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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ubRx...
Rust in Piece.
Yes, he did ok in his term, but I'm not a big fan of settling for "ok." As I mentioned to him (or more accurately: to his disinterested staffers,) a couple of times in some of the many messages I sent via the http://WhiteHouse.gov comment form: If an Administration - "...your Administration..." is not attacking the philosophical root of its opponents' agenda, then all of the Executive Orders and all of the half-hearted rollbacks (like Obamacare, which has already arisen from its four-year "timeout" and is poised to enslave again,) will be simply overturned - and as simply forgotten - within weeks of the next Democrat Administration's taking office. Which is precisely what we're seeing unfold before our very eyes, right now.
What the Republican Party desperately needs - and has needed for some 32 years - is a President who has enough grasp of America's intellectual foundations to be not only an intellectual leader, but an intellectual teacher. Trump hasn't exhibited evidence even of having read any of the Founding documents, to say nothing of carrying around with him a working knowledge of Americanism's intellectual requirements.
But to step down from that lofty expectation to the issue of simple nuts-and-bolts competency: A spotlight on that elephant lounging in that corner over there, which nobody seems to want to talk about:
=> Why would we want to re-run a candidate who has just shown us that he was not even capable of defeating a lame-arse cipher like Joe Biden? A bright nine-year-old could've wiped the floor up with Biden-Harris - blindfolded, both hands tied behind his back, and stone drunk. But Trump, for all his bluster and all his "rough and crude" bulldozer personality, could not manage that task.
Why am I the only one asking this rather obvious question?
Yes, we arguably have a kind of crisis situation which would seem to demand a "win at all costs with the candidate most likely to do so" compromise. Even if you ignore the inherent rottenness of compromise, and ignore the Pyrrhic folly of successfully electing a President almost entirely devoid of philosophical grounding of any kind, and who previously did not eradicate, in total, a single one of the vast horde of must-eradicate evils from the political realm (that fabled "swamp-draining,") again there's - ahem! - a largish pachyderm in yon corner. To reiterate:
On what fanciful basis can we assume that a candidate who's just proven beyond a doubt that he's sub-par to ... Joe Biden? ... will somehow magicallly pull off a win in 2024 if we just...let him try again? That's a real head-scratcher, from where I sit.
Even his son Eric would be a vast step up - with all of the name-recognition (for good or for bad,) but little of the baggage, and with what seems like a little more sobriety and common sense.
But we have a Constitutional scholar in Ted Cruz, we have a no-nonsense Governor who, much like the Tiananmen "tank man," did not hesitate to stand up, immediately and virtually alone, in defiance of an avalanche of statist orgying - in Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota.
We have plenty of good minds from which to choose.
So why are we fixating on the guy who lost an election to a ticket comprising a guy with dementia and a running mate with a dope problem?
Because you are the only one here who believes Buy-dem won the election.
For all his faults, frankly, Trump is too good for the GOP. The party has betrayed America since its founding. The only good thing I can say about the GOP is that sometimes they are a little better than the Democrats. The GOP party motto should be : We're not Democrats. That is the depth of their principles.
ffa, again I disagree strenuously, and I think that passing it all off on election fraud is a bit of a cop-out. But several points to be made on that issue anyway:
Of course this election was awash in fraud, maybe more than any other in modern American history, largely (but not exclusively,) engineered by opportunistic Democrats as a convenient adjunct to this ClowPiv-19 fiasco. But this time there's a pair of elephants in the room. Elephant #1: Again this is Joe Biden we're talking about here - and Kamala Harris, a woman so lame even the Democrats couldn't stand her, so much so that she had to bail out of the Democrat primary a full three months before the rest of the pack. Biden himself is easily the weakest candidate the Democrats have run since Walter Mondale, and everybody outside of far-Left news organizations knows what happened to Mondale in 1984: The single worst landslide defeat in American campaign history.
In short, the 2020 election should not even have been close - even with massive, broad-scale election fraud.
