Former President Donald Trump’s list of critics and enemies certainly includes a lot of truly awful and nasty people.
From CNN and MSNBC hosts to neocon war hawks to the so-called intelligence community to Lincoln Project con artists, an awful lot of people don’t like Trump.
And of course the Democrat conspiracy theories about Trump being a Russian asset and the Russians successfully “hacking the election” were gibberish from the start.
And yes, many of Trump’s supporters are vilified and abused by elitist left-wing snobs who don’t care to understand why they support Donald Trump.
All that said, Donald Trump is a malign force in American politics who does not deserve a second term in the White House.
A thought experiment
On the one hand, Trump has obviously done things that, if done by a Democrat, would make Republicans foam at the mouth.
Imagine, for example, if President Barack Obama lost the 2012 presidential election, spent every day after that insisting that the election was stolen from him (and thus the country was stolen from the American people) , called at least one secretary of state to demand that they “find.” the votes” to help change the results, staged a “stop the steal” demonstration outside the Capitol building while the electoral votes were being counted and said nothing as his supporters stormed the Capitol and assaulted police officers Obama, in this scenario, would also have been angrily attacking Vice President Joe Biden for not violating the Constitution and throwing out electoral votes.
Then imagine that Obama kept things, including the call to “terminate” the Constitution. Separately, imagine that Obama faced possible criminal prosecution for the aforementioned efforts to interfere in one of the state election recounts and was found liable for sexual assault and defamation in a civil trial.
Imagine how mad the Republicans would be at the Democrats who, in the midst of all this, apologized to Obama and said it was all a Republican plot against him orchestrated by the “deep state.” And besides, the economy was booming, so all of Obama’s mistakes were totally fine. Only minor character flaws.
Go ahead, imagine.
No, really, think about it.
Seriously, meditate on it.
If you really thought about it, my point is made.
Trump is not a conservative
Second, Trump has alienated Republicans from any coherent conservative philosophy.
Even before COVID, Trump blew up the national debt and didn’t care. His signature statement on fiscal matters: “Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country.”
He abandoned conservative commitments to free trade in favor of abusing executive power to launch a trade war with longtime allies like Canada, Mexico, and the European Union because he seriously believed the following nonsense: “Because of the tariffs we can start paying large amounts. amounts of the ‘national debt’, while reducing taxes for our people.”
Trump clearly didn’t understand that the tariffs are actually taxes “for our people,” that the main result of the tariffs was to undercut American companies and workers by raising the costs of doing business, and that tariff revenue was a trickle in the bucket to the trillion dollar deficits he approved each year as president.
And now, ironically, he’s running to the left of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, repeatedly hammering DeSantis for supporting reforms to America’s unsustainable entitlement programs. Trustees for Social Security and Medicare have long warned that both programs are facing insolvency, which will result in significant benefit cuts if nothing is done. And doing nothing is exactly what Trump wants to do.
“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security,” he said in a video earlier this year.
Instead, Trump has floated solutions that cut foreign aid and “left-wing gender programs in the military.” If not. This will not make Medicare and Social Security solvent.
These fiscally and economically reckless Trump ideas may be good policy for Trump in the short term, but they are bad for the country and worse for the coherence of the Republican Party in the long term.
Trump is a loser
The Americans gave him a chance in 2016 and have since rejected him and his ilk, which should tell you something.
In 2018, the “blue wave” swept away Republican control of the House.
In 2020, Trump was kicked out of the White House. He and his supporters were reduced to blaming everything from Venezuelan voting machines to ghost ballot-stuffing operations.
In 2021, Republicans managed to lose two GOP Senate seats in Georgia thanks to Trump’s tantrums, in turn losing control of the Senate.
In 2022, Trumpism quelled what should have been a “red tide” by giving clowns like Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker as Senate candidates in key races, protecting the Democratic Senate and giving the Republican House a razor-thin majority.
Public opinion polls have consistently shown that the majority of Americans do not want either Trump or President Biden to run again. They want someone new.
If you’re a Republican, conservative, and deeply concerned about woke leftists winning elections and taking the country to a bad place, shouldn’t you want a president who can actually, I don’t know, win? Because the reaction to Trump is what gave the country big wins for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
The country needs better
Many pundits have complained in recent weeks about CNN’s town hall with Trump, saying it shouldn’t have been “platformed.” I do not agree.
Like it or not, Donald Trump is a major political figure in the United States and, by extension, the world. It is important to know what he says and how he thinks.
Anyone who hasn’t been drinking the MAGA Kool-Aid, thanks to CNN, got to see and hear how incoherent and insane Trump is. We could see and hear Trump, right after being found responsible for sexual abuse, attack the victim on live TV with complaints: “Her dog or her cat was called Vagina, the judge didn’t allow it” .
We live in the “Idiocracy” as long as it is a powerful political force in the United States. And guess what? He is, therefore we are.
You can contact Sal Rodriguez at salrodriguez@scng.com
