Should Trump run again, and should we support him?
In the spirit of the old Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times.”, it is interesting that we have such an incompetent administration in the White House, and interesting to watch them stumble around and lie and spin, and bungle so many things important to Americans. So what to do?
It is clear Trump wants to run again, most likely to face Hillary again. But should he?
If one looks back at his 4 years in office, one sees a record of great accomplishments. Whether foreign or domestic, his administration took on seemingly impossible tasks and won.
We had relatively secure borders.
The economy was booming.
Inflation was nil.
Interest rates were low.
Unemployment was at record lows.
We got a COVID vaccine in record time.
Our relationships with other nations greatly improved.
North Korea and Russia were talking to us.
Our trade was greatly improved, and China trade deal renegotiated.
NAFDA was dumped and a new trade agreement signed that was more fair to the US.
So why would we not re-elect this guy? Answer: The media.
We lived through 4years of Trump in the White House with the media nipping at his heels the whole time. Trump never had a real chance to govern without lies, rumors and innuendo following his every step. He not only had to fight the Dumocraps, there were the false Russian collusion charges, the false dossier, the false inditement of Trump staff, lies and misrepresentations galore, false impeachments and an American public divided, rightly or wrongly, as never before.
I support Trump, and I believe that his record and accomplishments will stand up against anyone’s. In addition he has shown that he can get the job done. He deserves a second term. But what concerns me is that the Cabal, the Deep State, and/or his opponents and the media will pick up where they left off in January 2021, and we will have another 4years like his previous 4 years with fabricated lies, distortions and fabricated scandals as then promulgated by a corrupt leftist media and the socialist/communist Dumocrap Party.
So here’s the question; if we know that Trump will be slandered and face the same opposition and baseless accusations as in his previous administration, would you vote for him in 2024?
It is clear Trump wants to run again, most likely to face Hillary again. But should he?
If one looks back at his 4 years in office, one sees a record of great accomplishments. Whether foreign or domestic, his administration took on seemingly impossible tasks and won.
We had relatively secure borders.
The economy was booming.
Inflation was nil.
Interest rates were low.
Unemployment was at record lows.
We got a COVID vaccine in record time.
Our relationships with other nations greatly improved.
North Korea and Russia were talking to us.
Our trade was greatly improved, and China trade deal renegotiated.
NAFDA was dumped and a new trade agreement signed that was more fair to the US.
So why would we not re-elect this guy? Answer: The media.
We lived through 4years of Trump in the White House with the media nipping at his heels the whole time. Trump never had a real chance to govern without lies, rumors and innuendo following his every step. He not only had to fight the Dumocraps, there were the false Russian collusion charges, the false dossier, the false inditement of Trump staff, lies and misrepresentations galore, false impeachments and an American public divided, rightly or wrongly, as never before.
I support Trump, and I believe that his record and accomplishments will stand up against anyone’s. In addition he has shown that he can get the job done. He deserves a second term. But what concerns me is that the Cabal, the Deep State, and/or his opponents and the media will pick up where they left off in January 2021, and we will have another 4years like his previous 4 years with fabricated lies, distortions and fabricated scandals as then promulgated by a corrupt leftist media and the socialist/communist Dumocrap Party.
So here’s the question; if we know that Trump will be slandered and face the same opposition and baseless accusations as in his previous administration, would you vote for him in 2024?
Previous comments...
Yeah, he's screwed up a few times, but he's still the best for America to come along in a long time.
Trump is not perfect. He’s not a politician who was raised and groomed by the Party to have the right spin/sound bite at any and all times. Disgusting person? Maybe, but that’s relative. I ignore that he runs his mouth, tweets, grabs women by the pussy (God knows I wish he didn’t.)
That said, I consider Trump, with all his flaws, to be a patriot. He believes in the Constitution, and the vision of the Founders. He took no salary his entire time in office. And he told it like it is with regard to the shenanigans of Pelosi, Schumer and the rest.
I first voted for President in 1968. In that election, and every presidential election since, I have voted for the lesser of two evils. I don’t expect future presidential elections to be any different. That’s what you get when you distill down the wishes of everyone across the country to one person - half or more of the people don’t like him much.
The question today is whether we support Trump if he runs again, and when I think of the candidates the Dumocraps are likely to field, the question answers itself.
Turn off the media because some of it is getting through.
