OPINION: How I came to Donald Trump and why I don’t regret it

By Scott St. Clair | The Save Jersey Blog

I’m absolutely for Donald Trump for more reasons than you can count.

This election cycle, I started out supporting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. After he crashed and burned before takeoff, I spent a cup of coffee with Carly Fiorina and then Marco Rubio until Gov. Chris Christie beat the tar out of him during a February debate (If you can’t handle a Jersey tough, how can you handle Vladimir Putin or even Nancy Pelosi?).

At that point, it was “Whither thou goest?”

There stood Donald Trump. Starting last fall and into the winter, I stopped being viscerally opposed to him for all the same reasons self-centered ideologists were opposed to him and started digging into what it was that was causing so many to be attracted to him. After realizing that nobody outside the blue-nose and Puritanical wing of the GOP – in my opinion, a singularly small albeit vociferous minority – gave a rip about his personal life, how he talked or what he did for a living (I LIKE casinos – I’ve won big in casinos!), I discovered several things.

First, Donald Trump is a closer — he knows how to sell and then seal the deal. Trump has made the campaign all about America and the people, while the others made it all about themselves. He has imagination and he weaves a compelling and positive narrative into which people see themselves because it’s largely the narrative they’ve conjured on their own.

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is viscerally understood and accepted by voters. We know that America has been great, but isn’t now – and it’s not just eight years of Obama that’s run it down. Frankly, the Bush years sucked, too. America hasn’t been great since Ronald Reagan was president.

But Trump tells people to believe in the country and themselves. With leadership that does likewise, America can be made great again. Voters hungering for a vision latch onto that.

The career politicians in both parties have royally botched the deal, and it’s time to hold them accountable. You can’t do that by putting another one in the White House – time for a new and outside broom to come in and sweep clean.

That the voters understood this over a year ago goes without saying. The utter collapse of establishment front runner after front runner was, at first, ignored by political insiders and the media, and then, when it was too obvious to ignore, dismissed by them as so much ignorant populist rabble rousing.

I’m here to tell you that since it’s that very same rabble who exercise ultimate sovereignty in the country, only a complete fool would be so Marie Antoinette-classless in showing such contempt.

As an aside, there are a few of us who advanced beyond the second grade and who can string two words together in a sentence without committing grammatical error who support him.

Remember: When the people are united, they will never be defeated.

For the first time since President Ronald Reagan, somebody on the national scene wants to put America first. No more of the “We’re one of many” or “All nations are equal” garbage – it’s an unabashedly and unashamedly proud and patriotic America First!

Traditional conservative Pat Buchanan says that Trump is fomenting a revolution:

By what he castigated, and what he promised, Trump is repudiating both the fruits of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy and the legacy of Bush Republicanism and neoconservatism.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of American treasure being wasted and American blood being shed in conflicts where I’m hard pressed to discern a vital American national interest. And I have skin in this game since my uniformed army sons and Marine veteran son and navy veteran daughter-in-law are the ones who’ve been sent off to risk their lives when the sons and daughters of those who have the most at stake are home in bed.

Again from Pat Buchanan:

Can anyone argue that our interventions to overthrow regimes and erect democratic states in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen have succeeded and been worth the price we have paid in blood and treasure, and the devastation we have left in our wake?”

Damn good question, don’t you think?

Trump represents a pre-neo-con strand of traditional conservative thinking that calls for the U.S. to be VERY skeptical about foreign adventurism and entanglements, especially when other countries with more at stake are only willing to hold our coat while we do the fighting and dying. Again, I don’t want my sons and daughters dead in such a cause, do you?

Put the interests of the nation and the people as the number one priority in everything. No more bending the knee to international organizations or worshiping at the altar of globalism — if a trade deal or membership in a treaty club results in the screwing of the people cut a new deal, reform the organization so that all countries carry their own weight or bugger the lot.

The United States spends 3.6 percent of its GDP on defense. Most other NATO countries spend less than 2 percent. That benefits the American taxpayer how again?

Time to tell the freeloaders to pony up or you’re on your own.

The U.S. currently runs a trade deficit of over $47 billion, and it continues to grow. Our erstwhile “trading partners” make out like bandits while the American taxpayer suffers as a result. And have you actually read what’s in the Trans-Pacific Partnership “agreement”? It’s worse than the tax code and filled with more loopholes.

Factories close, jobs disappear, a very small number of people become rich beyond the dreams of avarice and nations we should be viewing with a great deal of suspicion gobble up our assets. How can that possibly go wrong?

Those who call this “isolationism” are themselves uninterested in protecting American interests and human capital. Donald Trump isn’t talking about ending trade or alliances, but rather of making them more even-handed and less we-give-and-you-take rip off in nature.

So-called “conservatives” howl that THEY should be the ones setting the agenda — that THEY know best how to run things. But the voters have rejected them in massive numbers because THEY are so focused on themselves and each other that THEY have lost touch with the nation.

