At least Trump isn’t politics as usual.

Bobbi has a post up today musing about the Trump presidency as a “yawner” compared to, say, Johnson’s and Nixon’s.  I can’t disagree with anything she said.

I’ve no problem stating that I was a never-Trumper until Cruz fizzled. You can easily search this blog and see where I said I’d never vote for Trump.  I said I’d vote Libertarian if I had to.  But when Gary Johnson picked the egregious anti-gunner Bill Weld for VP, that put paid to that idea. And I had the sense at that point to drop my never-Trumpism like a hot rock when it was clear that it was a choice between either Trump or Hillary. Some on the right haven’t gotten to that point yet, and probably never will.  I feel sorry for them, because they are pushing back against history, and history never, ever loses.

Now, Trump was not my ideal candidate by any stretch of the imagination.  The truth is that Trump is neither left nor right, neither conservative nor progressive, neither fish nor fowl. He’s a businessman first and a populist second. He got tired of the constant anti-business attitude that emanates from Washington, under both Dem and GOP leadership, and decided to do something about it. Of course, as a billionaire, he could muse, like many of us do, “If I were president…” — and then actually suit action to words. By abandoning the politics of political correctness, and by enunciating a message that resonated with the American electorate — making America great again, subtext “after the disasters known as Clinton, GW Bush, and particularly Obama” — he clearly tapped into the psyche of the silent majority, because he beat the polls, not handily, but in sufficient numbers in sufficient states to win the Electoral College. (I’m minded of Joe Kennedy and the statement attributed to him regarding Jack’s first run for the Senate: “Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”) Of course he also benefited from poor campaign decisions by Hillary, like her not campaigning in Wisconsin and probably losing there because of it.

Since the election?  Reagan was the Teflon president, I don’t know what they ought to call Trump, possibly the force-screen president, because all of the turds the Dems AND the GOP have thrown at him have either vanished into the ether or bounced back onto the throwers.  Trump’s base doesn’t care.  They somehow have the ability to tell the truth from the lies.  And most of it’s been lie after lie after lie, starting with the “Russia thing”, which was clearly made up out of whole cloth the day after the election to “explain” Hillary’s surprise loss.

Trump doesn’t care about party as much as he cares about restoring balance to the political environment and getting Washington out of things in which it has no business meddling. Like, gee, business, which has been slowly asphyxiating to death under the last three administrations. People can say that is selfish on his part because he’s a businessman, but like Reagan said, a rising tide floats all boats. Fix how government treats business, and everybody benefits.  The entire entrenched political class hates him for this — Dems and GOPes alike — because it threatens their little fiefdoms built up over the past half-century and more.  And you wonder why the GOPe won’t get behind Trump when the rank and file of the party seem to be willing to give him a chance?

Like Glenn Reynolds says, “Worst political class ever.”

And it doesn’t hurt that Trump’s a patriot at the same time, and willing to flex a little military muscle to put a stop to things like Daesh,* and Lil’ Kim’s megalomaniac drive to nuke the world.  Don’t think for a minute that he’s bluffing.  I don’t think Trump bluffs about anything.  The fat boy is going to find this out if he ever manages to loft a real nuclear weapon into the air — and maybe before.  The Chinese already have a strong inkling of it, and the mad mullahs in Iran would be well warned to have it on their radar, too.  The Russians?  The Russians are a joke, if a nuclear-armed one, because no matter what Putin does, the US can bankrupt them by simply opening the fracking taps wide.  We’re already on course to do that with our new ability to export natural gas and oil.  (Now if we could just get rid of the Jones Act…)

Then there’s the border wall.  I got to thinking the other day about Trump’s insistence that the Mexicans would pay for it, and their huffy rejoinder that they wouldn’t pay a dime for it.  The more I think about that, the more I think the left got it wrong (as usual) and so did the Mexicans (also as usual).  Hell, even the GOPe has gotten it wrong.  If you look at the recent ICE statistics on illegal border crossings from Mexico, they are way, way down.  And some re-crossings are happening in the other direction.  This is because the illegals here and the potential illegals there are more and more concerned about just how serious Trump is about rounding them up and sending them back.

The upshot of this is that I think the wall has already been built.  It’s a metaphorical wall built by a constant drumbeat of policy from the administration that says we aren’t going to put up with this any longer.  You don’t need concrete and steel and millions of dollars’ worth of labor (and graft — don’t forget the graft) to simply lay down a strong policy and then start enforcing it.  If Mexicans are afraid of what might happen if they cross illegally and get caught, they won’t cross.  And that’s a wall if I ever heard of one.

And as for the Mexicans paying for this metaphorical wall?  Can you say that they aren’t paying for it?  Somebody has to feed those people, clothe and house them, find them jobs, etc.  Remittances from the US back to Mexico are also dropping.

For once, it’s not Uncle Sucker paying Mexico’s welfare bill.

I haven’t even mentioned how Trump has the hapless, partisan press on the run.  I hate the fact that nobody took his Twitter account away from him after the inauguration, but what the hell, it makes the press go cuckoo for coco-puffs.  They spend so much time worrying about his latest tweet that substantive change being made by the White House goes right over their heads.  And now CNN has damn near committed suicide over a stupid YouTube video retweeted by the president.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes.

Having a Grand Master Patriot Troll as president?  Yeah.  I can live with that.  Winning is good.

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* I like calling them Daesh because apparently they hate it.  It’s an acronym for their name in Arabic, and apparently the acronym is close to the Arabic word for “shit” or something like that.  Anything that pisses those bastards off is OK with me.