Still Winning : Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (9781546085287)

by Hurt, Charles

  When the president invited the Clemson Tigers football team to the White House to celebrate their national championship, it happened to be in the middle of the government shutdown. Instead of providing the typically elaborate White House spread, he ordered out for burgers and french fries from fast food-joints for the football team.

  Asked if he prefers McDonald’s or Wendy’s, President Trump was torn.

  “I like them all. If it’s American, I like it. It’s all good stuff, great American food.”

  To Dan Pfeiffer, a longtime flunky for President Obama, this was somehow proof that President Trump is racist: “Trump patting himself on the back for paying for the cheapest food available for the Clemson Football team after he shut down the government down [sic] is about as Trump as you can get.

  “In so many ways, Trump is a racist, angry version of Michael Scott,” added Pfeiffer, referring to the popular character from television sitcom The Office.

  With people like Pfeiffer making such a mockery of actual racism, it is little wonder that race relations deteriorated so much under President Obama.

  It is not just President Trump who is the racist. All of his supporters are, too.

  Hollywood idiots refer to the red “Make America Great Again” hat as the “new white hood.”

  The Washington Post published a column from a professor comparing the red hat to a Ku Klux Klan hood or robe. Wearing one “constitutes a deliberate political act and deliberate provocation.”

  The Post’s fashion critic Robin Givhan also got in on the red hat hysteria, explaining: “To wear a MAGA hat is to wrap oneself in a Confederate flag. The look may be more modern and the fit more precise, but it’s just as woeful and ugly.”

  Is it any wonder that deranged anti-Trumpers out there are incited to violence against people wearing these hats?

  And is it any wonder that HBO soap opera actor Jussie Smollett used the MAGA hat in the elaborate hoax he staged in order to get a pay raise from the creators of his show?

  So, where and who are the true racists in our society? Well, some of them are scattered throughout the land—sad, hateful people, often misfits and nearly always lacking the smarts and sophistication to have any impact on our nation’s rocky march toward a more perfect union. Any threats they pose are immediate and specific—certainly nothing capable of contaminating our society.

  Far more dangerous than these scattered bigots are the smarmy political sophisticates who live and breathe their passion to control the electorate. Armed with vast banks of computer-generated polling and personal information, emboldened by pretentious arrogance, these wretched politicos harness their high-octane deceit to slice and dice voters into little niches of people who can then be pushed one way or the other with information that is often false. Essential in this process are religion and gender and racial ethnicity—always the raw ingredients of racism.

  With great cunning, swathed in callous indifference to what’s good for the nation, these political operators are able to create and sustain loyalties among voters, as well as bitter divisions. In every sense, these geeks and the political parties who are their masters are the true racists in our society.

  Voters can be quickly forgiven for not understanding how all of this works. But in their guts, they know they have in President Trump a man who probably doesn’t understand it, either, and wants nothing to do with it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  President Trump at his desk in the Oval Office (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

  VERY STABLE GENIUS

  There’s a new muttering around town that has become the mantra of the Never Trumper Republicans as well as the media elites who long for their old comfort zones in covering the president. “This is not normal,” they say. Those most deeply afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome repeat the mantra as if they could erase the past three years by just repeating it over and over again like a political rosary.

  “This is not normal.”

  I hear it from political reporters who are still shell-shocked, wandering dazed through the rubble wondering what the hell came out of the clear blue and knocked them all down like a shell blast.

  Dan Rather says, “This is not normal.”

  Ex-President Obama, who paved the way for the Trump presidency, says, “This is not normal.”

  Countless newspapers and magazines covering national politics have devoted entire articles to the repeated mantra, “This is not normal.”

  One electronic political rag on the Internet ran an entire story titled “This is Not Normal,” beneath a picture of President Trump on the telephone in the Oval Office, Andrew Jackson peering down above a bucking-bronco bronze sculpture by Frederic Remington.

  The story itself was fourteen paragraphs long and consisted of the same sentence written over and over and over again. Four hundred and forty times.

  “This is not normal.”

  The article concluded with this: “You’re absolutely correct. None of this is normal.”

  Sometimes I find myself jubilant watching these people consume themselves with anger and rage. They despise Donald Trump so much it is hard not to love him just on those grounds alone.

  He is like kryptonite to them. Electing him president was like pouring an entire shaker of salt onto a slug. They writhe in pain, begin frothing until they turn inside out.

  If I wind up going to hell, I am pretty sure it will be because of how much I enjoyed watching all these people writhe in such misery over Donald Trump.

  While on the topic of “normal” and “not normal,” it bears consideration of what is actually not normal.

  Owing $22 trillion in debt is truly not normal. It also should not be normal for legislators to steal from government programs aimed at keeping the poor and elderly from starving and throwing that money away on other government boondoggles.

  Forcing taxpayers to put money into government-run retirement accounts—and then stealing that money to spend on other purposes. That is not normal.