They screech, “Trump supported Democrats and once had liberal positions!” (cue the EMT’s with oxygen tanks.) Who cares about past positions? Ronald Reagan was once a liberal Democrat, but nobody held that against him. And Donald Trump’s campaign contributions are what many to most CEOs at his level would do. To complain about them, as Ted Cruz and others have done, suggests that they haven’t a clue how business really operates in the U.S., which isn’t surprising since most of them are life-long political animals and bureaucrats who’ve never done a day of real work in the real world in their lives.

Long ago, I came to the conclusion that this will be the least-ideological election of my lifetime, and I’ve been through 17 presidential contests. Voters aren’t interested in electing a platform written by nameless establishment insiders that does absolutely nothing for them.

Instead, voters are interested in electing someone who, in Peggy Noonan’s words about Donald Trump, “is on their side.”

The conservative “movement,” if there really is any such thing any longer after the likes of National Review and George Will have so thoroughly disgraced themselves with their mouth-foaming anti-Trump diatribes, has failed to convince the people that it has their best interests at heart.

If anything, so many conservatives these days come across as loyal more to an ideology and those who fund their efforts than to the welfare of their country or its people. You cannot lead, nor do you have the right to claim the authority to lead, when you lose touch with those you demand must follow you.

When the answer to the people’s question of “What have you done for us lately?” is “Not much with even less forthcoming because our ideas and posh lifestyles matter, not you,” then things are really out of whack.

I get that. When others either don’t or won’t and continue to insist that they have a monopoly on truth, beauty and wisdom they tell me, and, frankly, the people, that they’ve completely jumped the shark into Out-of-Touch Land.

To borrow from Peggy Noonan again, this year “Patriotism Trumps Ideology.” (The title of her most recent Wall Street Journal column). In that column, she wrote comparing the indifference of both the Bush and Obama administrations to what is on the minds and hearts of Joe and Jane Doakes in East Paducah and the millions upon millions of Americans like them:

They seemed not so much on America’s side as on the side of abstract notions about justice and the needs of the world. Mr. Obama’s ideological notions are leftist, and indeed he is a hero of the international left. He is about international climate-change agreements, and leftist views of gender, race and income equality. Mr. Bush’s White House was driven by a different ideology—neoconservatism, democratizing, nation building, defeating evil in the world, privatizing Social Security.”

Before the conservative movement, or what’s left of it, can claim any legitimacy it’s going to have to preface everything it does, thinks or says with, “This will help the American people put food on the table, a roof over their heads and put the kids through college by…” Right now, too many of the bow-tie-wearing and sensible-shoe set cloistered in their exclusive salons talk only among themselves while looking down their noses at the great unwashed who deserve their miserable lot in life. With friends like these, do the people really need enemies?

I really would like to see some of the pundits, politicos and poobahs on the right go to Indianapolis and tell the workers at United Technologies’ Carrier air-conditioning plant how the closure of the plant and relocation of the work to Mexico is a swell deal for them.

Donald Trump solid performance in Indiana on May 2^nd is attributable in large measure to the stupidity of American corporate decision making in a political year. The same goes for Ford Motor Co.’s announcement to expand in Mexico rather than in the United States.

I also like that Donald Trump is a disrupter. He’s upsetting apple carts and promising to chase the political money changers out of the temple of the people’s government. Voters know the existing nomination process is crooked, and they see in Trump someone who will make it right.

As Thomas Jefferson once wrote:

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”

In the chaos of rebellion, the stodgy, turgid and moribund are broken up to be replaced by the new, innovative and fresh. Lord only knows, a little chaos directed against the system is desperately needed today.

Three years ago, after working as the communications director on a failed New Jersey U.S. Senate race where I got up close and personal with Republican Party big shots and operatives on the local level, I came away convinced that the lot of them were beyond hopelessly corrupt or inept or both.

When you see four times as many votes cast in support of endorsing a hand-picked candidate as there are people in the room, you know something stinks, and that’s what I saw.

At that point, whatever tangential loyalty I still had to the GOP as an entity was severed. Now, I’m a full-blown convert to breaking the backs of both parties and taking away from them whatever power, control, authority or ability they have when it comes to candidates getting on a ballot, ballot placement or otherwise.

I favor ending registration by party and nominating petitions. I also support going to a wide-open, blanket, top-two-finisher primary system and putting absolute control of decision making at all levels in the hands of the voters since the so-called “professionals” have bungled the job and caused the problems we’re in. The people over party.

Donald Trump is a figurative stick of dynamite in the logjam of corrupt and incestuous establishment politics. His blowing up of the process will go a long way toward restoring government that’s of, by and for the people.

All the gloom-and-doom naysayers who predict disaster if Trump is elected are preaching the same sky-is-falling treacle that I heard directed against Ronald Reagan in 1980, with too often the same people preaching it! They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.

Every single solitary negative prediction about Trump has proven to be utterly, totally and absolutely flat-out WRONG! When so many are off by so much so often after a time you have to question whether they knew a damn thing at all in the first place.

Too many in the Never Trump crowd are more concerned about their own place in the political universe than they are anything else. If Trump’s elected, their career ambitions to be pundits or inside operatives will come crashing down, ergo they must do everything possible to stop Trump. Again, whose interests do they represent – the people’s or their own?

