2016 Election, Dona;ld Trump, Elitism and Class

The Most Important Truth About Donald Trump

…is that almost everything said about Donald Trump is actually about something else.

Several weeks ago I began what turned out to be a series on Donald Trump, when I suggested that Ted Cruz should let Donald Trump go first, if for no other reason than to understudy the kind of executive (crisis) management skills Trump possesses and Cruz does not. And which will be required the day after the Inauguration. There will be no honeymoon if either outsider is elected. (Witness the Friday night March 11th shutting down of a Trump event in Chicago by hoodlums. Expect four years of this whether Trump or Cruz are elected.)

But I never endorsed Trump outright. In fact, I’ve said repeatedly here that I think Ted Cruz is head and shoulders the better man in every philosophical subject we consider to be “conservative” and constitutional. Trump is no conservative. In fact, he’s as ordinary as most any citizen, in that his political views outside his world of business are very narrow, usually picked up in random conversation with people he normally associates with, and about as deep as a pool of warm spit  (I think attributed to VP John Nance Garner,  who, coincidentally, went into the 1932 Democratic convention 100 delegates short of being the nominee, ending up instead as FDR’s Veep). Most people are political only about things that affect them personally, close to home.

Trump, like most citizens became professional at something other than politics, and I have long supported the idea of a president not arising from the political class, i.e., not beholding to it. That is the definition of “outsider” in this campaign, and keep it in mind – outsiders out-score the Establishment around 80:20 in voters’ eyes. (I include Cruz in this group, even though not private sector.) This private sector background was why I supported Herman Cain in 2012, who, unlike Trump, is a known quantity as a true conservative. Herman made the idea of an “outsider” president both plausible and desirable, so that the past four years’ descent into political perdition by the Republican Party only punctuated the urgency for this change in course.

My original Trump-Cruz analysis was that Ted’s best route, (and possibly only one) would be through Trump, not over him. Mr Trump simply has executive skill sets Cruz doesn’t yet possess, while Cruz has a boatload of knowledge Trump does not possess. Too me, a match made in heaven, if your long view is 30 years instead of eight.

But to do that we must first overcome the conditioning imprinted in us that in order for our guy to win we must utterly destroy the other guy, which is a modern contrivance of the political consultancy class based on a notion that political candidates are a dime a dozen, and that protecting the political class is the only long term objective worth fighting for…for that’s where great wealth and status can be obtained. Bottom line, short of an out-and-out shooting civil war, we can’t ever cure what ails us as a nation so long as that establishment, visibly getting larger every year, remains intact.

Which brings me back to my opening note about Trump, that everything said about Trump is really about something else. I’ve just told you what that “something else” is about Donald Trump is in my own soul…a vehicle, a plow, if you will, that could give us a generation or more of Ted Cruz’s, including a federal city largely turned back to pasture land where “sheep may safely graze” once again. (A little Bach nostalgia for the America we once knew) .

In one way or another Donald Trump is a test for every American who still knows anything about the old art of soul-searching, for everything about him tests our innermost beliefs, prejudices, vanities, vices as well as virtues. Based on what I read and hear, I can list a hundred negative things to say about Trump, only to find many of them not to be substantiated by fact, and the misstatements of fact I’m finding are often sourced back to the Left. Ironic isn’t it that much of conservatism’s attack-facts on Trump are from the Left?

For instance, “Trump is a failed businessman”…who somehow has a net worth of 14 billion dollars?  When I was kid we were taught in school that Abraham Lincoln failed in several business ventures before he “went into government,” considered to be a higher calling in those days, almost as high as the clergy. Men in business, owners of companies of ventures and enterprises they build, often fail. Corporate CEO’s such as Carly Fiorina never fail, they are only fired. Their resumes almost never show they ‘failed’. In fact, most corporate severance contracts insist that “failure” “incompetence” or other such terms can never be used in separating a high executive from his post. For most executives, such as Michael Eisner who took Disney in the wrong direction, then parachuted to safety with tens of millions after a few years, the only “art of the deal” they ever practiced was in that compensation package they negotiated at the beginning of their tenure.

Especially today, the chasm between multi-millionaire executives who manage empires built by someone else two generations earlier, but who still only draw a paycheck, answering to a board of bosses, and the man or woman who builds something from scratch, answers to no one and takes full responsibility of every good and bad decision they make, is as wide as the Grand Canyon. I can walk into a 100 small businesses within a five minute drive from here and find better men than any of the hired guns at Disney. As a class, these have been in the crosshairs of a government-big business alliance for at least 8 years, their ranks decimated. I was in big business in the 1980s and saw the seeds for this first being cultivated. America’s business schools were plowing the rows.

Interestingly too is how easy it has become to look down upon Trump as if he were just a rowdy school-yard bully. A local radio host only today, probably in his 30s, called Trump a “liar” out of hand when he stated that most of Islam was anti-American. I can say unequivocally that all of Islam is antithetical to American democracy and to almost all the principles underlying the Constitution, not to mention plural American society. Our Constitution has always allowed for religious sects to withdraw from the rest of society and live separately…only they can’t come out at night and make war on the rest of us because we are not like them. A few years ago, 2006, polling was done in which it was reported, through  Michelle Malkin, that 10% of Indonesian Muslims approved of al-Qaeda style jihad, approximately 19 million, and that closer to 80% worldwide believed that sharia law should be imposed worldwide.

Just another anti-Trump comment that tells us much more about the speaker than Trump. You see this everywhere these days, people, including many professing (or professional) conservatives. I’m no longer sure.

I just know that a little introspection can go a long way.  A friend was gobsmacked when Dr Ben Carson not so much endorsed Donald Trump but said some incredible things about him; “deep, introspective, loves America deeply.” The other Donald Trump. My friend has to choose between one of three possibilities: Carson was either bribed, or maybe he is not half the man he thought Carson was, having fooled us all, just as Jeff Sessions or Phyllis Schlafly had. Or finally, just possibly, though highly unlikely (we tell ourselves), perhaps Dr Carson actually has seen and knows things about Donald Trump from an up-close and personal position that we can never know.

Donald Trump forces us to weigh these things, the fate of the nation, and our own personal pride, in ways we don’t think we should have to. Clairvoyance is such a fickle lover, ain’t it, Glenn Beck? Call your therapist. Please.

Instead of 35-65 scale, Trump versus the field, using an outsider scale it’s 80-20, so a Trump-Cruz makes all the sense in the world, for it can destroy the underpinnings of the entire establishment infrastructure.

Any person calling him or herself a conservative and who cannot see beyond February, 2017, at least thirty years, is not a true conservative

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