A Note on the Trump Cult of Personality and the Omnibus Bill

I’ve always known there were a few cultists out there.

Actually, I’m a cultist too, only not about Donald Trump. Talk about the Constitution, and the purposes of the Founders? Then I’m a cultist, which is why I have cut my Conservatism Fan Club list in half.

A couple of days ago Donald Trump signed a horrible omnibus spending bill which, on its face, purported to give the Democrats everything they’ve been holding out for while denying the American voters almost everything they’ve been asking and expecting from candidate Trump, save a giant increase in military spending for much needed big-ticket items such as aircraft and weaponry.

And adding to the sobriety of the occasion, Trump was hardly happy-go-lucky in explaining this decision. I recall a Baptist preacher called in to speak over a man who never darkened the doorway of a church, going around to family members and friends trying to find something nice to say about the fellow. Trump was almost funeary in the way he also tried to paint a hopeful picture on this bill. Something that “had to be done” he explained.

I think everyone was shocked Trump went ahead and signed such a bad bill, but trying to understand his true meaning, and explaining it to his jilted Cult Clatch is not the same.

Twitter was filled with cries of “Quisling sell-out”, “double crosser”, “I’m outta here”, “No hope, no how”, making Ann Coulter seem like an optimist by comparison. We’ve all seen this kind of star-worship on Twitter, as if Donald Trump were their own personal saint. I can’t know their age, or sex (if they have an androgynous handle), but on Twitter a majority seem young, where star-gazing isn’t all that far fetched. But on Limbaugh some people called in who clearly were over 50, at least. And they sounded even more fatalistic, without the pain of Cupid’s arrow being jerked out of their hearts.

Sober, clear headed resignation.

A few observations.

Donald Trump was never Frankie Avalon, Elvis, or the Beatles, who only sang songs so we would buy them. With Donald Trump, the reverse is true. The American people wrote the music, actually the entire score, of Make America Great Again. We defined him. He did not mold, shape or define us. It has always been the other way around.  And our war began almost a decade ago, for some, over a generation.

So what we do, even in the worst case scenario, is still get up each day and do battle with the same Enemy(ies) we had before Donald Trump came on the scene, even before Barack Obama came on the scene. We’ve already made Donald Trump president which means Hillary Clinton is not president, and until I see the Congolese Marching Band, flying the flag of the United Nations, marching down the center of Main Street in Richmond, Virginia, I’m going to insist that this win in 2016 changed America history for the next 100 years.

It cannot be undone.

This was my analytical starting point in November, 2016, and it remains so today. The things we have since learned about the depot of criminality that existed in government and the US Congress, lights up my life daily, simply because we get to know it, instead of just guess it. And for every step the Enemy might employ to take that knowledge away from us will be met with 10 times the response. We are only at the beginning of the this clean-up, while still trying to do it by the book, without me and thousands more going out at night and start killing peoples’ rosebushes.

I have no doubt about how it will end, only if it will be peaceful. Or not.

This thinking frames all my analysis of events.

And until or unless the Congress says otherwise, Donald Trump is still the guy who will carry America’s football forward constitutionally. If he’s gone soft, gotten chicken, or sold out, I still have to try and get every good thing I can out of him from now til Jeff Flake or John Kasich try to replace him in 2020.

The true test is in the GOP House-Senate, and will be how they will move on the actual appropriations of the things authorized in this omnibus bill. I expect to see dozens of GOP Members be primaried on this vote alone. I wonder, as I asked at the time, if Karen Handel, GA-6, can hold onto her seat?

Everything we decide as a people, the nation’s largest voting base, does not depend on what Trump does, or doesn’t do, but what we know, or think we know, as to why he did it.

Yeah, that clairvoyance thing again. I used to think that was a millennial disability, but it seems I’m wrong.

To believe Donald Trump has flipped is to believe someone is holding members of his family hostage (as some still believe about Chief Justice John Roberts) or that he never really meant a damned thing he said in all those speeches that had people standing and cheering in their living rooms all during 2016 and 2017.

If the magic wasn’t real, then it was hocus pocus, for he sure as hell hasn’t gone wobbly. Wobbly didn’t make him $15B, and America’s biggest private-sector small businessman in history.

If Trump did mean it, and I think he did, in my own humble opinion that means there are other matters WE DON’T KNOW and HE DOES, that went into his decision.

I’m sure if you paused and put your whole minds to it, you could list several. But foremost in my mind is that something military (China, Russia, North Korea, hell, maybe even Yemen) is about to bust out all over, and we can’t get caught 100 attack helicopters short of a full deck of cards.

Then there’s this possibility;

… that in the actual appropriation of the money authorized by Congress, Trump can “negotiate” (his favorite term) just who gets what and what they have to give up to get it. Congress deals with people who have political capital, only Trump has never used that formula. His political capital is us. The people.

Planned Parenthood would be wise not to go to bed early after a bottle of pinot noir and sleep the sleep of the victorious. Obama gypped America by making all sorts of ledger changes in prior spending bills, funding all sorts of off-the-books things, only our Congress didn’t object, so we really don’t know if it was constitutional or not. But when you’re dealing with criminals, you don’t have to match their criminality, you only have to keep them believing you’re just as criminal as they are. And they will behave accordingly.

In the art of negotiating that is called “having an edge”. A good hole card.

Neither can Congress, Ryan’s Congress and McConnell’s Congress, go to bed at night thinking they have battened down all the 2018 hatches tight. Instead of a big bridge, which this Omnibus Bill purports to be, we may be seeing a lot of little bridges having to be crossed between now and election day, and in the GOP, a lot more sweat to be sweated.

We are still in charge.