President Donald Trump has a tendency to throw rhetorical fuel on the fire. When his riffing at a rally, or sending out a tweet storm, he often creates needless feuds. This kind of rhetoric can obscure a substantive message about his administration’s America First accomplishments. In this way, he tends to forget that when your opponents are digging a hole, let them keep digging.
Of course, the perpetually outrage media pretends that it doesn’t understand when Trump is joking or engaging in hyperbole, so they accuse him of “lying.” As Howard J. Warner of the American Thinker explains, Trump’s blustery comments “are not material lies that adversely affect policy or citizens (such as President Obama’s assurance that we would be allowed to keep our doctors or insurance plans). The same cannot be said about statements from many of the Democratic opposition. Unfortunately, the media’s prejudice is demonstrated by their lack of reporting on these issues.”
As this blog has previously pointed out, Trump — a former Democrat and independent — has taught the GOP how to fight back against the shamelessly biased Democrat-media complex.
This is a point underscored in an excellent New York Post column by Miranda Devine in the aftermath of jealous Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s anti-Trump remarks.
“Genteel Republicans like Mitt Romney complain about Donald Trump’s unpresidential behavior, but how else does he combat the dirty left? Only a barbarian could defy the liberal establishment as he has done.
“Imagine if Romney were president, trying to be dignified and patrician. They’d eat him alive. Unless, of course, he did nothing to block their agenda, in which case he’d be left alone like all the other cowardly roll-over Republicans.
“The American people chose a barbarian for president because they knew only a barbarian could drain the Washington swamp.
“And, judging by the president’s unchanged approval ratings since House Democrats launched their impeachment inquiry, not to mention his record donation take on the back of it, Trump fans are with him for the long haul, no matter how boorishly he behaves.
“They see him implementing his agenda against all odds. If the swamp gets in his way, Trump bulldozes over it. Supreme Court, tick. Taxes cut, tick. Regulations slashed, tick. Jobs up, tick. Military rebuilt, tick. ISIS stopped, tick. Globalism challenged, tick. Paris climate treaty scrapped, tick. Borders strengthened, tick. Wall built, half-tick.
“All while the Washington establishment tries to sabotage his presidency and the liberal media reviles him.”
Added J.R. Dunn of the American Thinker:
“One way the Democrats could fulfill their dream of crippling President Trump (as opposed to simply running him out of office) would be to stampede the Republicans, to send them running wild-eyed for shelter from shouted accusations and piercing rays of adverse publicity. There is no shortage of weak-spined GOP officeholders, and it has happened many times before. The Dems had no reason to doubt that it would happen again.But it’s not happening. Apart from the usual suspects such as Mitt Romney (Romney as Massachusetts governor was the sole politician to hold out against the Bulger brothers, but that was a long time ago), the GOP wall is holding firm, with no defector or weak sister of any significance…
“This is not your grandfather’s — or even your uncle’s — GOP. For generations, the GOP has accepted the role of the battered wife of American politics, cheated, beaten, and manipulated repeatedly with no response whatsoever. In fact, party officials — along with conservative spokesmen — have gone so far as to claim this as a virtue, in that being constantly humiliated in public was somehow keeping traditional values alive.
“This, along with much else, has ended with Donald Trump. Trump has clearly demonstrated that the only way to answer a belligerent, hostile Left is to go blow for blow with leftists. He has continued this round after round and shows no sign whatsoever of backing off. (His current campaign commercial states flat out: ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy.’)
“It appears that the younger GOP pols have been paying close attention. So along with his other accomplishments, President Trump has presented us with a clean new deck of cards at the political table. It’s about time.”
This blog has also outlined how impeachment-obsessed Democrats accuse Trump and his supporters of doing things that Democrats are actually doing. Devine also noted this form of project by Biden, Schiff, and Ocasio-Cortez among many, many other left-wing hypocrites.
“He is Teflon Don, energized by a battle that would have broken a genteel Republican long ago.
“That’s why the Dems are afraid and it’s why they’re projecting like crazy. This is the disease of the left.
“The legendary Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud defined ‘projection’ as a psychological defense mechanism in which people repress their own shameful thoughts and impulses by attributing them to others…
“So, when you hear liberals constantly accuse their ideological enemies, without evidence, of such thought crimes as racism, sexism, xenophobia and bigotry, chances are they’re projecting. In the case of Democrats, they constantly accuse Trump of sins they have themselves committed…
“Then there is #MeToo. It’s hard to ignore how many high-profile perverts are liberals who bought themselves protection by mouthing liberal platitudes and funding Democratic causes.
“Hollywood is the most liberal enclave in America, yet the Sony Pictures hack attack of 2014 exposed the racism and sexism under the politically correct facade. Here were studio executives proudly contributing to President Barack Obama’s campaigns while making racist jokes about him with colleagues.
“Liberals are obsessed with identity politics yet stoke racial tensions to gain power. They are obsessed with diversity yet impose a stifling intellectual conformity on our cultural institutions.
“In their frenzied projection of their own flaws onto the president, their Freudian slips are showing.”
Historian Victor Davis Hanson also weighed in on the Democrats’ projection in the context of Russia, Ukraine, and other scandals in which Democrats actually engaged in collusion or are riddled with conflicts of interest:
“Unfortunately, projection is now an encompassing explanation for almost everything the Left alleges…What is behind this strange collective psychological condition of projecting one’s own guilt on to another? In part, out of embarrassment that Hillary Clinton blew an election despite having the edge in money, the media, and the popular culture, Trump was recalibrated as a cheater. Otherwise it was impossible to accept that the Manhattan wheeler-dealer had outsmarted, out-campaigned, and out-hustled the progressives’ best and brightest—and worse yet might have every intention of keeping his campaign promises to undo the entire Obama agenda…For tens of thousands of government careerists, by and large political partisans of the Democrats, using any means necessary was justified by the supposedly noble ends of ending the coarse Trump…In sum, had Trump just lost the election, the illegal use of the intelligence agencies by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s administration would have been an insider topic of pride…
“Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D.-N.Y.) later admonition, that Trump was being ‘really dumb,’ given that, ‘You take on the Intelligence Community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.’ Or Samantha Power’s postelection smirk, ‘Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.’
The only Trump ‘crime’ was in his winning an election he was not supposed to win, which then “pissed” off the wrong people and of course amounted to acting ‘dumb’ with the intelligence agencies. So after the election, prior illegal acts were redefined as legal, and legal ones as illegal.”
The left and the right are currently joining in criticism of Trump’s decision to remove Troops from northern Syria. Apparently there are only about 1,000 soldiers in all of Syria. It remains to be seen whether this is a good or bad idea.
Trump is, however, incrementally fulfilling another campaign promise. i.e., to bring troops home. If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, U.S. forces would be bogged down in new military conflicts all over the world.
Much of the criticism about Trump’s decision revolves around abandoning the Kurds and trusting Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan to clamp dowm on ISIS. Observed the New York Post:
“We’ll grant that the president is delivering on a campaign promise here: Like most Americans, he doesn’t want this nation serving as the world’s policeman; other countries should share more of the burden when it comes to both troops and money….The president is right that it’s not America’s job to solve all the problems of the Middle East, but giving a green light to Erdogan’s invasion is all too likely to mean trouble down the road for the United States.”
At least some of the backlash seems ironic in that most readers can probably remember when left-wingers were anti-war. And the NeoCons (who put the “con” in conservative) seem to love endless war as long as they don’t have to physically enlist. Plus they have proven that will will abandon their other so-called deeply held views for a paycheck or just out of personal animosity toward Trump.