Elephant #2: Who was it who had been President in the four years leading up to November 2020? Actually you've just pointed out another massive, catastrophic default that Trump committed, alongside of failing - utterly - to "drain the swamp" of Leftwing-dominated American education, or even to sop up some of the moisture along its periphery:
Screw "draining the swamp"; one of the very first things Trump should have done straight out of the chute on January 20, 2017 - that's: should have done but did not do - was to take a flamethrower to the Democrat Party's already-institutionalized assaults on American pluralism.
Some of us have been potbanging and shouting at the top of our lungs since December of 2000 and its gargantuan "dimpled chad" fiasco for the need for a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of the electoral process - via mandatory voter ID, the strict restoration of Election Day to one (1) single day, the strict abolition of any and all absentee voting except for people too sick or "too overseas" to vote in person, strict registration cutoff dates and verification procedures, an abolition of computerized voting machines in favor of paper ballots and non-networked tally machines, and strict US-Mint-type certified and pre-vetted guard details to accompany ballots from printing through tallying.
So on which communications-devoid tropical paradise had Trump been lounging from December 2000 through November 2020? How could he not know about this little... election fraud problem? How could he not place it right there in the Top 5 Priorities list for 01-20-17, maybe behind only national defense and eradicating Zinn, Gore and militant collectivist irrationality from American schools? On what basis, other than gross ineptitude, could he be shocked - shocked I tell you - to find, as late as the second week of November 2020, that "Oh, gee, the Democrats seem to have cheated. Well, we'll have to unleash the kraken on them, fer sure." Which "kraken" of voluminous election fraud evidence (Powell & co had even convinced me it was there,) inconveniently failed to show up. And please don't fall back on "Well... the courts are all corrupt and won't allow the evidence to be presented." Thataway lies rabbits.
So take the Democrat-Socialist Party's very first House bill, passed today, as photographic-negative instruction on the kind of activist for core Republicanism we must have in a Presidential candidate: They went straight for censorship of political speech and an expansion and cementing of the erosion of our right to vote, as their first priority. Imagine if Trump had possessed the principle - or simple presence of mind, for cryin' out loud - to have taken the opposite activist action, just as aggressively, in the first days of his term. "Imagine" is all we're left with because....
He did not.
What he should have hammered through to completion is the short list of election reforms I just mentioned, and launched a veritable war against all threats by government to freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, conscience. Instead we got all of: "Say, was that a pin hitting the floor?" Oh yes, and some rousing criticisms of "censorship" by... private entities. I'm think it's safe to say Mr. Trump has never stumbled across Rand's article "Man's Rights."
So here are some of the things - if I can get my verbose arse to condense them into a single sentence - that are needed in a Republican Presidential candidate:
Not slogans, not increasingly-threadbare excuses, but someone who can intelligently, clearly, forcefully and persuasively articulate the key principles of Americanism, within the general form of: "This is what we as a nation need to do, this is where we need to go, and [most importantly] this is why..."
And the same for the GOP as a whole. Other than hyperbolic rhetoric, "Trump is too good for the GOP" is a statement that is flat-out stunning in its implications. Trump is such a great intellectual leader for reason, for individualism, for human rights, for liberty, for capitalism, for a rational defense, that he doesn't need no stinkin' Republican Congressmen or voters? Really?
And who else but the Republican Party? The LP? I'm hoping that's not your proposal, else I'd have to ask why we're not championing Andre Marrou here.
Aside from an excellent 2016 analysis by author Robert Bidinotto of Trump's appeal to downtrodden rank-and-file Republicans (you'll need to dig through his Facebook posts because I don't think he put it on his blog,) I'm still having a hard time understanding why some other Republicans are so willing to grant to this guy these superhuman qualities. I can grant him a chunk of admiration for outstanding business acumen (I was a big fan of "Art of the Deal" and of Trump The Businessman back in the '80s,) but in the wake of his stint as President, on the Republican Politician Scale Of Excellence I would put him halfway between GWB and Gerald Ford. IOW, roughly a 5.5 on a 10 scale.
Look, if he could somehow win Round Two after completely botching Round One, and if he could actually do in a second term what he failed miserably to get done in his first, I'd be happy to eat my words.
But I have exactly zero confidence in either eventuality. Given November 2020 - and the span of time from then back to January 2017 - why would I? Why would anybody?
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