. But Toto is worse.
And they know it.
Published in General
Because they are incompetent and he isn’t.
There is an additional theory that I posted the other day, maybe not here. The shooting down of the Iranian airliner by the Vincennes in 1988 resulted in a car bombing of the wife of the captain of the Vincennes in 1989. The LA Times dismissed the bomb as an amateurish pipe bomb but it was most likely an attempt at personal revenge. The theory resulting from this event is that administration officials, “courtiers” as the article described them, developed a fear that advising the president could result in personal risk for themselves and their families. Consequently, since Reagan, the advisors who come from the Deep State almost exclusively, have avoided any recommendation of retribution to Iran. This continued through the IED scourge in Iraq, largely driven by Iranian technology, to Obama’s reticence to attack Iranians while he killed hundreds of Arabs with drone strikes.
Trump has zero support from and respect for the Deep State. They have opposed him and derided him and leaked secrets of his since his election. He could care less about blowback from Iran. Hence, he took the shot.
Doc,
You’d be very interested in this article. It claims that the political arrangement with Iran to suppress acknowledgement of Iran’s proxy war was maintained by successive administrations both Democratic and Republican, until the outsider Trump stepped in and called a spade a spade.
Iran and America are Suddenly Both Naked
Well, technically the second. George Washington was first. Not a bad club to be in.
FIFY.
Great post.
Wow. Had to look up the article: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-03-11-mn-792-story.html. Luckily, she escaped only the van was destroyed.
From the link:
Treasonous, if true.
Obama greatly admired Soleimani, and provided major funding (in the form of secret deliveries of pallets full of cash) to his military campaign. But you are missing the point of the article I linked to: it didn’t start with Obama, and it wasn’t just Democrats. It was US foreign policy till now.
Didn’t miss it, Mark. It’s just that Obama’s approach was so much worse.
OK, I understand now.
Obama’s approach was not just “so much worse”. Obama and Kerry and Susan Rice and Hilliary and Biden and all the rest of his white-guilt-ridden sycophants, were on the Iranian side. As they are today, being a group of treasonous Marxists who despite America.
My being the only person on Ricochet willing to point this salient out does not make it less true.
Very true. But I’ve seen other versions of this over my lifetime-Trump is just the most extreme version and entertaining of this phenomenon: exposing the left. How many times have we been told by Democrats that nothing can be done? That our best days are behind us? That the root causes of American pathology are so deep that we just have to keep pouring money into a problem that can never be fixed. Then a Reagan or Guiliani or Trump comes along and exposes the lie. All of them are harshly criticized at the time, and sometimes it takes a while for the turn around to occur, but the results are there to see. It isn’t all Republicans that can achieve this, because it takes a vision and the political will to take decisive and yes, sometimes harsh action (firing the air traffic controllers comes to mind) and we have too many Bushes in the Republican garden. But it is almost always a conservative with the courage of their convictions who increases the quality of life.
I prefer this theory. The deep state and Dems and GOP were after Trump long before he could show what his true policies were. Before Trump became president, there was no reason to expect he would move embassy in Israel, go after minority voters through economics and patriotism, completely reverse the trend on China, and flip the playbook in the Middle East. I think the deep state thought they could control policy though the inter-agency consensus. Given that, the Dems went after him early and often, because they new that he was on an island and had no support from the GOP. In 2016 the GOP establishment was lead by John McCain, who actively hated Trump. The only support he is getting even these days is from young GOP Reps and Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Franco has observed that Trump is the child that observed that the King had no clothes. Strangely, he also doesn’t have any clothes.
Even his die hard supporters suspect he slept with Stormy Daniels and that he is a rude boorish man and they don’t care. He is a most perplexing figure indeed.
Trump blocks them from power therefore is evil and must be destroyed. The exact reasons aren’t really all that important. He is an obstacle that must be removed no matter what. Remember how Stalin was a reactionary when his version of Communism didn’t work out? Anything that opposed the perfect socialist vision was rightist or fascist or reactionary or all three. Now Trump is both anti-gay and anti-semitic… somehow. To Leftists, Leftism is the one word, the way and the light and all who oppose them are the anti-Christ.
A lot of the Trump aversion goes past politics and into culture and social standing, dating back four decades, to when Trump first became a public figure in New York.
While he came to own and/or control a ton of real estate in Manhattan, Trump has never been one of the Manhattan elites — he’s always been seen as an outer borough Brooklyn-Queens guy, who never refined his style to fit in with them. The comparison others have made to Rodney Dangerfield’s Al Czervik in “Caddyshack” really is apt. The Judge Smalls elites were reflexively turned off by his low-brown style and his ostentatious displays of wealth (though 40 years ago when the movie was made, they no doubt saw Ted Knight’s character as the country club Republican surrogate in the story, and not as the guy representing the Democratic political and business elites).
