Trump Twice?

by G. Murphy Donovan (February 2019)

Illustration by Pierre Mourgue

If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.
—Mark Twain

Two years have come and gone and the Donald Trump presidency is not like anything the country has ever seen before and then some. Indeed, in less than thirty months, Trump has changed the presidency, the country, and the tone of American political discourse. We are louder, less civil, less tolerant, and less politically correct—and probably better off too, in many respects, for those breaches of etiquette.

With Trump, the pigeons of political correctness came home to roost. When the bird scat was weaponized, the Donald already had a New Yorker’s edge. Trump throws guano with the best on the left.

Trump represents a new brand of politics; not Democrat, not Republican, and surely not the usual fare. He ran under a Republican guidon, but clearly it was a flag of convenience. Indeed, most of the pushback against Trump comes from the radical fringes, the urbane far right and the urban far left—both condescending cultural elites to be sure.

The animus is personal too. Trump is a rich, white, male heterosexual chap from Queens. He doesn’t toke, smoke, shoot up, drink, shvitz, or slum with the rent control crowd. One of the great ironies of the 21st Century is that the same rent seekers who oppose border control are the first to whine about opioid and suicide “epidemics,” as if open borders and toxic imports are not part of the problem.

The establishment, the “business as usual” crowd, abhors Trump because the urban stasis caucus has the most to lose when Trump, or his constituency, wins on any issue.

A third party was never an option for Trump. His challenge was to take and remake the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan into a new party that actually stands for something besides globalism, pork, and domestic sugar teats.

The MAGA meme is more promissory note than campaign rhetoric.

The Jeffersonian left, in contrast, remains true to its origins: sedition, slavery, street violence, arson, civil war if necessary, apartheid, and identity politics. Former plantations in old Dixie have been replanted in Democrat urban cityscapes across the land.

Alas, ideological servitude is the worst kind of bondage.

Most urbanites, where and if they vote, vote monolithically with the left. Washington, DC is the best example. The nation’s capital, Virginia and Maryland suburbs, are the definitive, liberal, dependent, deep state demographics. American civil “servants,” country wide, now serve and hit from the left.

The hate, invective, mendacity, and vitriol blitz from media since 2015 was predictable too. The difference then and now is that Trump, unlike his Republican predecessors, didn’t fold; he shot back. Indeed, he won round one. Against all comers and odds, the wisdom of crowds prevailed in 2016.

Most media outlets, print or broadcast, speak for a cliff dwelling demographic, a coalition of claustrophobic constituencies where labels like socialism are inadequate to describe the variety of barnacles. The modern American nanny state is an archipelago of urban addictions and dependencies.

Higher taxes, bigger government, and street pharmaceuticals are the new normal. Unfortunately, literal and figurative pipe dreams are financed by other people’s money, those “one-percenters” and the sober working class demographic, Hillary’s now legendary “deplorables.”

Urban pathologies are, in fact, birds of a feather. When you can’t deal with loss or reality; alcohol, street pharma, or prescription drugs become default settings. Chemicals, gun play, homicides, abortions, suicides, crime, identity politics, and pollution are still trending in Metropolis.

Climate change zealots seldom mention that the great pollution venues are the very same cities controlled by Democrat Party politics. If climate change is real, the monolithic urban left own the problem and the solution.

Trump, a New Yorker who should know, had the chutzpah to suggest that urban values were not necessarily the best values.

Thus spoke Fritz Lang as early as 1927. Nearly a hundred years later, Trump found his ironic political sweet spot in flyover country, the American heartland.

Urban civility has always been an oxymoron. Candor or manners in politics were never Yankee values. The Ugly American is not just a literary trope. Americans, especially lawyers and politicians, have always been full of themselves, mostly for all the wrong reasons.

Indeed, Trump has finally brought transparency to the deep state. Mandarins at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Intelligence Community have been exposed as partisan if not seditious hacks. To a man, the Obama era national security team, before and after the 2016 election, seems hell bent to defeat and destroy an elected CINC.