We need someone squeaky clean, and that does not describe Trump, as much as I love him and appreciate what he did (and didn't do). Rather than go on and on, I'll just say I agree with the things Drive Train has to say. (Edit: most of the things Drive Train has to say).
Instead, we now have the dirt on them. And Dem Congresscritters are resigning in droves because they know it.
If you want the Full Monty on this vital point - principle vs. pragmatic fluff (and worse, tribal collectivism) - I recommend to everybody who's interested in the Trump question and in what the GOP needs to do - nay, must do - to clean up the gargantuan mess we're in, that they read these essential analyses. And if you agree with them, bookmark and disseminate them to all in your networks:
Edward Hudgins' 2006 piece "Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party:
https://www.atlassociety.org/post/cri...
Robert Bidinotto's award-winning 2007 piece "Up From Conservatism":
https://www.atlassociety.org/post/up-...
Mr. Bidinotto's 2016 follow-up "The Republican Crack-Up, Revisited":
https://bidinotto.blogspot.com/2016/0...
And his two scathing but important statements on Trump and the 2016 GOP race, "A Vote for #Neither"
https://bidinotto.blogspot.com/2016/0...
and "In the Wake of the 2016 GOP Convention":
https://bidinotto.blogspot.com/2016/0...
My own perspective on Trump's term: Yes, he managed to get a few things done that were positives. But as we are seeing in vivid, scratch-and-sniff 3D clarity, not a single one of those momentary accomplishments lasted beyond his term. Why? They were tied to his range-of-the-moment pragmatism, not to any deeper animating principles. Principles like Individualism, for example. Or human rights. Or the morality of capitalism and immorality of collectivism. Or the fact that government - every government, at any level, is potentially, perennially, the single greatest threat to human life in existence.
For those who were around then, recall that President Reagan, for all of his own imperfections, succeeded not only in putting these principles into practice in his policies, but succeeded in imbuing American culture with those principles as well. To use the lingo of that RINO cipher George H.W. Bush, Reagan had "the vision thing." Trump did not, and does not. He's a finger-to-the-wind pragmatist, not a beacon of principle. And one thing we know with absolute certainty is that - thanks to that absence of philosophic grounding - he is not and cannot be an activist for Founding principles, much less an activist for the radical reforms which should now be considered mandatory for any Republican officeholder.
To run through a short roster of the vital reforms he left untouched, and which utter default is biting us now in a big way:
- He did exactly nothing to end, decisively, the absolute war the Democrat-Socialist Party has been waging against American election integrity since November of 2000. After four years of sitting on his hands he had the audacity to act surprised that the 2020 election was riddled with large-scale fraud. The reason? Trump's inaction;
- He did exactly nothing to end the domination of the Howard Zinn / Albert Gore fraud within American education - finally latching onto the wishy-washy haze of something he called "Patriotic Education," not on January 20, 2017, but after those four years of inactivity, in the midst of his failed 2020 campaign;
- He presided over the descent of America and the rest of the world into this Covid-cloaked global totalitarian putsch - leaving it untouched and fully intact through 2020, when he should've been identifying it as a CCP bio-weapon attack on the world, organizing the nations of the world to call for the abolition and dismantling of the Communist Chinese regime on that basis. Not likely to happen, but as I've said before, politics is a pendulum-swing; the side that pulls the hardest sets the entire context of debate, and this Covid putsch should have earned Xi and his brutal thugs a global blowback to send them reeling. Instead we got, from Trump, the sound of pins hitting the floor. Zilch. At the very least he should have taken a flamethrower to this whole grab-bag of mask mandates, the lockdowns, the virtual shredding of the First Amendment, and the Nuremberg Code-violating neo-Mengele vaccine mandates. But... zilch. Just nothing. Trump. Let. It. Stand.
- Similarly, the entire framework for Obamacare - which ought to be identified as a human rights violation to its core - remains intact. Again, utter inaction from Trump. He let it stand when it was - is - imperative that it be repealed and dismantled to its every word, as the vastly superior candidate Ted Cruz put it.
I'm up against the 5000 character limit, and that's just scratching the surface.
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Look at the weaponized FBI DOJ IRS And Executive Branch . None of them are defending the Constitution.
All your talk of principals are well and good , when the rule of law and the constitution is the guide.
We the people don’t have the rule of law enforced equally.
Kennedy wouldn't stand a chance today in the DemonRat party and I have serious doubts the RinoRepubs would accept him either.
We live in interesting times, and that's not meant to be complementary.