Speaking of the people’s interests, Donald Trump, and ONLY Donald Trump, has been articulating them since day-one of the campaign. He identified the issues of concern to millions upon millions of voters: Trade and the economy, jobs, immigration and the threats posed by unchecked and unfettered flooding into the U.S. of so many, jobs, defense and national security, jobs, the massive corruption in the political process that ignores the people in favor of an elite few, jobs and jobs.

Don’t forget jobs.

When Trump is out on the stump, he’s taking up the people’s cause. When Ted Cruz and John Kasich are on the stump, they are taking up their own and the insiders’ cause. There is a difference, and voters see it.

Cruz is, to me, a singularly distasteful individual who’s more akin to Elmer Gantry than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. With all the flexibility of a cheap pane of glass, his my-way-or-hell’s-highway messianic campaign has been a complete turn off to this former Southern Baptist deacon.

I’m convinced that the only interest Ted Cruz promotes is Ted Cruz. After all, what should you expect from “God’s anointed one“?

I was unaware that the Lord had a SuperPAC promoting Holy Ted.

John Kasich might make a fair to middling director of the Office of Management and Budget, but he’s about as inspirational as 10-day-old toast when it comes to leadership. Also, and this is huge, he’s opposed to right-to-work legislation, and anyone who refuses to support workplace freedom is nothing more than a big labor stooge.

His thorough rejection by the primary base attests to how little they regard him and how less they support him. That he is still running fourth in what’s now a three-man race would, to a normal person, be utterly humiliating. But clueless Kasich cannot see the forest or the trees — he’s focused on his obsession with how he’s the only one.

Those who claim Trump can’t win are, in a word, chicken – they’ve tossed in the towel and run up the white flag of surrender without even firing a shot. Anyone who says the polls prove he will be defeated by Hillary Clinton is engaging in spurious negatively wishful thinking.

Taking data to conclusively prove the results of an event that won’t take place for more than six months from now is delusional. Especially when it comes face-to-face with numbers that show Trump and Hillary Clinton in a statistical dead heat.

Campaigns are waged to move poll numbers and change minds. Besides, Hillary Clinton is a horrible, terrible, no good, really bad candidate who has more personal and political baggage than Amtrak could handle in a hundred lifetimes.

She can be beaten because she’s so vulnerable in so many places.

Trump has driven Republican primary and caucus numbers through the roof, while Hillary has caused Democratic numbers to crater. The enthusiasm is on The Donald’s side, and the level of his support is vastly under counted and under reported.

I completely dismiss predictions of catastrophe that stem from the rise of Trump, who he is and what will happen if he’s elected. The country has been in far worse situations in the past, and today is nothing by comparison.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 resulted in the deaths of 620,000 Americans in the Civil War. All the rest of America’s wars combined cost us 640,000 killed. Perspective, perspective, perspective.

I don’t fear angering trading partners or allies because, quite frankly, it’s time they were angered. Instead of getting all worked up and terrified about what China, Mexico, NATO or the UN General Assembly think of us, isn’t it time they started being very concerned and worried over what we think of them? America first, dude.

Trump as a candidate is well within the traditions of American political history. Look at the elections of 1824 and 1828 when the outsider Andrew Jackson, with whom Trump is often compared, took on and then crushed the political establishment of the day and how it rigged the 1824 election of John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives. The election of Jackson in 1828 was followed by decades of Jacksonian presidents.

The big shots and smart types of the day were appalled, but Jackson ushered in an era in American history that bears his name: Jacksonian Democracy.

For years, so-called “conservatives” have demanded an end to political correctness.  They want an outsider uncorrupted by the filth that has become the two axes of the Acela Corridor between Washington, D.C. and New York. That a straight talker who won’t back down emerges in Donald Trump causes all hell to break loose with them screaming that it will be the end of the world if he’s nominated, let alone elected. That tells me that Republicans and those who claim to be “conservative” are all hat and no cattle – they talk the talk, but when given an opportunity to walk the walk they panic and run.

They made the mistake of wishing for something and then getting it.

Since coming out publicly for Trump, I’ve taken a lot of hits including vicious personal attacks because my support of The Donald jeopardized an aspiring pundit’s livelihood, that I’m a RINO without any core beliefs, that I must be a pervert – you name it. Some who I regarded as friends on social media unilaterally dissolved that relationship without even a lick of conversation as to why. And some morphed into hate-filled stalkers to the point where blocking them became necessary.

Whatever happened to agreeing to disagree without being overly disagreeable? Breaking friendships over politics – have you ever heard of anything so shallow in your life?

As Newt Gingrich recently said, it’s time for the Never Trump crowd to chill out and “get over it.” Trump will be the nominee, with no ifs, ands or buts about it. Since Newt’s down with it, why can’t the rest of the hyperventilating , Never Trump crowd follow suit? After all, continuing with a Never Trump obsession translates into a default Forever Hillary concession. No two ways about – it’s one or the other because there are no other viable options and nobody gets to play Switzerland.

Meanwhile, I sleep well at night knowing that my candidate is Donald Trump.

_________

Share on Facebook

Tweet

Follow us