Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Donald Trump

38 Comments

…and the revolt of the unseen:

one day, the Deplorables, standing athwart history, yelled “Stop!” They saw their taxes given to crony capitalists, welfare recipients, and government employees; they saw their plants close and their jobs go overseas due to government regulations and taxes; they saw veterans used and abused by a dysfunctional Veteran’s Administration; they saw their cities erupt in protests and violence based on “Hands up, don’t shoot” lies; they saw their police officers assaulted and murdered by ideological thugs; they saw Islamic jihadists commit mass murder; and they saw the government schools force their kids to read Heather Has Two Mommies but otherwise leaving them uneducated.

The Deplorables had been neglected, forgotten, and abused for so long that the Ruling Elite just assumed they would fall in line as they always do. The Ruling Elite didn’t notice that the Deplorables had been pushed to the brink of despair. They were humiliated by unemployment and the foreclosure of their homes; they were sick and tired of twentysomethings defining marriage and bathroom policy for them; they felt threatened that their guns would be taken from them; they cried at the sight of their neighbors’ sons coming home in body bags; they were fed up with being called racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, and Islamaphobes.

What can’t go on forever, won’t. One day, about two years ago, the Forgotten Man, the faceless American, finally awoke from his slumbers. He looked around and saw the devastation, and he knew the promise of American life was no longer open to him. And so he screamed, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” The cry went unheard by the Ruling Elite. One man did hear it, however. That man was, of course, Donald J. Trump.

For better or worse, Trump did get people to the polls who don’t normally vote.

38 thoughts on “Donald Trump”

  1. Until the left (and that includes Bob and Jim) understand why Trump was elected, they are going to continue losing.

    The Tea Party movement was a true grass roots movement. Trump, Cruz and Paul understood that. What we’re seeing on the left right now, including Town Hall meetings, is top-down, bought and paid for by Soros, Inc. I’m not saying there won’t be a true, leftist, grass-roots movement, but it isn’t happening yet.

    1. Oh, I don’t know. The Congressional Republicans can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by simply not acting on Trump’s more popular initiatives (e.g. repeal of ObamaCare). If they fail to act on enough of these things, we won’t see another Republican congress for a very long time.

        1. It’s not an issue of competence, it’s an issue of getting hundreds of individual people, under various political pressures from their constituents, to agree on a course of action.

          1. …under various political pressures from their constituents…

            I see your point. Unfortunately, I am now so cynical that I believe the greatest political pressures on our representatives are exerted not by voting constituents but by corporate donors.

        2. IMO, they are just afraid of Democrats saying mean things about them and the fear of a future they can’t control.

          The best way to lower costs, increase quality, and broaden access is to embrace the free market where there are 350 million customers to please instead of just 5 congresspeople.

          1. “Embrace the free market.” That approach is similar to the liberal/progressive faith in the Federal government. Your faith lies in the “free market,” an equally vague aspiration.

          2. Yes, it is vague because the future can neither be predicted nor controlled. You can’t lay out a series of defined innovations because it is impossible to know what they are.

            But when there is only one customer, government, and only a small subset of congress that the health care and insurance industries have to please, then the hundreds of millions of other potential customers will not have their needs met.

            There are so many niches for healthcare innovation that will only be exploited by people pursuing what they think is important. Just look at Dean Kamen. If the government controls what research can be funded, what products fielded, and what insurance covers it prevents people from being able to help people whose health problems don’t affect everyone.

            IMO, a good government program is one that enables people to make their own healthcare decisions, buy what they think is important, and creates an environment where developing new treatments can flourish.

            If the government is going to make mandates, I would rather see a mandate that pulls money out of a paycheck and deposit it directly into an individual’s HSA, where it sits in perpetuity untouched by the government. A portion of it could even be allowed to be used as an investment vehicle to generate increased safety over the long term.

      2. Exactly right. The game can be won or lost right here. When a law has no chance of passing the GOP can be brave. Now that they can get results they hesitate and even plot against Trump. They are the stupid party.

        1. “They are the stupid party.”

          “Stupid” isn’t the right word for them.

          More like “cowards” and/or “hypocrites” and/or “liars”.

      3. If President Trump and the Republican houses of Congress turn out to be a gridlocked mess where nothing at all gets done, I will consider this a “yuge” success.

        The alternative was, dunno, Single Payer, legal status for anyone who asks for it, extreme stoppage of anything fossil fuels, a Supreme Court putting an end to separate Women’s and Men’s rooms.

        I really, really like “nothing.” That is, in contrast to a whole bunch of “something.”

        Nothing? Bring it on!

  2. The tea party was top down.. it was started by the big tobacco and the Koch brothers… hardly grass roots.

      1. What, Rand, you didn’t see those Tea Party candidates chain-smoking all the time? Cigarettes were all over their campaign literature… {/sarc}

    3. Shows what little you know. Must be psychological projection. It is simply impossible for your side to understand true grass roots.