We need a gloves-off fighter. A honey badger of a president who believes in the Constitution and ain't afraid to kick @$$.
that he got done as mush as he did is to his credit
what we do not is is another politician that is 100% out of touch with reality, with We the PEople as almost all are
we now see Teed Cruz lying about how bad Jan 6th was
As you can probably guess I am not only not a fan of Twit-length one-liners, I consider Twit-length one-liners to be an insult to intellectual discourse. So given that I like to present arguments instead of one-liners, that number is not in the thousands. If that's what you expected, then I'd ask you to contemplate the concept of "quality over quantity" and to familiarize yourself with the results of clicking on any given member's nick. When I look at my list, I myself am surprised at how much I've written on the subject of Trump's foray into Republican politics over the last couple of years.
The intention of my above post - and I think it's crystal clear to anyone willing to read - is not to let this devolve into a High School bull session about "Who would be nice as a new Presidential candidate." The intention of my post is to address the specific topic raised in the opening post. To recap:
"Should Trump run again, and should we support him?"
I presented a short list of what I consider to be must-read preliminary homework on this specific topic, along with my own position on Trump as a leader and on Trump's record of performance over his four-year term.
And so far I haven't seen anyone here address anything I've said, much less indicate they could even be bothered to spend a few minutes reading so much as one of the articles I linked. Instead I see everything from defensive bandwagoneering to excuse-making, and even some juvenile ad hominem potshots of the "you must be Hilary Clinton or Mike Pence" type. (And for the record, it was Trump who selected Pence, not me. WTH)
As I've said elsewhere on this site, if the people here are in agreement with Objectivist philosophy - or at minimum are familiar with its key principles (else I cannot for the life of me understand why they would be here in the first place) - then we are presumably intelligent people selecting political leaders on the basis of their merits as intellectual leaders.
This criterion is distinctly different - nay, the polar opposite - from emotionalistic, bandwagon, beer-hoist-hell-yeah, "Don't you dare bad-mouth Our Guy" juvenility. This latter is a big part of why we've had a thirty-three-year parade of inept buffoons both running for and sitting in the office where the President of the United States should be and should have been. Thirty-three years is a disturbingly long time for the United States to be operating without a President.
As Mr. Bidinotto said in his April 2016 post:
"For decades, every time the GOP put forth some lousy liberal loser, we individualists and constitutionalists were told to put aside our reservations and support him at the polls. It was just a short-term compromise, they told us, because we had to beat the Democrat du jour if we hoped for America to survive until the long term, when we might get better candidates. Well, Donald Trump is the long term that all those short-term, expedient compromises have brought us to."
My position is simple: We can (and must) do better than Trump. Much better. And while no one politician is going to magically right every wrong, we do not have time for another placeholder whose best effort amounts to lame damage-control against the collectivist cult's ceaseless barrage of assaults on humanity. We arguably did not have time for placeholders 33 years ago, when that cipher GHWB tossed out his "read my lips" fakery. Much less for Dole / GWB / Romney / McCain. As I said, clearly, in my previous post, we must have an activist who is at least as radical in innovating steps back to core Americanism as the Demo-Socs are radical in innovating steps to enslave humanity under neo-communism. It's hard to lose when you're unopposed, and so far the collectivists are winning by default - in the form of Trump's inaction, among that of many others.
Putting aside coaldigger's Leftwing-standard backhand swipe (below) at Reagan-as-"actor," obviously there is no single politician who is going to magically right every wrong, and there is no guarantee that any given agenda will succeed. But those facts are not arguments for excusing Trump's refusal to even attempt the kind of aggressive agendas I mentioned in the previous (and in many other posts here at JGO.) The man sat on his complacent hands for four years and let this garbage grow four years more dangerous, when he should've been throwing punches (and draining swamps, to use his un-kept promise,) from January 20, 2017. And he did not.
And on a purely election-performance basis, I'm still scratching my head as to how anyone with a functioning cognitive apparatus could look at a candidate who was too weak to beat an opponent with dementia coupled with a running mate with a dope problem, and say "Oh yeah, that's the guy we need in 2024." Hey, why don't we just dust off Mitt Romney?
So this is a horse-water proposition. I've made what I think is a pretty reasonable request that people set aside the time-span of a standard-issue sitcom to read five sober analyses of Trumpism and of the conflict for leadership within the Republican Party (which persists to this day,) and take a sober, new look at Trump's actual quality as an intellectual leader and as an activist for Republican goals, shorn of personality-cultism, shorn of bandwagoneering, and shorn of the irrelevancy of "He's better than the Democrats."
