There are few of us who have successfully avoided exposure to the Republican presidential nomination contest. In my case I have had no interest in avoiding it, but as a lifelong observer of politics I must admit that in this cycle I’ve gone from shaking my head, gasping in shock, pinching the bridge of my nose in utter dismay and now trying to find a suitable way to combine the urge to vent my frustrations with my adult duty to only say something when I think it might be helpful.
So here goes.
The populist appeal of Donald Trump, as I see it, is equal parts frustration with the “way things are,” anger with Barack Obama and the creeping ignorance of history and politics that a failed educational environment in most homes has created by conceding the responsibility for learning to television and social media. So, strangely enough, running against the failures of Barack Obama, Donald Trump is succeeding because people want hope — and change.
It’s not magic that he is doing well. It’s not brilliance either. As the highly successful motivational speaker Tony Robbins is reported to have once said, “It’s not hard to become successful. All you have to do is study what other successful people did, and then do that.” The last president to be elected twice in America against all odds and in an environment where most of the pundits said he couldn’t do it was Barack Obama. Trump studied what he did and is now doing that.
Trump is a traveling entertainer. As Obama did, he fills auditoriums and stadiums and is virtually worshipped by his followers. Trump said it himself, he could shoot somebody on the street and his supporters wouldn’t abandon him. So why he is popular isn’t really so much of a mystery as some commentators would feign to suggest. He has tapped the anger and anxiety of the nation and is playing it for all it is worth. But there is one thing that does surprise me.
For all of the plans to change the world that Trump says he has but is apparently keeping secret for now, rational voters must ask themselves, how much of this is bombast and how much of it is substantive? Because if people really only wanted someone to occupy the Oval Office with plans to truly reverse the direction we are going and get us back on track in reality it occurs to me that Rand Paul would be the better choice.
The media darling
In fact Trump is just the most recent media darling. Not long ago Rand was the most interesting politician in America. He was on TV 24 hours a day it seemed. He stood his ground on the Senate floor in defense of privacy. He has called for an audit of the Federal Reserve, a long overdue pursuit that holds the best chance to get a handle on our economic failures which in turn is the first step toward recovery.
Rand was actively engaged in the effort to stop Barack Obama when Trump was still making nice with Obama’s democrat friends. And Rand was at one time the most recognizable leader of the TEA party movement in the nation and clearly not a member of the establishment. More importantly Rand has articulated plans, not just claimed to have some secret ones.
But compared to Trump Rand is now an incumbent, he made nice with Mitch McConnell and so he has lost some of his “outsiderness.” Enter Donald Trump to steal Rand’s ideas, Rand’s media magnetism and, like Rand, earn Sarah Palin’s endorsement, (which despite teeth gnashing immediately earned Trump a boost in his poll numbers). Like it or not Trump will likely become the Republican nominee and might win in November. Now comes the hard question, will he be your kind of president?
Trump is not fully invested, if at all, in the protection of life and I’m not sure he has any serious devotion to the Constitution or its recognition that all laws and all taxes end up restricting liberty. Not for one minute do I believe that Trump sees the role of government in our country as to ONLY serve as protection of our God given rights from power hungry humans. Nor do I think Trump would necessarily hold the line against weakening the 2nd amendment. As such I, like many other conservatives, have my hesitations.
On the other hand many of these issues are somewhat firewall-protected by a Republican congress, the mood of the country and effective advocacy by the groups I support like the National Right to Life and the NRA. So, wisely, Trump is avoiding most social issues.
I think a President Trump would likely focus his energy on military and fiscal security for America, and in that context there is no other Republican candidate who is perceived by votes to have a real chance to make as much of a difference as Trump appears able to make. Whether he succeeds or not doesn’t matter at this point. In politics, perception is reality. He knows that and so he’s creating the precise perception people are yearning for. Now comes the question of whether Trump is all hat and no cattle — or the real deal.
I’m not sure that when it comes to Trump’s abilities are as flimsy as you might think in the areas of fiscal responsibility and foreign negotiations. In fact I’d say in Moscow, Bejing, Pyonyang, Tehran, Dasmascus, and many other places where their goal is to find a way to turn the USA into a prison of people enslaved to the economic feed trough or social feed trough of competing ideologies and economies, that the thought of Trump as President makes their back doors pucker. As a friend of mine says, that’s the heart of the “art of the deal.”
The negotiator
Trump doesn’t start negotiations in the middle; he starts in the stratosphere of the ridiculous and sticks to his guns. Then he tells the guys on the other side of the table to take his offer or take a walk. He may end up near the middle by the time the deal is done, but he understands that starting in the middle means any compromise puts the other guys on your end of the field and he understands that you can’t win if you are backed up defending your own goal line during the whole game. Unfortunately for the overly sensitive out there this means he doesn’t start from a position of political correctness.
And one more thing. I’d say it was inadvertent, not scripted and actually from the heart when Trump made perhaps his most important revelation during the last debate which I think closed the deal for many people who were hesitant about voting for him and only decided to do so after he answered this one question.
When asked if he could really just walk away from the company of which he is so proud, a company he built by his own obsession with success and put everything he had built into a blind trust to take on the job of becoming CEO of the USA Trump said this: That he would gladly walk away, that his company would mean nothing to him at that point, that his family could take it over, and that what he now wanted was to do for America what he had done for his company, to make America great.
It was clear that he meant it. And why was it clear? Because anyone who watches Trump knows that he is obsessed with winning, that he refuses to fail and that the fate of the nation would, if he was elected, become his legacy and as such failure would not be an option.
He made it clear that unlike many of the others on the stage with him, winning the presidency alone was not the prize. To Trump winning the election merely places him in the driver’s seat from which he will set out in pursuit of his real goal of national success. To Trump winning the presidency is only necessary in order to provide him with the opportunity to unleash his ego driven compulsion to succeed.
Deja vu all over again?
Would he be more hayseed than Harvard? Maybe. Would he be more Billy Carter than Ronald Reagan? It’s possible. Would he be prone to dangerous rhetoric? Probably. Might he become so frustrated as to mimic Obama and try to circumvent Congress? On that count I doubt it.
I rather think that he will be more like LBJ in his ability to get Congress to do what he wants rather than ignoring them. After all, few if any of those in Congress are as popular Trump and most are so insecure about their jobs that they wouldn’t dare having him as a political enemy.
But might he dare to take bold directions, be firm with our position in negotiations, find ways to cut spending and increase prosperity? Well, when you think about it, who else in the race has ever done that?
It’s tough to say this, but Trump is probably going to be the GOP nominee and with the kind of enthusiasm he has thus far developed, would have a very good chance of beating the democrat’s choice. So now my focus is less on the antics of the campaign, and now on visioning what the next four years will look like if Trump wins.
I’d like to think that a bold departure from the norm coupled with a deep desire for our side (that is the USA) to win for a change, will become reality. But then isn’t that just more “Hope and Change”?
If so then I guess it’s déjà vu all over again.
Marcus Carey is a Northern Kentucky lawyer with 32 years experience. He is also a farmer, talk radio host and public speaker who loves history and politics. As a commentator, he is “dedicated to honest and respectful comment on the political and cultural issues of our time.”
The Republican cabal and their donors will not allow Trump, Cruz or Carson to be the nominee. The nominee, and perhaps the VP nominee will come from the trio of Rubio, Bush and Kasich. Everybody else will fall by he wayside.