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Quote of the Day: President Donald J. MacGuffin
To me, the key to understanding Trumpism is remembering why he was elected. What do I mean? Voters chose Donald Trump as an antidote to the growing inflammation caused by the (OK, deep breath…) prosperity-crushing, speech-inhibiting, nanny-state building, carbon-obsessing, patriarchy-bashing, implicit bias-accusing, tokey-wokey, globalist, swamp-creature governing class–all perfectly embodied by the Democrats’ 2016 nominee.
This was from the Op-Ed in the February 10th Wall Street Journal by their Inside View columnist, Andy Kessler. The rest of the column describes all the distractions used by President Trump to set up the press and the other party, to take their attention away from all the positive things getting done behind the scenes. It worked, too, didn’t it?
Published in Group Writing
They were so obsessed about getting Trump before the 2020 election they’ve failed to set up their normal talking points used against any generic Republican president seeking re-election. And even if they tried it at this late date, talking about “Two Americas” and Trump and the GOP being beholden to the “Wall Street 1 Percenters” is kind of tough to sell when Michael Bloomberg is your second highest-profile candidate now behind Bernie (and goes to the reality that much of big business really likes crony capitalism and has now found the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party as their preferred home. Hillary and even Obama could pull off the con of pretending to rail against the super-rich while making deals with them for donations — the Dems can’t even think about doing that with Trump if Bloomberg ends up at the top of their ticket).
The sad part is how many conservatives are caught by the scintillating twinkles of the distraction. We’re supposed to be deeper thinkers than that. We’re supposed to be the ones looking at results rather than intentions.
Both versions of Statism are toxic to Liberty. However, Liberty requires taking personal responsibility which is HARD, something the majority of modern Americans eschew. That’s why both parties pander to their bases by promising the bestest free stuff. The Republicans under Trump are marginally better than the Dems so they will get my vote in Nov, however they don’t even closely approach what I’d prefer if it were available. At least they don’t espouse policies that would destroy what economic freedom still exists. Not right away anyhow.
Sure they can. Hypocrisy has never been a problem for the Dems. They’ll just hope the LIV’s won’t know or notice that Bloomberg’s so wealthy.
And it’s still working. Only stories of sizable note make it to the top of the fold during the 24/7 anti-Trump bash-a-thon . . .
Some folks deal mostly with abstractions, some are lawyers but most are journalists or writers of some kind, and have little experience working, manufacturing, buying, selling out in the real world. Perhaps when one works only with abstractions the difference between Washington, which is all abstract and the real world where people live and work is not so clear and takes more effort.
The bitter eruptions over Trump’s tweets, the weird fantasy that Trump is a greater threat to the Constitution than Obama or the crypto-commies currently seeking the Dem nomination and the complete absence of a coherent, realistic agenda … it’s almost as if the secret deal that Mueller failed to uncover has paid off and Putin’s agents have infiltrated the Democratic Party and turned it completely stupid. They couldn’t really be doing this voluntarily, could they?
It’ll work with the Clinton wing of the party, and most of the media. But the Bernie Bros are the truest of True Believers in the evils of capitalism, and the guy who made his billions selling proprietary data information terminals and news to Wall Street is just a bridge too far for them to cross if he gets the nomination, and especially if he spikes the football and taunts them in the end zone by picking the woman they think stole the nomination from Bernie in ’16 as his VP.
You’re not going to get them to turn around after Labor Day and go all-in on fighting the evil 1 percenters by electing Bloomberg no matter how much they hate Trump (even the teacher’s unions are grumbly about Bloomberg right now over his charter school support. If he doesn’t have them in 110 percent plus the Bernie Bros, he’s in trouble, though I expect him to do a Stop-and-Frisk like flip on charters any day now).
I especially like “tokey-wokey”.
I liked all the underlined descriptions. You do have to take a deep breath to say them all. Are there more to be added? How about “Trump voter-denigrating”?
I’m sorry to rain on the parade…but remember two things:
“The voters” didn’t choose Trump. They chose Clinton. Now, it is a good thing the voters don’t elect the president (the states do), or she would be president right now.
In my opinion, the middle class, moderate labor “democrats” who came across and voted for Trump did so because of their pocket book, because he spoke to them in a way Conservatives haven’t in a long time. And, it’s important to remember the visceral hatred many people had for Clinton. It is hard to imagin that folks will have that same level of hatred really for any of the current crop of Democrat candidates, especially now that Kamala Harris is out.
