Donald Trump is a truly dynamic figure. Many Republicans understood after the disasters of 2008 and 2012 that the party needed someone different. Some of us saw early on in the 2016 election that Trump was just the man for the job.
Of course, the Left spewed its usual hate. They attacked his looks; they attacked his kids; they attacked his wife. They also called Trump a “Fascist!” What else is new? They say the same things of any Republican candidate who looks strong enough to win. To the Left, a Trump presidency (as a Romney presidency in 2012 or a McCain presidency in 2008) would have ushered in a tyranny not seen since the early days of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
To be sure, Trump manipulated the media in much the same way savvy dictators do. Also, he is loud and he loves gold. And he doesn’t tolerate nonsense from the “lying press.” Where I was raised, though, what Trump has been doing with the media is called standing up for yourself. To the media, however, a Republican that stands up for himself is “dangerous.”
If Trump were elected, the Left insisted that he would override Congress and the courts, in order to push his purportedly unpopular agenda through—just like so many strongmen have done throughout history.
So it was with bated breath that so many awaited the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017. Would this be the savage end of our republic?
Trump wasted no time pursuing his agenda. He looked to areas where he could effect change rapidly, after realizing that Congress would drag its feet on virtually everything. Trump is a businessman in the truest sense. In his world, the customer is usually right—at least on some level—and a corporate leader must deliver his product as advertised. Thus, President Trump issued a series of executive orders addressing some of his biggest promises on the campaign trail.
It was during this period that the first constitutional challenges to Trump’s “absolute power” arose. The Left was giddy. They were not only going to prove that Trump really was Hitler reincarnate, but they were also going to set the stage for a constitutional crisis that (in their minds), would ultimately lead to Trump’s impeachment.
They just needed Trump to take their bait. The Left waited for President Trump to ignore the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned his initial executive order on immigration. After much back-and-forth in the press (and on Twitter), something unexpected happened. The great tyrant…adhered to the ruling of the court!
align=”right” After 100 days of the dreaded dictator what can we Trump supporters say to our fellow Americans? Do we apologize? Do we hang our heads in shame? No! We turn to our Leftist friends and say, “you’re welcome.”
The Ninth Circuit demanded of Trump that parts of his executive order be rewritten. Rather than waste more time and energy challenging the ruling, the Trump Administration took its licks, and made the necessary changes. I can’t seem to remember Mao turning to his lawyer, rather than his gun, when his enemies successfully opposed him. Then again, my mind is soup after years of watching “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
Meanwhile, the strongman-in-waiting did something even more unbelievable: He started consulting with Congress on key legislation, such as healthcare reform and tax cuts. Oh, yeah, and the Man-Who-Would-Be-King even offered to work with his political adversaries on the Left to craft a sensible infrastructure bill.
What a tyrant!
Just when you thought Trump’s autocratic tendencies couldn’t get any worse, he did something truly unprecedented for a dictator. Trump backed down from healthcare reform when Congress made it clear that it would be unable to pass the reform as written. Did Stalin ever take “no” for an answer?
It’s unconscionable, I tell you!
Our Caesarean overlord then pivoted in foreign policy and did the very thing that many of his most ardent followers believed he would never do: Trump launched a limited strike on Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria. Never in my life have I seen such vitriol directed against a President by his own supporters. The Left thought that Trump and his “fascist” supporters would be cheering on an aggressive foreign policy. They weren’t. In fact, Trump’s base of purported warmongers and white nationalists were apoplectic over his attack on Syria. And do you know how the tyrant responded? He listened to his supporters!
After 100 days of the dreaded dictator what can we Trump supporters say to our fellow Americans? Do we apologize? Do we hang our heads in shame? No! We turn to our Leftist friends and say, “you’re welcome.”
In 100 days, President Trump has returned more power to the people and their elected representatives in government than has any president in the last 70 years. Because of Trump’s unwillingness to ignore the bizarre court rulings against his executive order on immigration; thanks to Trump’s respect for the legislative branch (when, frankly, none should be given to Congress); and thanks to Trump’s willingness to buck his own supporters in the name of doing what’s right in foreign policy, he is helping us make America Great Again.
Rather than acting the part of a dictator, Trump is the ultimate democrat. In a way, Trump is like Napoleon in reverse. When Napoleon rose to power, he legitimized his coronation by crowning himself emperor as the Pope looked on. Thus, Napoleon stood above all. In Trump—the Left’s newest fascist bogeyman—we have a leader who has taken the vast powers of his office and slowly started returning it to where it belongs. Trump is taking the imperial crown from atop his head, cutting it into equal parts, and handing each component to the other two branches of government—all while standing eye-to-eye with the legislative and judicial branches.
Some tyrant.
To my Leftist friends, I say this: If Trump is truly a tyrant as you believe, he’s not very good at it. So, please, quit whining and focus on the future.