As Republicans we can - and must - do better than Trump.
The arguments for the "why" are above. But I do not have the time to banter with people who refuse to read them. Debate is a two-way street, and I'm getting a whole lot of "brick wall" here.
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Two words: Supreme Court. Not to say that Trump's picks are perfect, but think about what the Court would look like if Hillary had been able to choose three justices.
Also Trump delivered several hundred lower court justices that would have otherwise been selected by Hillary.
The man did some worthwhile things, as I said - and these Judgeships will be the most lasting - but this is just the Judicial branch. There is a whole great boatload of things he should've been pedal-to-the-metal on, from Day One.
I’m not advocating another candidate. I’m just asking the question to see what Gulchers think.
Trump is not perfect
what a news flash... /s
we knew this day one
Trump FIGHTS
we cannot spare him
or he does not fight
or mike pense downvoted me
First, he did, in fact, say many times that COVID19 was “the China virus”, and was excoriated for it, and labeled a racist.
The lockdowns and masks and the other actions you decry were “the science” led down the rabbit hole by the good Dr Fauci. The real damage has been done by Biden, his minions, and again, the good Dr Fauci.
Finally, perhaps you could expand the actions Trump should have taken to “ end, decisively, the absolute war the Democrat-Socialist Party has been waging against American election integrity since November of 2000.” Just how would you implement that without calling out the troops and implementing a fascist state?
But to get the tangent out of the way, the list is obvious and expanding: Ted Cruz, Allen West, Candace Owens, Kristi Noem, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker, Dan Crenshaw - to name a few.
I'm arguing that Trump, comparatively, is utterly devoid not only of these candidates' greater intellectual depth, but even of their ideological vision. A perfect example is what I mentioned above about his bizarre default on education:
In the period between his entry into the race in summer 2015 through his Inauguration in 2017 and to the end of his term, he gave evidence of complete obliviousness to there even existing a problem in American education. I honestly doubt he would've known (if indeed he does now,) of Howard Zinn's existence, or of the influence of Zinn's fraudulent work on students' attitudes toward core Americanism. It was only until the catastrophic spectacle of these punks, educated to America-hate, actually yanking down statues and publicly screaming "We're going to burn it [Western Civ] to the ground," that the condition of American "education" seemed to seep into his thick skull. Again, he didn't even address the issue until he was at the tail end of his re-election campaign - we are talking mid-September, 2020 - before he even got around to mentioning it! We cannot afford that level of obliviousness in a President or a Presidential candidate.
I'm thinking Cruz - a Constitutional scholar, BTW - or Owens, or Noem, or West, would be hammering away at this from Inauguration Day as a #1 priority. Which in point of fact it is: every single caustic emanation we see from the collectivist crowd, whether in politics, in academia, in news media, in entertainment, in religion, has its roots in education. Trump still seems shockingly unaware of this issue's importance.
There is no "perfect" politician in intellectual and ideological understanding and motivation. But finding politicians superior to Trump on ideological understanding and motivation is a veritable "fish in a barrel" proposition.
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But for the record, recall that Cruz was the single most consistently-principled candidate in the 2015-2016 roster until (and after) Trump bellyflopped into the middle of it, and I'm convinced that Kasich refused to drop out precisely because his job was to run interference on behalf of the Establishment types who were scared to death of another "Reagan Republican" actually getting the nomination. Sans Kasich there'd have been a stark contrast between two very different primary candidates; his lingering presence wiped out that clear choice and smeared Cruz as an "also-ran" after the media (enthusiastically,) and the Establishment alike had enshrined Trump, almost from the second he declared, as "frontrunner."
I voted Cruz / Fiorina in 2016 as a write-in, held my nose and voted for Trump in 2020 (primarily because of the alarming events of that summer,) and if Cruz - or another of the caliber of those I just mentioned - is not the 2024 GOP candidate, I will be writing him in again.
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A migration of the Hispanic vote to the GOP.
No, the ethnicity of a candidate should not matter, but there are a whole lot of people for whom ethnicity and "heritage" and "color" are everything - to the point where they will vote for someone of their own tribe before someone of another.
If the GOP were to nominate a black candidate of the strength of Allen West or Candace Owens, assuming either got elected it would essentially obliterate the Demo-Soc Party for the better part of the next century.
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or Mike Pence?