It’s like, out here in President Trump country, there’s nothing we can do to help the president. Whichever red precinct we occupy, or especially if our home is adrift in a sea of blue, there’s an occasional feeling of helplessness. That’s just what the left wants us to feel. We can’t vote for Trump again until 2020. With a few special election exceptions, we can’t vote for Republicans who are supposed to have his back until 2018.
Even if we contributed money to the Trump campaign, for working class citizens, it seems counterintuitive to send money to a multi-billionaire now. It doesn’t seem like money is what is needed. We had no use for political “architects” like Karl Rove during the campaign because they were not sufficiently on board with the program; now we find ourselves wishing there was such an advisor on the team to smooth out the protocol and communications gaffes and to give advice on the wonky B.S. that a businessman like Trump probably has always delegated to underlings. A guy like Rove, or Newt Gingrich, to guide Trump along the lines of what is worthy of his time and response, and what is not.
On most days, it seems as if all the middle American Trump supporter can do is sit back and take it, as the unhinged Democrat left, maximized for influence in media, academia, the federal judiciary, and pop culture, looses the hounds of political hell on the great orange hope. Even though the Trump-generated precinct map of the United States runs redder than the bleed-outs from an appalling terrorist attack, we are marginalized in the national conversation.
It’s all Fox News, conservative radio, and conservative internet sites like PJ Media can do to mount even a semblance of fairness, let alone the robust defense Trump’s supporters long for.
We knew it would be bad, but not this bad. We figured Trump would get the George W. Bush treatment, as in default ridicule, illegitimacy before the fact, and the tiresome “not my president” shenanigans that soured like spilt milk on Election Day in November 2004. Real Time host Bill Maher has said that he never thought he would miss Bush 43, and these days he’s openly pining for Mitt Romney. Don’t believe any of it. Whichever Republican won would have been scathed and delegitimized. But it is a testament to the extreme distress and loathing Trump causes that Maher even posits such nonsense.
What Trumpsters in the virtual heartland—wherever that territory exists on the map—weren’t prepared for was a concentrated, hysterical effort to render the presidency of Donald Trump a historical footnote, a mistake, an impeachable offense on its face, something that cannot be countenanced. From election night, through the inauguration and the first 100 days, the onslaught has continued unabated. It is so furiously relentless that in dark moments those who liked Trump from the outset—because he was new blood, was talking the talk they hoped he would walk, and promised (among many other things) to drain a moribund, globalist federal government swamp —may start to question themselves.
If enough white working-class Reagan Democrats or Trump-generated newbie independents start doing that, the Democrats hope, it will be a death spiral from here to 2018 and beyond.
The prime example is the relentlessness of the Russian collusion conspiracy theory. In Trump-land, we don’t believe any of it, but constantly having it alluded to as if it was accepted truth wears on the ability to filter out the emptiness of the accusation. Wasn’t it Nazi Joseph Goebbels whose first rule of propaganda was, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”?
Eyes glaze over at duplicitous outrage over the firing of the underperforming, haphazardly partisan, and semi-competent FBI Director James Comey. It ‘s the same-old-same-old when the Washington Post bends over backward to kiss its own journalistic ass on the Trump/Russian meeting, and constantly misses the real story: the Deep State leakers Attorney General Jeff Sessions should be perp-walking out of the inner sanctum every day of the week.
Trump is vowing to get rid of the notorious MS-13 gang. That kind of action and others like it will be his ticket to success, but in Trump Country, we’d like to see a little concurrent bureaucratic housecleaning as well.
There’s always the option of paddling our topical surfboards away from the undertow of the prevaricating mainstream press. The rationale for that is, hey, we won, we won it all; screw the sore losers, the entrenched bureaucracies, and the America-last crowd. Leave them to stew in relative impotence for the next four years, at least. In the never-to-be-final analysis, isn’t that really what we’re looking at here, a political party and socio-cultural movement that cannot accept defeat?
Checking out can work for awhile. But the forces arrayed against the president deemed to be our best bet is so dogged, so systematic across the leftist spectrum, so tireless and unethical, that constant vigilance is required. The impulse is to stay engaged, to keep fighting in whatever ways we can. Like showing up on the street for Trump when such an event is planned. Like showing up big league if the president comes to town.
Like turning to another station the very second that a news outlet, daytime talk show, or late-night comedy program veers into territory that reflects the smearing, unsubstantiated, and un-American liberal hate-fest that has befallen the nation. Like being present and accounted for in the comment thread wars, or penning submissions like this.
Nobody out here thinks Donald Trump is the second coming (though he did win evangelicals by around 90%). There’s a learning curve going on, and he’s up against a concerted effort to destroy him the likes of which this country has never seen. There are days when it can get you down, and days when you wish that Trump would welcome aboard somebody like former skeptic Rove, or backer from the get-go Gingrich, as an all-purpose advisor and orchestrator-in-chief.
Meanwhile, there’s one more thing a person who wants to give Trump a chance can do: Remember. A day will come when votes will be cast again. Don’t forget what the Democrats are trying to do to your duly elected president.
It is unfortunate that cyclic payback has become the modus operandi of politics in our times, but there’s no escape.
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