Comments on
Trump’s Victory
There are several
universities that are offering grief counseling to millennial students to help
them with the trauma of the loss of the election by Hillary Clinton and the
resultant win of the presidency by Donald Trump. This is one of the results of
our increasingly liberal/progressive thinking and education. You can’t blame the kids, They don’t know any better than to identify a
life disappointment as something to be treated as a major upheaval to be
addressed by counseling, rather than as something that life offers up to be
lived through.
Today is Veteran’s Day, and I
just put out my flag. I can’t help
thinking that millennials in my parents’ generation (and in mine) were also
offered some form of counseling. It was for trauma from war, which was called
“shell shock”, for those of you who remember. (Called PTSD later). In the mid-20th Century, those 17, 18 and 19
year old kids were fighting real life bloodletting battles against dire
physical enemies – Nazism, Fascism, later Communism, and not imagined political
bogeymen. Their psychological impact was
real, from seeing their compatriots killed and maimed in front of them, rather
than reaction to a political disappointment.
How perceptions change, or are educationally catered to change over a
few generations.
We love our kids, and
they should not have to endure the wartime hardships their parents did, but we
should be raising educated and adjusted human beings, not a bunch of
maladjusted crybabies. I don’t think that
those that fought and died for our freedoms envisaged our kids going to
universities that would indoctrinate our millennials with the shopworn and time
disproven doctrines of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.
Yet our whole university system is decidedly socialistic. Our
universities churn out liberal/progressive clones that seem incapable of
balanced thought and reasoning. We defeated communism in some places, and were
defeated by a determined communist population in Viet Nam. Communism died of its own weight in the old
USSR, and it changed to be barely recognizable in China. At any rate, communism and its socialist
offshoots are defunct, discredited ideologies.
You wouldn’t think so
though, after seeing how our left liberal educated millennials flocked to that
acknowledged old Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders. Bernie promised them the old
communist/socialist saws – something for nothing, and pay for the something by
stealing from the true producers in the society. Free college tuition, freedom from college
debt, and “the rich” will pay for it – sweet music to naïve young ears. What Bernie and later Hillary did not tell
them that when the piper has to be ultimately paid for all this “free” stuff,
the result is a stifling, choking mediocracy of society. One only has to look at many European
countries, where the same back lash is occurring that brought Trump to victory
in this country.
A true wonder is how a
candidate like Donald Trump could win the presidency. Not that he is the demonized “prince of darkness”
or devil incarnate defined by the same media that lied about all other aspects
of the election, but because how heavily stacked against his candidacy were so
many aspects of American society. The
president and his minions, and virtually the whole Washington political
establishment were against him. Virtually all major newspapers were against him
(including my own Dallas Morning News, which I barely forgave). All major media other than Fox were against
him. Virtually all so called
intelligentsia were against him. Pretty
much 100% of university thinking was against him. All the special interest minority and
lifestyle groups were against him. The
above societal elements, (which I will collapse semantically as the
“liberal/progressive elite”), radicalized women, blacks and Latinos against him
(or tried to, as it turned out). He did
not help his own cause by his own outrageous pronouncements and tweets about
women, minorities, trade agreements and other topics normally not broached in a
presidential campaign.
So how did he win? He won by sensing early the undercurrent of
dissatisfaction within the people of America and appealing directly to the
people. He created a movement and this
spoiled, wealthy celebrity playboy somehow managed to identify with so many
real life working people. He stressed
that he was an outsider and flew in the face of the elitists massed against
him. His outrageousness kept him and his
candidacy a top news item for much of the campaign. He spent a fraction on paid media coverage of
what the Clinton group did. He didn’t
have to – he was at the top of the news every day. His speeches and tweets were directly to the
people, and not just sound bites for the media and press.
Obviously the people
heard. Not the few dazzled by Clinton’s
pop stars. Not the inveterate conventional Democrat voters (who almost
eviscerated themselves by attacking Bernie).
Not the “presstitutes” and liberal academics. The people heard - the ones who do the work,
whether in factories or in offices or in hospitals or in schools, or in so many
other productive capacities. And Trump
drilled it home, directly to the people, in the face of the liberal elites and
the Washington establishment.
The people that
responded to Trump’s message were the working professional and blue collar
families who worked their 40-50 hours per week, many times with two wage
earners, who could not seem to get ahead, no matter what. If they still had decent jobs, they had not
seen real wage/salary increases in years.
It was their jobs that relocated to Mexico or China, leaving them with
second tier, low paying jobs. They
continued to work the long hours. They
saw the abuses in our society, the breeding “welfare moms”, the lawless
movements that killed cops and demanded special privileges from society, the
increasing toleration of drugs and other moral aberrations in our society. They saw their values, religion, morals and
ethics ridiculed by the liberal elite cabal.