So there was a class hatred going into 2016 that was already in place, and they didn’t really have to gin up the derangement syndrome from zero, as was the case with Mitt in 2012 or even Maverick in 2008. Add in the left’s Wile E. Coyote-like certainty of their own super-genius status, and the idea of their vulgar moron beating the Smartest Woman in the History of the Universe® drove them to the where the starting point for their hatred of Trump after 11/8/16 was pretty much at the level of the apex of their Bush Derangement Syndrome a decade earlier. Even before Trump started actually doing conservative things, he offended their cultural sensibilities (and this also includes some of the #NeverTrump pundits with New York roots).
No, I don’t suspect he slept with Stormy. He did. Trump is also very polite and approving until you insult or attack him first. Then he doubles down on insults and attacks. Very New York City of him. It isn’t that I don’t care, exactly the opposite. I love that he is Toto and Don Rickles simultaneously. He pulls back the veil of deception and calls everyone of those back stabbing deep staters what they are.
Your being the only person on Ricochet who writes about it doesn’t mean that you are the only one who is aware of it :-)
My point is that Presidents and high officials, going back to Ronald Reagan, who were not Marxists traitors were a party to the long-standing agreement, referred to by Lee Smith, that the US would pretend that the attacks on Americans and others by Hezbollah and the other Iranian proxy forces were independent attacks.
The purpose of the policy was to avoid open war with Iran, which would likely have ensued if the US had admitted that Iran was conducting a proxy war against the US and its allies.
Don’t assume that none care. Just ask what they can do about it if they do care. The answer is likely nothing, and that settles it. For now.
My personal take is they have not actually feared him. Because of several things. (1) NeverTrumpers in the Republican Party give the impression of a fractured party and tenuous support. (2) Trump’s personal character under pressure will be a turnoff to the general public. (3) The media has so turned against Trump, even more so than regular Republicans, that good press for Trump is impossible and they can control the message. (4) He didn’t get a majority of the votes, he won because of the Electoral College. Given all that, they perceive Trump as weak. That’s why they have gone ahead with essentially two impeachment, one official, one not, thrusts against him. Fear would suggest they would not attempt impeachment over strictly political reasons.
This I understand, Mark. But I don’t understand the passes we give to those who, like Mr Obama and his crowd, are not our colleagues but really, our enemies.
Fear. It’s the reason why six Presidents have failed to confront Iran. Millions, perhaps billions of words have been used to justify our national cowardice. While we’ve been busy taking counsel of our fears, we’ve let the Iranians kill our citizens and threaten our allies.
Sometimes the neighborhood bully needs a punch in the nose. The punch has been administered by an unlikely pugilist. Now we see if the bully gets the message.
Don’t forget the weapon Trump does have that previous presidents haven’t, which is the amount of shale oil pouring out of Texas, New Mexico and North Dakota. Gas prices at best budged a nickle after the strike on Soleimani and the Iranian rocket launches on the U.S. bases in Iraq, and barely budged last summer when Iran hit the Saudi refineries with their drone strikes. While you’d like to think past presidents wouldn’t be concerned by domestic poll numbers or re-election matters, a major conflict with Iraq in the past had the ability to push oil prices up a 30-50 percent in a very short time, and give everyone in the U.S. California’s current gas prices or worse. Trump can take action like he did 10 days ago, and as long as we keep some oil flowing out of the Middle East, prices aren’t going to soar and people aren’t going to be irate because their gasoline or winter heating costs have suddenly gone through the roof.
No thanks to Obama.
I agree our strategic position is much more favorable today. But our position has always been better than Europe and the Far East. We have always had ample supplies of crude in the ground. It was, at the time, cheaper to import oil than drill domestically. Oil was always a double edged sword.
One reason we have such extensive E&P today is because oil was selling for over $125 a barrel in 2008. And there was a looming shortage of natural gas. In effect, the high prices of yesterday produced the low prices of today. Markets, what can’t they do?
Regardless, any oil shock would be temporary. I’ve always considered oil as more of an excuse to do nothing than an actual concern.
This post brought me out of hibernation.
Every Republican President since at least Eisenhower has been accused of incompetence and stupidity.
As far as Trump goes, don’t forget that Obama’s own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that Hillary’s promise of a no-fly zone over Syria was impossible to fulfill without going to war with Syria and with Russia. Remember Eisenhower’s warning about the military/industrial complex?
