What’s Wrong With President Trump’s July 4 Military Show?

Is it wrong for a free country to display its military might? Absolutely not.

Leftists and Democrats don’t like America, not as it is, and they don’t like President Trump. So of course they were outraged at the military exercises on display at the 4th of July events in D.C. yesterday. Had Obama or Hillary Clinton done something similar, they would have been just fine. Why? Because the issue is context.

President Trump stands for viewpoints that are radical and extreme to leftists in our academic and media establishment, as well as a majority of voters in urban areas. His premise is one they do not share. It’s often called “America First” but in this context, “America” is equivalent to individual rights and freedom. Whether President Trump always takes the exact right (i.e., pro-freedom, pro-individual rights) position on every issue is not the point. The point is that freedom is HIS overriding premise — and it’s NOT the overriding premise of the socialist, statist media/elite establishment.

For that reason, shows of force under any Republican president who shares the premise that America is a great nation because of its respect for individual rights represent heresy to anyone from a leftist point-of-view. According to the leftist point-of-view, the individual is subordinate to society. Society, to them, is run by the government — a proper government being a government of leftists, meaning people like Obama, all of the Democrats presently in Congress or running for President, or the similarly soulless creatures in the European Union that Brexit advocates are rightly trying to escape.

The basic issue in government and politics — in our time, or any other time — is the individual versus the state. President Trump comes down essentially on the side of the individual. Compared to the Democrats, who are now TOTAL statists and socialists, he does so overwhelmingly. This means, according to conservatives, the state is there to serve the individual — not the other way around. The function of the state is not to force some to pay the way of others, as leftists dictate, but simply to protect people’s rights to private property, free speech and the products of their efforts. (Yes, and also to keep Social Security and Medicare going. Those programs, sadly, were terrible mistakes, but we are stuck with them for now and when they finally go totally bankrupt, and explode our national debt to a point where it’s too high to calculate, there will be days of reckoning.)

The hard-core socialist left represents the exact opposite of these pro-freedom views and attitudes, which “right wing” Republicans, libertarians and conservatives hold to various degrees. To leftists, the individual exists to serve the state. That’s why they’re for open borders. They want the state to be free to force productive citizens to serve the world’s needy, and in the process give themselves more power by making millions of more needy non-citizens permanently dependent on them.

When you think of leftists, think heroin pushers, only instead of heroin the drugs are free school, free health care, free child care, free cell phones and free college, for as far as the eye can see. Open borders simply mean world socialism — the welfare state now applied to the entire planet, paid for by the half or so of Americans who actually pay taxes. These massively expensive goods and services are provided NOT by the politicians who take credit for providing them, but by the productive members of society who will be forced to carry the load and pay the bill. It’s involuntary servitude in the truest sense of the word, no better than the slavery of the 18th and 19th centuries.

So when leftists foam at the mouth over President Trump’s display of military strength at a public event like July 4, they’re not angry about the show of government power. They LOVE government power more than President Trump or his supporters could ever begin to imagine. They’re angry because they know Trump (and his supporters) do not share their view that the purpose of all this military strength is to force some to pay the way of others through a massive socialist-like state. A state, by the way, which outlaws guns and curbs free speech because, after all, how can you expect a formerly free people to go down such a road willingly?

President Trump’s idea of military strength is to keep us free, or at least as free as we are now. And to leftists, including all of the media and academia, we are still far, far too free. This is the thing that makes them enraged. When they lash out at President Trump’s military jets, this is what they’re really lashing out at: the idea of freedom. It KILLS them that so many millions of Americans still value their freedom. And, for all his imperfections, President Trump speaks for them with remarkable clarity.