They saw our country, the one our forefathers fought and died for, being
made a laughing stock by an apologetic and do nothing government in Washington.
Enough was enough. Hillary represented a continuation of this
unacceptable status quo, and in fact was coupled with the exact abuses of power
that was causing our national and international morass. Trump may not have been the most ethical and
moral individual himself, but he was a plain talker and was aware of and
addressed the main concerns. Even more
importantly, he was an outsider, a businessman, not part in any way of the
existing system. The Republicans need to
thank him for running as a Republican. He
most likely could have won on his own, and the Republicans could have lost both
houses of Congress. One can also speculate
how far Bernie Sanders could have brought his Democratic Socialist movement,
which appealed to many of the same disaffected Americans and nearly all of the
millennials, if the DNC and Hillary’s minions didn’t sabotage his campaign.
Leveled against Trump by
the Dems and the “liberal/progressive elites” were labels like “sexist”,
“racist”, “misogynist”, “homophobe”, “fascist”, “megalomaniac”. While possessing some elements of truth
culled from Trump’s long background in New York real estate and in the
celebrity limelight, these epithets were embellished and levelled by the same
entities that were so wrong about all the other aspects of this election. His response throughout the campaign was that
he would work for ALL AMERICANS who loved this country, were here legally and
were law abiding citizens. He eschewed
illegals, terrorists and potential terrorists and other criminal elements in
our society. His “locker room talk” in a
Hollywood style venue was broadcast by the Dems/Libs to the world. Suddenly, the Dems/Libs produced many women
who claimed that he sexually abused them in the past. Trump continued campaigning and none of these
attempts to discredit him made any difference, perhaps because of the
amateurish nature of how they were presented, perhaps because the electorate
was inured by a constant barrage from WikiLeaks, of Hillary’s email based real
crimes and indiscretions.
How could the media,
and particularly the vaunted polls, have been so wrong? I wrote blog months ago about drinking the
biased media Kool-Aid. It still
pertains. The discussion above of how
skewed nearly all aspects of society were against Trump gives some
insight. After a while, they believed
their own biased lies, and those fed by the liberal/progressive elite
establishment. Attempts to find some balance during the election cycle
inevitably led one to Fox or Newsmax or Breitbart, but accessing these gave one
the feeling of being badly skewed the other way. One poll, the USC Dornsife / LA Times
Presidential Election "Daybreak" Poll consistently showed actual
trends in the population rather than the biased trends fostered by the
liberal/progressive elites. Trump and
Kellyanne Conway and company followed their own data, which told them that
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and the middle of the country were in play.
The liberal/progressive elite establishment called them crazy when Trump went
to Wisconsin the Sunday before the election.
What is amazing is that how many so called reputable polls could be so blatantly
wrong. Their trends seemed correct. They just had to be shifted about 5% toward
Trump.
Another aspect of
Trump’s campaign was the enthusiastic crowds at his rallies across the
country. He would pack in 20,000 or
30,000 people with SRO and people waiting outside. The conventional media pooh-poohed these
crowds and said they meant nothing.
“Only the polls count” (sic)
In another vein, it is
not to say that all of Trump’s pronouncements should be taken at face value.
The wall and having Mexico pay for it seems a bit of a rhetorical
embellishment. So does deporting 12
million illegals. So does excluding legal immigration based on religion. These sound good when emphasizing abuses, but
need to be examined in the cold clear light of day. It is obvious that we need to secure our borders. If a wall is the answer, so be it. It is also clear that we need to do something
about the 12 million illegals in our country.
This means provide a legal path to absorb them, or expel some of
them. More closely scrutinizing
potential immigrants? – That goes without saying in our terrorist prone
world. A review of trade agreements? - Absolutely if we are getting screwed by
existing ones – may hurt some of us in Border States, but that’s the price to
pay. Beef up our military? - Absolutely
after the debilitating cuts of the last eight years.
For many of us old
types who remember the transition from Carter, and 52 American Embassy
prisoners held by Iran for 444 days, to Reagan and their immediate release,
this is a bit of déjà vu. America’s name
was dragged through the mud by fumbling, if well intentioned Democrats in the
1970’s. It was restored and reburnished
by Ronald Reagan, originally an actor.
He was a, president that knew how to hire the right people, listen to
them, and make us all proud to be Americans again. Let’s hope Donald Trump can do the same and
truly give our country the reset in so badly needs.
Ray Gruszecki
November 11, 2016