There are a lot of people invested in both financial and career terms in planning for war with Russia. Be that as it may, I think Trump took that assessment seriously. Rhetoric aside, he’s been, I think correctly, characterized as—so far—the least bellicose president in a long time. (My own suspicion is that the Chinese are working behind the scenes for the US to be tied up in combat away from the South China Sea, though a counterargument is that China benefits from low oil prices. China wants to grab as many assets as possible worldwide to cushion its coming population crash, and right now has an excess of military age males.)
Border control was a major campaign issue for Trump; virtually the entire Democrat party and a lot of the Republican Party were and are invested in open borders. The Democrats see a permanent electoral majority; California’s one party state is the model. Trump threatens the immigration industrial complex, which is, if it can be imagined, even more based on rent-seeking than the military version.
Not only that, the immigration industrial complex has put in place conditions that benefit the entire social services industrial complex which includes the domestic social assistance, immigration services, homeless services, and the administrative complex that wrangles all of the above plus the gender/racial/whatever activism industry.
The social services industry is the foundation much of the rent-seeking “private” sector (including the non-profit sector, the government services “private” sector and other bureaucracy wranglers, much of the education bureaucracy) and of course the various levels of government.
Trump ran on cutting the administrative state and to widespread dismay is actually doing it.
Furthermore, the immigration industrial complex is international, and so is the investment in a new cold war with Russia, preferably going hot locally at locales of NATO’s preference (e.g. Syria, but not Crimea or Ukraine. Too many EuroAmerican rice bowls in Ukraine (cough, cough, Biden.) No wonder Five Eyes were on the Trump campaign (and maybe Ben Carson’s, too) and that there seems to have been international intelligence input into the Russia Collusion hoax. Dan Bongino thinks that Brennan conned Comey into doing his domestic dirty work, knowing that Comey wouldn’t look too closely at the faked evidence.) Once that was off and running, the lid would come off if Hillary lost.
The Democrat agenda has been impeachment since before Trump was inaugurated. His “high crimes and misdemeanors” were getting elected and then fulfilling promises.
In addition, I think the Democrats recognized instantly they were dealing with a force they were utterly unprepared to fight – another version of themselves.
Republicans could always be made to feel shame, to ‘unite’ the country for the greater good, to resign, recuse themselves, to be the parental model for the country, and never go as low in their own defense as Democrats were willing to go in their attacks. This, by the way, also appalled the Never Trumpers, as their entire argument had become, Republicans are better people than Democrats and our elected representatives ( especially President) proves it. This approach metastasized during the Clinton era. (I’m not saying this is entirely wrong, it’s just not a very good default approach)
These Never Trump Republicans held special pride that, at least their guy or gal would always do the ‘right thing’ and give way to a Democrat, who would immediately do all the wrong things, but at least they could not be held responsible, since they themselves weren’t – God forbid -Democrats.
Policy actually became a secondary argument and as we see now, a tertiary priority.
The moral argument became moot with Trump. Democrats to this day are still deploying their old weapons of shaming which worked so well in the last 5 decades, hoping that this latest scandal they’ve uncovered – or invented – will bring Godzilla down. Many of us who have been at effect of having our elected representatives slain, or worse, co-opted by this weaponry are reveling in watching our Godzilla push down establishment buildings whilst barely reacting to the cannons and gunfire.
Because Trump is Toto,( sorry for the mixed movie metaphors) who, as a dog, walks around naked and occasionally pees on the carpet, ultimately he’s simply who he is. Toto is a dog, and Trump is Trump. We really can’t blame either for being who they are.
The smart Democrats never thought Trump was stupid. That’s just been another weapon they have in their arsenal which hasn’t been updated in decades but useful for the propaganda narrative to satiate their many dumbed-down supporters.
Much of what animates Democrats ( and people in general, to be fair) is not so much what they actually believe but what they want to believe. Honest Democrats, who can be found mostly in the hard left camp, have a healthy respect for Trumps abilities. Most Bernie Sanders supporters have a much more realistic view of Trump. They still dislike him personally and ideologically, but they also see behind the curtain ( they just want a very different Oz).
We are in the stage where the Great Oz is loudly proclaiming through the microphone, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”And pushing every effect-button on his console. In the film that lasts just a few seconds. In our world it’s lasting years.
I’d like to nominate this for comment of the month.
Maybe Trump is also Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Sacrecrow. On the way to the Presidency and in it he found his courage, his heart and his wisdom. Trump vanquished the witch of the East and now the other forces are threatened. Flying monkeys are deployed. Of course, we are the Munchkins.
It’s the hero’s journey in real time.
My appreciation for this amazing epic piece of art continues to grow.
Try this flavor, it will provide a refreshing different appreciation:
To your first point, I wrote this elsewhere:
To your second point, as FDR allegedly said about Samoza, “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”
Thanks Dr.
And your posts have been excellent- and inspiring!