  And, of course, if anybody other than the federal government did any of these things they would be thrown in jail for the rest of their lives.

  Just ask Bernie Madoff.

  To many Americans, here are some other things that are not normal:

  Leaving all three major entitlement plans on a glide path to insolvency within a generation is not normal.

  Passing a bunch of laws and then not enforcing them is not normal.

  Maintaining a hopelessly porous border that we do not defend is not normal. Thinking that it is okay that more than ten million illegal aliens have invaded our country in violation of our laws is not normal.

  Running around the world using our sophisticated military to enforce other people’s borders while ignoring the invasion at our own border is really not normal.

  Truth is, at the end of the day, the federal government has just a few simple responsibilities that cannot be taken on by anyone else. The first is to defend our borders. As valiant and dedicated as our Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are, they cannot do it alone. They especially cannot do it while politicians in Washington constantly carp about them, undermine their work, and create uncertainty about what they are supposed to be doing. Describing these brave men and women as Nazis and comparing detention facilities for illegal aliens to concentration camps and threatening to abolish ICE is as cruel to those men and women risking their lives every day as it is counterproductive to the overall mission.

  As for Congress, they have one huge and overriding mission above all others and that is to use the power of the purse. Their biggest job—and theirs alone—is to simply approve twelve appropriation bills to fund all the departments of the federal government. Now, we can argue about how many of those departments should be eliminated and how many more should have their budgets slashed like households or small businesses in America do during tough times. But at the moment we have twelve departments that need to be funded and so Congress needs to approve
spending bills for each of them.

  Astonishingly, President Trump’s first full year in office was the first time in ten years that Congress passed appropriation bills on time for the president’s signature. This kind of disregard for basic budgetary processes and disdain for taxpayers tells you all you need to know about professional politicians in Washington today. Of course, this refusal to follow fundamental spending rules is why Congress passes all these massive, pork-laden, opaque “omnibus” spending bills. It is also why we see so many government shutdowns.

  None of this is normal, yet it has been around for decades and was growing worse and worse long before Donald Trump ever got into the White House.

  Meanwhile, the Federal Register, the daily publication from the National Archives that makes available to the public the rules, regulations, and other legal notices issued by federal administrative agencies, is also an informal measure of how much bureaucratic nonsense is being heaped upon the innocent taxpayer. You will not be surprised that it keeps getting larger and larger.

  President Trump’s first year in office was a banner year for Americans who want limited government. Only 61,950 pages were added to the Federal Register, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Only! That was the lowest number of pages added to the Federal Register in a quarter century.

  President Trump’s first year in office also saw the lowest number of new rules added to the Federal Register in the forty-plus years those records have been kept. The good news is that among those 3,281 new rules, many actually repealed previous rules that had been added under previous Congresses and previous presidents.

  This was a massive blow to the federal bureaucracy in just one year. President Obama’s last year in office saw the largest number of pages added to the Federal Register with 95,894 pages, adding 3,853 new rules.

  So, if you want to talk about what is truly not normal, I will grant you that Donald Trump is not your run-of-the-mill Washington politician. In that respect, he is not normal. And that is precisely why he got elected.

  It doesn’t really bother me how much the political press in Washington hates Donald Trump. They are entitled to their opinions. I don’t even care how wildly out of touch they are with regular Americans out there who are paying all the bills. What bothers me is how dishonest and deeply delusional they become when they try covering Donald Trump as compared to their coverage of other politicians.

  “He’s a narcissist!” they scream. “All he cares about is himself!”

  Seriously? Are you freaking kidding me? Have these people ever interviewed a politician before? Did they just fall off the back of a turnip truck and find themselves covering politics in the capital of the most powerful nation on earth?

  Did they read any Machiavelli in school? Do they get Netflix? Ever watched House of Cards?

  Honestly, you don’t need to turn to fiction or television or even sixteenth-century Italian political literature to understand the breed of people drawn to politics. They are all narcissists, at least to some degree.

  The first thing you learn covering Congress is why all the hallways are so wide: So they can accommodate the massive ego of members of Congress walking up and down them.

  One of President Trump’s favorite techniques on Twitter is to refer to himself as “your favorite president.”

  In the summer of 2018, after his former lawyer Michael Cohen had his office raided, for instance, President Trump tweeted: “Inconceivable that the government would break into a lawyer’s office (early in the morning)—almost unheard of. Even more inconceivable that a lawyer would tape a client—totally unheard of & perhaps illegal. The good news is that your favorite President did nothing wrong!”

  Cue the hysteria.

  Never mind that a president under a sprawling—and questionable—investigation had issued a comment about a raid by federal agents of his own personal lawyer’s office, which included tapes of conversations between the president and his former lawyer. We are talking a major constitutional situation and all anyone could talk about was how outrageous it was that Trump would refer to himself as “your favorite President.”

