Donald Trump is not the great political savior that people think he is, and America needs to recognize that quickly.
Political campaigns for the 2024 presidential election will begin next year, and with Trump expected to run, the time has come for Americans to figure out what we want. An Emerson College poll recently showed that preferences for the Republican primary election were Trump, then Ron DeSantis, then Nikki Haley—when Trump was excluded, preferences were DeSantis, then Mike Pence, then Ted Cruz.
For the general election, the poll showed competitions between Biden and Trump, DeSantis, and Mitt Romney. Predictably, Romney earned the least favor, with more voters picking an anonymous “Someone Else” over Romney. (Romney would probably prefer to be Biden’s running mate, anyway.) In second place was DeSantis, who still had a voter deficit of 12% compared to Biden. Trump alone managed to earn more hypothetical votes than Biden, and then only by 1%.
But every American who is dissatisfied with the present erosion of freedoms should review who laid the foundation for it to occur.
The COVID-19 pandemic began while Trump was still the President, meaning that he determined how the national government was going to approach it. Trump appointed Dr. Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, and Trump let the states decide whether they would enact shelter-in-place orders.
Throughout all of Fauci’s flip-flops, Trump did not remove him from the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, even though the federal government states he had the constitutional right to do so, regardless of claims to the contrary. And instead of insisting that every American is an essential worker for their family, Trump signed a $2 trillion stimulus bill to give the people handouts as consolation for being prohibited from working.
Trump not only signed the stimulus, but he attacked Rep. Massie (R-KY) for trying to block the bill, tweeting that he was “a third-rate Grandstander” for taking “dangerous & costly” action to delay the bill. For Trump, the bill was necessary, of course, because, “Workers & small businesses need money now in order to survive.”
I must have missed when “work” came to mean “sitting at home to take handouts under threat of force,” or when “business” came to describe “an endeavor in expending no effort and relying on government handouts.”
If Trump was truly concerned about the [out-of-]workers and small businesses, he would have told the 42 states that implemented some form of shelter-in-place orders to allow those workers and businesses to perform work and conduct business unimpeded. Instead, Trump applied the stimulus as a band-aid to the mountain of jobless claims throughout the country, which had approached a rate of 7 million new claims per week. Despite the stimulus, every week afterward in 2020 never saw fewer than 700,000 new claims.
Trump could have stepped in at any time in the summer, fall, or winter and allowed the American people to get back to providing for their families, but he didn’t. He didn’t spur states to reopen quicker and he didn’t prevent them from blocking people from earning a living.
Trump also decided opted for a hands-off approach to the summer of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. As president, Trump could have held states to their own standards for mass gatherings, but he remained staunchly against deploying the National Guard to keep the peace. Citizens like David Dorn paid the price.
Being able to say, “Look how your decisions are destroying your communities!” was more valuable to Trump than being able to say, “Look how I protected your lives and livelihoods from violence!” Which I suppose only makes sense if you’ve already told people that they need government handouts more than they need their jobs.
However, Trump did not enforce any consequences against the Democratic politicians who encouraged violence and unrest for the purpose of bringing about a political outcome (I think there’s a word for that somewhere) and aided GoFundMe accounts to bail out rioters.
Trump set the trap, the Democrats to walked into it, but Trump didn’t close the trap on them; he expected the American people to do that on their own. Sadly, that would never have happened because most Americans are in the media’s pocket, and the media is in the Democrats’ pocket. The media has so influenced the American public that their perceptions of the Democratic Party are unmarred by its ideologues’ political violence, but every violent right-wing lunatic is evidence that right-wing politics are illegitimate. Trump assumed reality was different.
Despite these decisions, Trump was still the best candidate in the 2020 presidential election—an election fraught with issues that the Supreme Court decided to ignore until a ruling wouldn’t matter. When the issue was still contested politically, some Americans decided to petition the government for a redress of what they considered to be a grievance, since the First Amendment protects that action from government control, and the demonstration turned into a reenactment of the Democrat activists who stormed the Wisconsin Capitol shouting threats and pounded on the doors of the Supreme Court.
The media praised those guys in their reporting, and they spent the summer praising “fiery but mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots; what’s the worst they could say about this event? And even if the media demonized them, the President whom they were championing would surely champion them in return, right?
Wrong on both accounts. The media cannot but condemn all conservative protests, including flameless ones where many participants walk orderly and quietly through the government building while destroying zero businesses and zero lives. Because of the media, the events of January 6 are only ever referred to as an “insurrection” or a “coup” or an “attack on democracy,” with no meaningful rebuttal from Trump.
Trump talked a big game about the congressional proceedings of Jan. 6, telling his Vice President, “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a p*ssy.” The same is true for every moment after the election certification, Trump could have chosen to coordinate a defense of his supporters much like the Democrats did for theirs, but he refused, choosing for himself to be a p*ssy.
Capitol protestors charged with conspiracy are being held without bail, and even PolitiFact can’t hide the fact that some are suffering in solitary confinement despite slapping the claim with a “Mostly False” rating. And Leftists are doing more to champion those protestors than Trump is! The ACLU stated,
“Prolonged solitary confinement is torture and certainly should not be used as a punitive tool to intimidate or extract cooperation. We're pleased to see that message is getting through to Senators.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) defended the concept of innocent until proven guilty,
“Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging. And we’re talking about people who haven’t been convicted of anything yet.”
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) “expressed surprise that all of the detained Jan. 6 defendants were being kept in so-called ‘restrictive housing.’” He believes “there has to be a clear justification for that, in very limited circumstances” that the Jan. 6 incident doesn’t fulfill.
Do conservatives truly want to give control of the country back to the guy who is doing less for them than Elizabeth Warren?
Do Americans truly want to give control of the country back to the guy who let petty tyrants shut it down, close businesses, and interfere with churches?
I hope not, because that would be the wrong decision. America and her people need someone who is willing to protect the blessings of liberty at every opportunity and in every context.
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