Do you wonder why so many Americans love President Donald Trump? Here’s a story that illustrates why.
President Trump made light today of Russia’s retaliation for congressional sanctions that entailed expelling hundreds of U.S. personnel from the embassy in Moscow, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin helped him with a cost-cutting measure.
“I want to thank him, because we’re trying to cut down on payroll,” Trump told reporters after a national security briefing at his golf club in Bedminister, N.J. “And as far as I’m concerned, I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll. There’s no real reason for them to go back.”
“So, I greatly appreciate the fact that they’ve been able to cut our payroll for the United States,” he added. “We’ll save a lot of money.”
All you need to know is right there, in that one story.
Yes, President Donald Trump is irreverent. Not irreverent for its own sake, but because he makes light of the people who are inflated with their own imagined importance. Yes, that includes even the Russians, the ones he’s supposedly in alliance with and secretly likes. But it includes so many more: The inflated Republican leadership who think they’re more important than they really are…The Democratic socialist establishment who think their “truth” is all the truth we need…The career politicians in D.C., but also the career bureaucrats throughout the federal government who think the world would stop on its axis without them when, in reality, the world would be infinitely better without the great majority of them.
The last election was not ideological. We had no ideological candidates. Hillary Clinton was a thorough-going, lifelong socialist pretending to be a moderate. And Donald Trump, if you read his books, is basically a pragmatic Republican with Reaganesque leanings on things like deregulation and tax cuts, at least in part. He’s no more radical than Ronald Reagan was, and in many respects less so. I wish he was more radical than he is.
We need an ideological election, because without one America will continue its drift into statism, socialism and collectivism, with most Americans never even learning what those terms mean. But elections also ought to be about psychology, attitude and feelings. And Donald Trump represents the attitudes and feelings of those who are fed up with the people who think they are important, and who constantly change the world for the better, when they’re really nothing more than parasites parading as relevant government officials making our lives somehow better.
We don’t need government officials whose full time jobs have done nothing but bring us to the brink of nuclear war with North Korea, and possibly Iran next. We don’t need a government that spills red ink at $20 trillion and counting, doing nothing (or worse).
The bottom line is that we desperately need a limited government as envisioned by America’s founders, to protect the rights of the individual to be free from force – mostly from government force itself. The vast majority of what goes on today has nothing to do with that Constitutional function, and everything to do with undermining it. Those diplomats in Russia do nothing to protect us, and given the stupid ideas most of these diplomats possess, probably bring us much closer to conflict than we otherwise would be.
Trump’s opponents in both parties sputter and stammer over how Putin’s actions are no laughing matter. Well of course they’re not. But the absurdity of thinking the swamp-like Establishment can do anything at all to make our lives better by continuing to do the same old worthless things is absurd to the point of funny. That’s partly what laughter is, after all: A physical and emotional release, when you can hardly believe something and no longer can endure it.
President Trump may go down in history as the ultimate implementation of the old legend, “The Emperor Has No Clothes.” He has single-handedly exposed the overwhelmingly biased media, the feckless government bureaucracy, the hopelessly insulated career politicians and all the others who think they are important and relevant do-gooders as the toxic and destructive phony parasites they really are. He has shown how none of them have any clothes, and never really did.
Whatever lies ahead for America in general and President Trump in particular, it’s possible to argue that his most important mission has already been accomplished. Here’s hoping he does a lot more of it, for as much time as he has.
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