Hopefully this time around more people will recognize they are doing well under Trump, and vote for more of the same.
Biden’s goal was to try and claim that Trump boom was really Obama’s doing, and that if elected, he wouldn’t rock the boat too much. Bloomberg’s sort of running down the same lane, where his main thing to try and get the left excited are nanny state ones like gun control. Bernie’s the one who is going to run on blowing everything up based on the idea of ‘fairness’. How many people with good jobs and improving financial situations will buy into that is open to question, but it’s hard to see him winning back any of the 2008-12 Obama voters in key states who flipped to Trump in 2016.
<https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/new-repo>
Sorry @spin but 45,000 votes were duplicates from just 27 states, and that doesn’t count the states that refused to give Heritage.Org the information they needed, in addition it does not count the illegal voters, or the ballots of the deceased. So even with Hillery’s fraud, we did indeed choose Trump to be our president. Your above statement is pushed into my face by family members so often I want to slap them. Also many, many fake news sources still promote the nonsense that Hillery won the popular vote. We chose Trump, warts and all, and thank goodness we did.
And frankly, I want him to keep tweeting, otherwise we won’t know what really is going on. The vast majority of news sources LIE.
Yes, certainly.
Hillary won the California popular vote by 5 million, which probably included about 2 million illegals. The rest of the country gave Trump a popular vote majority of 2 million.
Dov Fischer writes for The American Spectator:
But it couldn’t hurt.
Trump’s lack of ‘softness’, thanks to his war against the Manhattan elites over the past 40-plus years also pushes his style for many more into the Don Rickles type of put-down humor directed outward, with fewer self-depreciating jokes.
Toss in the unapologetic outer borough (not inner, as in the article) ethos and taste, and you end up with someone whose lack of restraint has annoyed the people who might have been OK with non-threatening Borscht Belt humor, but even by the mid-1970s weren’t going to Grossinger’s, Kushner’s or The Concord anymore (and it’s also fun to note that the county where all the Borscht Belt hotels in the Catskills were located — Sullivan County — went Trump +11 over Hillary in 2016. They get him up there, or at least, they get what the voters in the main six downstate counties are doing to them up there…)
I don’t understand trying to settle arguments with popular vote ‘winning’ when it differs from the electoral college result. It is just an indicator. The electoral college assigns electors proportionately to each state in accordance with their population. It avoids outcomes where difficulty getting to the polls in rural states from bad weather or natural disasters would unfairly cause under-representation of votes tallied if it were in a national popular poll. BHO himself also touted the inherent difficulties of interfering with the presidential election under the electoral college system.
It’s in order to indoctrinate residents of the US to think the electoral college is unfair and undemocratic. It’s a phase in the effort to do away with the electoral college. It helps if people come to believe that the EC vote must not stand if it contradicts the Will of The People.
It’s the same Leftist activists and thought leaders who want open borders* and who think that all residents of the US, not just citizens should vote. The same people who are trying to pass a law in California to make voting mandatory.
*”Conservatives” who want open borders generally oppose non-citizen voting though the distinction may not make much difference given that open borders conservatives often favor pretty liberal amnesty policies.
He probably knew first hand.
Your page didn’t load. So…by our tally, how many votes were recorded for Hillary that weren’t valid?
My primary point is that many people didn’t vote for Trump so much as against Hillary, and she still got a lot of votes. There isn’t a Hillary this time. Now what might help us is that we’ve had three years of Trump and a good economy, and 3 years of the Democrats shooting their own toes off, one by one.
The counter point here is of course the use of “the voters chose”. If there are 100 voters, and you and I are running for dog catcher, and you win because 51 of them voted for you, then you don’t really get to say “voters chose” you. You won the election because a squeaked out a simply, razor thin majority. Now…the President isn’t elected by voters. He or she is elected by states. The voters simply choose how they want their state to vote. So the language is wrong, all the way around.
Great post, RB! John Fund mentioned the same thing.
But it was Dennis Miller that put it most succinctly: “I think since Trump doesn’t drink, lighting up a–holes on Twitter is his Cognac before bed.”
Tokey-wokey?
Wasn’t he one of the Teletubbies?