  It is yet another example of reporters being simply incapable of catching on to Donald Trump’s humor. Any normal person in America saw that line and burst out laughing.

  Realizing how crazy it makes all the right people, President Trump trolled again when he issued a “Hold the Date!” tweet announcing a big Independence Day bash.

  “We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C. on July 4th. It will be called ‘A Salute to America’ and will be held at the Lincoln Memorial. Major fireworks display, entertainment, and an address by your favorite president, me!”

  Hilarious, right?

  Not for these folks. More hysterics accusing the President Trump of denigrating the holiday and usurping patriotism for his own political needs.

  As usual, Bill Kristol—founder of the Weekly Standard magazine and Trump Derangement Syndrome—summed up the hysteria perfectly. “The last president to try to hijack July 4th was Richard Nixon, who staged Honor America Day on July 4, 1970. It was widely ridiculed. Nixon later left office in disgrace.”

  So, you get that? Trump throws a big party for the nation on the Fourth of July and is accused of hijacking the national holiday—an “offense” so serious that his term may end in a Nixonian disgrace. It is simply preposterous.

  Aside from their inability to find their own funny bones, swamp reporters also are completely incapable of evaluating the veracity of simple statements President Trump makes.

  But first, it must be noted, that—again—we are talking about politicians practicing politics. And they are shocked—shocked, I tell you!—to find gambling going on. Holy crow, have these people ever listened to a single political speech in their lives? Politicians make stuff up all the time. In fact, they do it so much that most reporters give up on trying to report all the little lies.

  After all, what is the definition of a scandal in Washington? When a politician accidentally tells the truth. Such scandals are relatively rare—because it is so seldom that anybody around here tells the truth.

  Yet President Trump says anything with the slightest twinge of bull and suddenly it’s Watergate all over again. Exhibit A will always be the president’s boasting about the size of his inauguration crowd. Not since the Pentagon Papers has anything out of Washington gotten so much press coverage. (Warning: In case any political reporters are reading this, that line is what we call “hyperbole.” Kind of a joke, but trying to make a point.)

  Vogue magazine became so consumed with President Trump’s supposed “lies” that they published a list of his twenty-five biggest on the occasion of the two hundredth day of his administration. The list is extraordinary, revealing just how wildly jaundiced—not to mention, unfunny—political journalism has become in these times.

  Among the top “lies” noted by Vogue were a series of presidential tweets in which Trump described how anti-Trump MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had begged to visit his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

  Twittered Trump: “She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

  The magazine acknowledged that, indeed, Scarborough visited for dinner one night and the couple returned for another visit the next night. And, in fact, Brzezinski was, in fact, recovering from cosmetic surgery. The lie? The magazine claimed that the lie was that Trump did not actually turn the couple away.

  Another “lie,” according to the magazine, was when President Trump said former FBI director James Comey was not respected inside the agency and referred to him as a “showboat,” perhaps one of the funniest things Trump has ever said about an enemy. The magazine’s evidence that this was a lie? A quote from another senior FBI official who said that “the vast majority of FBI employees enjoyed a deep, positive connection to Director Comey.”

  That quote, and I am not making this up, was from former acting FBI director Andrew McCa
be, who was eventually fired for lying.

  The list goes on and on and on with moronic claims like this. It reaches full-moon absurd when it fact-checks the president’s defense of his son in the midst of some media-manufactured “scandal.”

  “Don is, as many of you know, Don, he’s a good boy. He’s a good kid.”

  “In fact,” Vogue reported in all seriousness, “Trump Jr. is a 39-year-old man, and father of five.”

  Dear Lord, we do not deserve to keep this republic!

  Politico magazine, so deeply concerned about the effects of President Trump’s “lying,” wrote a very serious story about the psychological effects on people who are constantly being lied to. Obviously, they should have conducted a reader survey if they simply wanted the answer to that question.

  Instead, they recounted more and more supposed “lies” and interviewed a bunch of professors for their article titled “Trump’s Lies vs. Your Brain.”

  “Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream, and Trump, we know, lies constantly, about matters as serious as the election results and as trivial as the tiles at Mar-a-Lago,” Politico reported, referencing a claim Trump supposedly made about how Walt Disney himself crafted the tiles in the nursery at Mar-a-Lago.

  “When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift though everything,” the magazine concluded. “It’s called cognitive load—our limited cognitive resources are overburdened.”

  Lord, help us.

  Reporters pride themselves on having keen and sensitive “BS detectors,” we call them. Like a spider lying in wait at the corner of her web, she senses the slightest vibration of dishonesty and pounces. Well, certainly a BS detector is a very important thing to have. The only thing worse than having a broken BS detector that never rings is having a broken BS detector that never stops ringing. And that is where we are with political journalism in Washington today. That’s how all those the little fibs and boasts and funny asides from President Trump wind up as front-page fodder in once-serious newspapers.