      I find it humorous that as soon as Beck exposed Soros, this myth of the Koch Brothers appeared. Of course they finance what they like, but they don’t organize like Soros and other globalists to.

    4. That’s about the stupidest thing you’ve ever posted here, Vladislaw.

      Crawl back under your rock and don’t forget your tinfoil hat.

  3. If you still think an establishment conservative would have been a better choice, consider… The litany outlined would have continued and gotten worse as it did under others. Trump has proven he has fight in him.

    There really was no other choice.

  4. I think the article has problems, especially in identifying the “deplorables” almost exclusively with less-fortunate socioeconomic circumstances. I believe that a significant number of socioeconomically fortunate people identified with the deplorables and voted against HRC because of her naked ambition without any core beliefs other that “It’s My Turn!”, slobbering allegiance to the unelected mandarin class, and the Democratic Party’s extreme turn away from core civil liberties such as those embodied in the Bill of Rights.

  5. The concepts of “tea party” and “organized” don’t go together in my head.

    In general it seemed to me a dozen grifters all raced to battle for a slot at the head of a parade already underway … and the bodies of the losers tripped-up and dispersed the marching bands, floats, and cavalry corps who MIGHT have been heading in a good direction if the would-be “leaders” had been prevented from “organizing” things.

    On the other hand, if you like the idea that big-money puppet masters control events, then the disorganized, dispersed parade was the intended and desired outcome of big oil, the tobacco lobby, etc. Don’t let my perspective ruin your beautiful theory…

  6. ” . . . they saw their plants close and their jobs go overseas due to government regulations and taxes . . . ” Okay; but didn’t their champion, Donald Trump, campaign not against such regulations and taxes, but against free trade sending those jobs overseas? That was the message I got.

    2. You must not have been paying attention to the times when he talked about cutting business taxes and regulations. I heard him several times.

    3. It’s a profound misunderstanding to think that free trade means ‘bend over and take it.’ Multilateral deals thwart free trade. One on one deals keep the players honest.

      1. Ya, there is nothing magically virtuous about a trade agreement just because it is called a trade agreement. The contents are what matter. TPP isn’t free trade, its managed trade.

        1. And how would you guys fix it? (Frankly the only answer I’d be interested would be reducing the amount of State power–or as the late, great Leonard Read put it, “Anythiing That’s Peaceful” –i.e., sans coercion.)

          1. I don’t have a good answer.

            Multilateral trade deals are much more complex than bilateral ones. The only reason we even need trade deals is to get governments to create an even playing field of regulations for businesses. How many trade deals create an even playing field rather than make things more uneven and complex?

            Ideally, we would just ship goods and services around the world, while not engaging in fraud, to people who want to purchase them and then pay a fair tax on them. Why is something like that so hard to negotiate?

  7. http://time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/study-confirms-tea-party-_b_2663125.html

    “A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.

    Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.

    The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.

    Published in the peer-reviewed academic journal, Tobacco Control, the study titled, ‘To quarterback behind the scenes, third party efforts’: the tobacco industry and the Tea Party, is not just an historical account of activities in a bygone era. As senior author, Stanton Glantz, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of medicine, writes:”

    3. Let me help you Vladislaw. You make the common mistake of connecting independent events.

      When the left, all within the same day/week, are all spouting the same talking points they got their marching orders from the same source.

      The tea party OTOH is well known for not speaking in lockstep with each other.

      It is delusional to assume the various very independent tea party groups are agents of the tobacco industry. Even if you could identify some evil mad scientist in the industry that would like such control.

      Independent thought is the hallmark of grass roots. Having the exact same talking points and trying to shout down reason, is that of astroturf.

      1. Yes, very interesting that a Democrat party activist would create this conspiracy theory. It’s hardly based on an academic study and its not even like an academic study is unquestionable in its motives and methodologies.

        A key passage,

        All of them saw their budgets expand significantly as Obama ran for the White House and then took office—months or even a full year before the Tea Party movement erupted into public view. This explains why the Tea Party movement was able to mobilize, spread, and network so rapidly, as if by magic.

        While never showing that any such funding went to any Tea Party group much less all of them, the author assumes it magically happened. How is it that in 2009, people would be able to quickly organize and share their views? It couldn’t have anything to do with the magic boxes on everyone’s desks? Why would they even choose to mobilize at the very time that policies they objected to were being voted on for implementation? Acting while they have the chance to stop them shows that big tobacco was behind everything…

        And how was this guy getting tax return information?

        As the movement progressed, there certainly was money flowing in, but mostly out. That the individuals setting up these groups all over the country had such different operational goals and had such a hard time forming and organizing, shows that this wasn’t a movement organized by big tobacco.

        It isn’t like the Democrat groups that always have their paperwork and legal arrangements in place before anyone shows up to the first meeting.

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