Passing Thoughts
The Democratic Party’s eager pursuit of impeachment, grabbing all the headlines and dictating the news cycle during these early days of presidential primary season, is a sure signal that they know their current crop of candidates would be unlikely to beat Donald Trump in 2020. They need to cripple Trump terribly, if not outright remove him from office, in order to give that batch of two-bit Marxist activists a fighting chance.
The proof of this is that although many Democrats have been calling for Trump’s impeachment since the day he took office, the focus of the current “inquiry” is a recent event, his withholding of military aid from Ukraine.
They know they cannot beat Trump in an election.
On the other hand, why should the Democrats try to beat Trump, given that, base-baiting bluster aside, he is more than happy to give them everything they want on a silver platter? Decrying America’s involvement in “endless wars,” surrendering to North Korea, hitting the “reset button” (aka the “Tell Vladimir I’ll have more flexibility after the election” button) with Putin, blowing the roof off the national debt every year, demanding impossible billions for infrastructure spending, dragging the Republican Party away from its hard rhetorical stance against government-run healthcare — on ninety percent of the issues, Trump is a Democrat’s dream president. I guess that might have something to do with the fact that he is a lifelong Democrat, and only a very recent Republican of convenience.
The latest joke on this front is Trump’s new melting tough guy stance on the so-called “Dreamers” act, or DACA, regarding illegal immigrants legalized by Barack Obama’s fiat.
Many of the people in DACA, no longer very young, are far from “angels.” Some are very tough, hardened criminals. President Obama said he had no legal right to sign order, but would anyway. If Supreme Court remedies with overturn, a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2019
For the base, Trump begins by claiming that many people covered by the DACA law are “tough, hardened criminals.” He then promises, as he frequently has, to protect all of the DACA people, presumably including the non-angelic ones, by striking one of his vaunted “deals” with the Democrats. In fact, he has offered such a deal before, but was rebuffed by the Democrats because he was offering more than they asked for, and they saw that this would effectively steal the immigration issue from them — by making Trump the most lax president ever on illegal immigration. Since political posturing, for Democrats as for Republicans, is all about winning elections and raking in piles of cash, the last thing they would want is Trump actually fulfilling the Democrats’ own platform. The important point, however, is that he would indeed do it, if given the chance, since his only interest, all bluster aside, is his ego and his reputation.
Nikki Haley, yet another “promising young conservative” who turned herself into an unprincipled sycophant for career advancement within the Trump administration, has gotten plenty of attention for her new book this week — that is, she has continued to do whatever she has to do to make money and get ahead — by attracting the media on two fronts.
First, she announced that former chief of staff John Kelly and secretary of state Rex Tillerson told her, while they were all working in the administration, that they saw it as part of their job to tug against Trump at the White House in order to “save the country” from his more outrageous acts of incompetence. Now, it seems to me that hiring independent-minded advisors in top positions would be a responsible thing for an ignorant “outsider” to do, and that it would make perfect sense for those more knowledgeable veterans of Washington politics to advise the rookie boss against some of his more ill-conceived notions. In fact, would that not be the main reason for having knowledgeable old hands on deck?
But in the interpretation of the commercial-book-sales-minded Haley, as amplified by both the anti-Trump media eager for any reports of Trump criticism within the GOP ranks and the cultists who regard every disagreement with Trump as a hanging offense, this suggestion of defiance and independent-mindedness among Trump’s top advisors looks like mutiny. And of course who benefits from this story, on all fronts, within the Trump GOP? Nikki Haley, of course.
Secondly, she was asked point blank, in an interview, whether she thinks Trump tells the truth. She answered yes, unequivocally. That’s not news. It’s just funny.