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The ‘resistance’ whining is too loud to hear anything except their own echoes.
Brandon, thank you for tagging me on this article! One important point, though: When you write of Trump supporters reaction after the lightning Tomahawk strike at Syria, only one portion of Trump supporters were apoplectic: Those of us who are Jacksonian Nationalists, such as Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, and mutual friend Sebastian Gorka, understood it completely. However, the other portion, who mistook Trump and his close circle as Jeffersonian Isolationists, were the ones who were disquieted [And I saw this in the half-million+ member The Deplorables group with hundreds of reported posts about opposing views on this.] [More after the quote]
Worth noting is that Trump (and Sanders) voters’ revulsion towards the putrid Wilsonian Progressive worldviews of the Bushes, Clinton’s, Rice’s (both of them), McCain, Powers etc… is a result of this terrible worldview mutation being diametrically opposite of both Jacksonian Nationalism .AND. Jeffersonian Isolationism; and that these latter two views are basically orthogonal to each other.
For more, simply google “Hamiltonian Jacksonian Jeffersonian Wilsonian” to see a number of references to Walter Russell Mead’s writings on this subject over the last two decades.
The progs see it both ways. He’s Hitler!… but not competent! So in their view, it all makes sense. He’s a bumbling nincopoop and a evil lever-puller and beholden to…. someone… muh Russia! Enter rabbit hole of progressive/lefty/Democrat/MSM thinking… play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
It’s odd that a party that prides itself on identity politics is unaware that Hitler was too.
This is my favorite part of the op-ed:
“The Left waited for President Trump to ignore the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned his initial executive order on immigration. After much back-and-forth in the press (and on Twitter), something unexpected happened. The great tyrant…adhered to the ruling of the court!”
There was a similar problem in Poland last year, with the difference being that the Law & Justice government DID ignore the ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal, claiming that “Constitutional court rulings are just opinions”. Then, as if that was not stupid enough, they invited the Venice Commission to report on the situation, utterly convinced that the Commission would determine that ignoring court verdicts was fine. That led to their censure in the EU- at their own request.
So – when Trump’s court challenge rolled around, some Polish colleauges wondered whether there would be an American constitutional crisis.
“No. Trump will just have the travel ban re-written to take into account the court ruling about green card holders and that ends the controvercy,” I opined.
And indeed, unlike Poles, Americans have a knack for not destroying their republic while repairing it under conditions of political turbulence.
This Presidency – a unique one under turbulent times – is going to prove the strength of the American constitutional system very well if nothing else.
Mr. Weichert seems to expect that the Left will ultimately acknowledge what unfolds before them. Not so. Trump will always be the racist, fascist, anti-Semitic boogey man for the Left because so many on the Left have turned pro. The professional Left make their fortunes in the industry of government.
Ever increasing government control means ever increasing campaign contributions and lobbying contracts. By empowering the judicial and legislative branches, the states, and the people, Trump represents a threat to the livelihoods of aspiring government entrepreneurs like the Clintons and their cronies. The Clinton Foundation reaped hundreds of millions from the series of deals that eventually transferred control over 20 percent of US uranium production to Russia. Would deals like that be possible under Trump? Possible but unlikely. Trump made his fortune the old fashioned way, in the private sector providing products and services that people choose to buy.
No matter how reasonable Trump’s policies and actions might actually be, Trump will remain a huge threat to the Left and, at the same time, a huge money making opportunity. Leftist fear mongering and scandal mongering are massive fund raising drives. “America is at risk! Your freedom is at risk!”, they always declare, urging followers to contribute to the likes of the Clintons, the Pelosis, and the Schumers, so that they can manipulate the levers of government, entrenching themselves in power forever and funneling more and more tax payer money to support their lavish lifestyles.
And naturally, the more power that accrues to the Left, the more stridently they will protest the Republican threat to America. MSNBC will continue its broadcasts of the Republican outrage du jour. New opportunities in the Leftist industry of government will arise, and life on the Left will go on.
I’m not so certain that Trump would be wrong to ignore a federal court ruling and “provoke a constitutional crisis.” The only institutions that can “check” the federal judiciary are the federal executive and the federal legislature. And oisn;t the judiciary an appropriate branch for “checking” the way the other two are? How have we arrived at a place where the very idea of a check to the judiciary is abhorrent to conservatives?
Trump could have declared, in a kind of Lincolnian manner, that the 9th Circuit’s ruling applied only within its circuit, and likewise that a federal district court’s ruling applied only within its district. I fail to see the logic behind continued abject deference to one branch of a tripartite government that has indicated for over a century that it does not believe itself to bound by anything beyond its own thoughts and has shifted the political 50-yard line so far towards the Blue end zone that certain political arguments are insisted to be off limits today.
I agree with your post, however I will trust President Trump to initiate this “Constitutional Crisis” at a time of his choosing. If we have thought of it, he has.