Shocker: No One Cares
Trump promised to eliminate the national debt. The debt is growing faster than ever.
Trump promised to build a big beautiful wall, and said Mexico would pay for it. There is virtually no new wall of any sort, none of it the type Trump promised, and Trump used a fake national emergency declaration (according to Trump’s own account) to steal American taxpayers’ money from the Department of Defense to pay for this non-wall. (Imagine if Barack Obama had used a phony national emergency to justify his misappropriation of funds from the military budget.)
Trump has spent the past two years praising and fawning over Kim Jong Un, meekly handing North Korea massive concessions for nothing in return, and spitting in the eyes of South Korea and Japan in order to please and appease a communist dictator, while the latter continues to develop his weapons programs and has gained new legitimacy on the world stage thanks entirely to Trump’s cowardly suck-up routine.
Trump has defied America’s G-7 allies by repeatedly and publicly defending the interests of Vladimir Putin at economic conferences, and fighting to have Russia reinstated into the organization from which its expulsion was probably the only principled decision the group ever made.
Trump is the most overtly anti-Second-Amendment Republican president ever, in both words and deeds.
Trump openly praised the Chinese government’s brutality in Tiananmen Square, has said nothing in defense of the current Hong Kong protesters, and just warmly congratulated President Xi “and the Chinese people” on the seventieth anniversary of the totalitarian takeover of that ancient nation, as though Xi and the Chinese population were of one mind on the regime’s ever-expanding, high-tech, post-Maoist death grip on their lives. (And imagine how deflating Trump’s constant sympathy with communist tyrants must be to the small minority within such nations who still have the independence and courage to resist, in defiance of all the overwhelming reasons to surrender their souls to fear and hopelessness.)
Trump openly threatens domestic political opponents and critics with legal retribution for their words and actions against him, even to the point of suggesting that a sitting Democratic congressman be arrested for treason for merely misrepresenting Trump’s words publicly.
In response to such essential failures, bald-faced lies, authoritarian reflexes, and gross incompetence, Trump’s millions say, “Gee, I don’t remember people complaining about this when Obama did it.” Really? I do. Perhaps you don’t remember because you were watching round-the-clock reruns of The Apprentice in those days.
Or they say, “So you think Hillary would have been better?” No, I think she would have been about equally disgraceful, though perhaps in slightly different ways.
Or they say, “Supreme Court!” Name Gorsuch’s great accomplishments so far; Kavanaugh is an establishment non-entity.
Or they say, “At least he loves America.” If loving America means anything at all, from a political point of view, it would have to be related to revering the Constitution, defending the rule of law, and actively promoting the conditions of civil society, would it not? Show me where Trump has upheld any of these goods; or more precisely, show me where he has not directly undermined these goods.
My contempt for Trump’s public apologists, in government and in the media, grows every day, as Trump shoots whole swaths of the population on 5th Avenue on a weekly basis, and yet these hapless tagalongs continue to obfuscate, excuse, and evade. (Remember Liberty and Tyranny, Mark?) As for the rank-and-file cultists, the reality television voters, they are doing a wonderful job these days justifying the “flyover country” condescension of the coastal elites.
