Donald Trump is more similar to the Founders of our country than anyone who has run for the presidency in my lifetime.
What?! What?! Didn’t Trump just jump an entire school of sharks in the third debate, saying he didn’t know if he would accept the outcome of the election. Isn’t he finished? Are you out of your bloody mind, Simon?
Okay, maybe, it wouldn’t be the first time… but hear me out.
Put briefly: If Donald Trump believes—as many of us do—that the FBI is corrupt, the Justice Department is corrupt, the other party is hiring violent paid thugs to disrupt his campaign rallies, that no one knows who is really registered to vote, that the press is stratospherically biased, and that his opponent, backed up by all those corrupt entities, should have been indicted, why would a patriot, or for that matter someone who is even routinely honest, necessarily accept the results of the election of that opponent?
Ben Franklin wouldn’t. Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t. James Madison wouldn’t. Sam Adams wouldn’t. Of course, those guys were revolutionaries. These days we’re just, you know, “good citizens” who obey the rules and move on. With that kind of behavior in the past, our country wouldn’t even be here. But never mind.
Not convinced? Think of the reverse. Suppose Trump had meekly said he would accept the outcome with the smirking Hillary—the woman he has called a crook and who, for all intents and purposes, is one—standing only a few feet away? Wouldn’t that, in the true sense, have invalidated everything he has been saying? #DraintheSwamp, my eye!
Now, as we all know, Trump has been here before, back in the primaries, when he made no guarantee he would accept the nominee of his party and, as I recall, received a round of boos at that debate for his non-declaration. He later went up in the polls despite those boos.
Will that happen this time? Not if the mainstream media has anything to do with it. As I write they are damning Trump forever with faint praise—or should I say they are “concern trolling” him—by saying how well he was doing in the debate until he jumped that shark and betrayed everything our country stands for.
The implication here, of course, is that everyone should forgive Hillary Clinton after she is elected and just ignore what happened with the bogus FBI investigation. Good luck with that. More likely the road ahead will be extremely rocky with more WikiLeaks revelations (they could even be saving their more dramatic ones for after the election), not to mention defections from the FBI and elsewhere, subpoenas from Judicial Watch and others with inflammatory and illegal emails and documents appearing for years.
Okay, I’ll say it. When Donald said he wouldn’t necessarily accept the results of election 2016, he was doing us all a favor. The democratic republic about whose precariousness Franklin warned us at the founding is shaky indeed at this moment. Leaders have gone beyond the law, as the new Project Veritas videos painfully remind us once again. Only the toughest love can save our republic now.
Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already.
(Artwork created using a modified Shutterstock.com image.)
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