Mark Steyn on Facebook this morning:
Five years ago today, round about 11.05am Eastern June 16th 2015, a New York property developer and TV host with no experience of elected office announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States.
I’ve noted many times that I wasn’t initially a fan. I agitated for and voted for Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary. Immediately after which, Cruz capitulated and The Donald “cruised” to victory at the Republican National Convention, and of course, later in the Electoral College as well.
After the Indiana primary and Cruz’s withdrawal in May 2016, I changed my tune. I didn’t get out and rabidly campaign for Trump, but I was at least amenable to his candidacy. I could see what he was doing through my historian’s eyes; he was and is, of course, not the first populist in American history to turn out those who usually remain silent and often never bother to cast a ballot. He brought excitement to a process that has had very little excitement since at least the days of Ronald Reagan, and probably before. Sure, he’s no Jack Kennedy, but his First Lady is no Bill Clinton. And for that we should all be grateful.
Certainly there was no way to predict the future and what sort of administration our billionaire bankruptcy-prone TV star “you’re fired” boss candidate would lead. And I doubt that anyone really foresaw the resistance that would pop up on both the right and left to his presidency. But quite a few rubes did self-identify, and a number of judges have marked themselves as unfit for the bench in the process. The “never Trump” movement have made asses of themselves, and the left has found itself tied up in knots by Trump’s willingness — nay, even eagerness — to troll them incessantly.
His opponent, in the meantime, has done little to prove that she’d have been a better president — indeed, she’s done a lot to prove she’d have been a lot worse. I’m certainly glad she wasn’t president when the ‘rona hit our shores. I for one didn’t want to live in a John Ringo novel, and thanks to this president, we probably aren’t going to. Though it’s still anyone’s guess if we’ll have enough food this winter, what with all the disruptions caused by what is increasingly looking like unnecessary state-level shutdowns whose rationale seemed to change by the day as they stretched on longer and longer and longer to little or no good effect (and plenty of bad effect).
The people who riot and complain about his presidency are little more than bad-tempered children who didn’t get their way. They know as little about America as most of the rest of the world — mostly because Hilary Clinton’s generation of Gramscians brainwashed them from the day they hit the school doors in first grade into being good little socialists. They have a blind spot about charging Trump with being a Nazi, a fascist, a tyrant, and a bigot — and that blind spot is in their own mirrors when they look at themselves. There is no bigger fascist or bigot in this country today than those who are projecting their own proclivities on Donald John Trump, and by extension, on the rest of the normal half of this country.
As for me, I don’t give a shit if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, green, or purple. If you’re a human being, that’s all that counts; as a friend of many years’ standing tends to quote in cases like that, “The thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a pea-wit. You take men one at a time.”*
But then we get down to beliefs and philosophies. That’s where you can feel free to call me a bigot, because if you’re a socialist left-wing cocksucker who’s bound and determined to destroy this country so you can have Venezuela or Cuba on a grand scale, you can go fuck yourself. Or if you’re a radical Islamic fundamentalist who wants Americans to kneel and submit to Sharia law, fuck you twice. Damn straight I’m bigoted against that.
These attitudes, though, pre-date Trump. They pre-date Obama. They pre-date Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, and Ford. They go back to the very formation of my political and moral philosophy. And I suspect that most folks who will vote for Trump in 2020 hold the same sort of attitudes.
So you will find that we believe strongly in civil rights, and in the various Civil Rights Acts as passed over Democrat objections back in the day, at least up to the Civil Rights Act of 1968. (The one passed in 1991 is weak and ought to be repealed.) Likewise we believe strongly in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, even if it was passed and signed by Democrats. (Democrats were different, back in the day.)
And I believe strongly that Donald Trump is also a big fan of civil rights. Other than a couple of fumbles on 2A issues (the bump stock EO was not needed and made him look bad among 2A types, most of whom think bump stocks are stupid anyway), he is clearly a believer in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Whereas his opponents mostly give those documents lip service and ignore them unless they’re trying to expand the emanations and penumbras that are already total bullshit and inimical to the spirit and glory of the Constitution.
What Trump’s opponents either don’t realize or are hoping nobody else will notice is that if Trump were going to become a tyrant and start oppressing folks and shipping people he doesn’t like to concentration camps, he would already have started doing so. But this is what they claim will be the result of a Trump presidency, even three and a half years into his term. (Hey, Don, you’d better hurry up. Where are those concentration camps I was promised?)
And they call the man a Nazi, even when his daughter is married to an Orthodox Jew (and converted herself and has brought her children up in the faith). Fucking mind-boggling.
Anyway, it’s been an interesting half-decade. I’m looking forward to the next half-decade, with Trump still large and in charge after the 2020 elections. He’s convinced me that he’s worth the vote.
(You’ll note that nowhere in this post did I refer to him as the Intergalactic Grand Master of Trollery. This is one of the most entertaining parts of the entire administration, and if the press would ever figure out that he’s trolling them unmercifully, they’d stop whinging about it and it would lose most of its effectiveness. But by all means, left whingers, er, wingers, of the press, please, keep on complaining and looking like the crybabies you really are.)
_______________________
* “Pvt. Buster Kilrain”, in the film Gettysburg, when asked what he thinks of Negroes, by Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.