Why I Don’t Want a Compassionate President

CNN, George W. Bush’s former press secretary and others are whining that President Trump is not “compassionate” enough about the flooding in Texas.

I reject the idea that a President should even be compassionate. Why? Because what such people mean by “compassion” is spending other people’s money. In other words, if Barack Obama spent $2 trillion on Texas while Donald Trump only spent $1 trillion, it would somehow prove that Donald Trump lacks compassion.

It’s amazing. Democrats, socialists and Communists claim to hate money. They brag that they’re not “materialists”. Yet their sole means of measuring compassion is monetary. He who spends the most is the most compassionate. It’s nothing more than a competitive bidding war where the winner gets to be seen as the most compassionate.

Promising other people’s money is not compassion. Giving away your own money might be, but not giving away other people’s money.

It’s not compassionate for a President of the United States to be a gigantic charity agency. The President of the United States is supposed to protect citizens from foreign invasion, and ensure that the Bill of Rights is upheld. A President focused on national defense, preserving the First and Second Amendments, annihilating terrorists and, yes, protecting our nation’s borders is a compassionate President. Because it means he’s doing what he’s Constitutionally and rationally/morally obliged to do.

It’s so easy to give away other people’s money. It’s so easy to say things like, “I feel your pain”, or to make funny faces oozing compassion like supposedly more compassionate presidents such as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and (seriously, CNN?) George W. Bush did, we’re now told.

I don’t even think these people know or care what they mean when they say Donald Trump should be more compassionate. It’s just virtue-signaling. Virtue-signaling is a way of telling their comrades (if they’re Democrats) or their alleged superiors whose approval they desperately seek (if they’re Republicans), “Hey, look at me. I don’t like Donald Trump”. As if that were some kind of accomplishment.

Grover Cleveland, a President during a time when the American government largely stuck to its Constitutional job, put it well: “When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government.”

Right on, President Cleveland. There’s nothing compassionate about bankrupting a nation.

There’s nothing compassionate about leading people confronted with a natural disaster to believe that the federal government could ever come close to accomplishing what local authorities and private charities could do far better, in the vast majority of cases. Sending in the military or National Guard to help out is one thing. Becoming a gigantic red-ink, politically motivated and unaccountable insurance company is something else, and speaks more to the kind of thing that Grover Cleveland and — before him — Thomas Jefferson and James Madison tried to warn us against.

Forget compassionate presidents. I want one, just for once, who actually does his job.