American elites have a unique set of values; moral superiority, arrogance, aggression, imperialism, violence, and vindictiveness top the list. We are a shrill, violent society and those kinetic qualities are now front and center, a major export too. Alas, American military operations abroad haven’t paid dividends since Douglas McArthur hosted the Japanese general staff aboard the USS Missouri.

If America was “great,” it did not become so because the superior social sensitivities of left-wing bookends like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Uncle Sam came of age with 18^th/19th Century brands of economic, industrial, agricultural, and technological enterprise. Trump’s definition of “great” is just that; mercantile pragmatism, capitalism, self-interest wrapped in an American flag.

Trump suggests, as did Washington and Franklin, that the best that the US can do for the world is to do better for itself. The attempt by globalist shills to equate nationalism with racism is just another example of fake news.

Beyond reseating national priorities, trade, taxes, the economy, and the Supreme Court; Trump has left his mark on the American political culture in two important ways. He has taken the policy initiative high ground and put his many critics on the defensive.

Donald Trump’s greatest personal achievement to date is poetic too. He consigned Bill and Hillary to the dust bin of American history and politics.

Now the American left finds itself with its head up its own azimuth. Erstwhile “progressives,” socialists, and populists now find themselves defending the status quo, beholding to those many takers whilst alienating a shrinking class of makers.

Leadership on the American left is a mix of hate, apathy, and mindless opposition. Policy for the press and Democrat Party is now a spiteful reduction; more of the same—or obstruction.

Liberal America now has two camps; the usual suspects and the R. Kelly/Louis Farrakhan caucus. The old school is bicoastal, white, and moribund; Schumer, Pelosi, Sanders, Warren, Boxer, Feinstein, Biden, and the Clintons.

New school Democrats are diverse and vulgar; including the likes of Maxine Waters (D/LA), Kathy Griffith (CNN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , Stephen Colbert (CBS), Keith Ellison, Samantha Bee (TBS), Rashida Tlaib (D/Detroit) and Hank Johnson (D/Atlanta) just to name some recent headliners.

The K&F wing of the Democrat Party routinely refers to the president or his family as Nazis, scumbags, racists, cock pockets, cunts, or motherfuckers, just to cherry pick some of the vitriol. Loathing on the left today is a fetid mix of bigotry, vulgarity, hate, and ignorance. Take the pride of Atlanta, Representative Hank Johnson, who said on New Year’s Day:

Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again followers . . . are older, less educated, less prosperous, and they are dying early. Their life spans are decreasing, and many are dying from alcoholism, drug overdoses, liver disease, or simply a broken heart.

Such rhetoric says as much about Johnson’s constituency and his Party as it does about Hank’s IQ. He could be a poster child for network fact checkers—or urban American public schools.

The Democrat Party today cultivates ghettoes—and harems for hypocrites. Why is it that racial identity and feminist zealots are the first to use sobriquets like bitch, cunt, motherfucker, cow, heifer, skank, twat and “ho” to describe their sisters?

Hate and self-loathing usually hatch in the same crib.

You would think that after all these years, the misogynist left would at least learn how to spell “whore.” The “w” is just silent, not AWOL.

Withal, name calling is still not an argument. Without alternative policies, Jim Crow legates can only play obstruction or defense in 2020. Thanks to Trump, urban American fish wrap no longer controls the larger political narrative.

With policy success, Trump has driven haters and their press lackeys father left. Trotsky we hardly knew you. Enter “Beto” and “Pocahontas” stage left, bearing gifts for the ungifted.

Liberals still have the numbers on paper; but the uglier it gets the more Trumpsters can depend on backlash, apostates, and deep state defectors. Trump’s best assets are his enemies.

Nothing excretes like excess.

Until something better comes along, Trump twice might be nice; just what the country needs—and deserves.

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G. Murphy Donovan is a former USAF Intelligence officer, Vietnam veteran, a graduate the Defense Intelligence College and the Air War College. He is a former Senior USAF Research Fellow at RAND Corporation, Santa Monica and the former Director of Research and Russian (nee Soviet) Studies, ACS Intelligence, HQ USAF, serving under General James Clapper. Donovan has served at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Central intelligence Agency.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast

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