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

by Hurt, Charles

  President Trump’s real sin is that he is an outsider. He is not a professional politician. He is not one of them. Even more vulgar is that he faithfully represents voters whom these people have deep disdain for. The people who elected Donald Trump are a bunch of dumb, toothless, racist rubes, in their minds. Such people are to be lied to and double-crossed by politicians once they get elected. The politicians aren’t actually supposed to keep the promises they made to those unwashed, hard-working folks who elected them.

  Add to that President Trump’s flamboyant and confrontational style and you have a real skunk at the garden party. Take his tweeting habit, which the president relies on to get his message out directly to the people without it getting perverted by the media. Between his election and Inauguration Day, reporters spilled barrels of ink worrying about whether Donald Trump would keep up his tweeting in the White House.

  In the first place, of course he would! Why on earth would he surrender such a vital tool for communicating directly with the American people? In the second place, the only reason these people wanted Trump to quit was that they didn’t like him in the first place. They don’t like his style.

  Nothing, of course, sparks pearl-clutching vapors among the political press the way President Trump does when he mixes his unorthodox manners and rodeo-style humor with a touch of self-effacing bravado. And, every time, nitwit reporters and late night so-called comedians reveal their own angry obtuseness, as when Alex Baldwin scrunches up his dirty lips, squints, and totally misses the joke. Everybody else knows that Trump is never funnier than when he is extolling his own considerable virtues.

  The media went perfectly mad when, during an event with supporters in Ohio, President Trump declared that he is “non-braggadocious” as he proceeded to take credit for the thrumming economy.

  “You know, you can work hard, but if you don’t have the right leader setting the right tone—in all fairness,” Trump said, catching himself, “I’m not even saying. I am non-braggadocious.”

  As usual, Trump brought the house down with that one. And the media went mad.

  Not as mad, of course, as when then-candidate Trump celebrated Cinco de Mayo—thumbs up—by boasting that the Trump Tower grill made the best taco bowls. That was, to the unfunny press, apparently racist or something.

  But nothing—and I mean nothing—topped the President’s Twitter musings after about one year in the White House.

  “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he thumbed. “Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames.”

  I could not find any evidence of this, but I bet somewhere, some reporter “fact-checked” this statement and determined that Hillary Clinton did not, in fact, catch on fire at any point during her campaign.

  But the president was not finished.

  “I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius… and a very stable genius at that!”

  Needless to say, the Internet. Melted. Down.

  But Donald Trump is not just noodling reporters and his detractors when he issues his “non-braggadocious” yet hilariously self-effacing Twitterisms. He is also being the master marketer he has been all his life. It is the secret to his success in real estate, in building golf courses and skyscrapers and in keeping relevant inside the pages of the New York City tabloids. And, of course, it is the secret to his success as a “T.V. Star.” President Trump is never more than about five sentences away from branding himself or whatever it is he is selling. Stay on message. Constantly remind people who you are, what you are selling, and why your product is exactly what people need.

  During the Republican convention in Cleveland, Trump scandalized the political world when he promised to bring real change to Washington.

  “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on the people who cannot defend themselves,” he said to roars of approval. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders—he never had a chance.”

  It was a line Hillary Clinton would later seize upon during her convention speech in Philadelphia. Her problem? Trump said: “I alone can fix it.” To her, this meant Trump was not trustworthy. The news media fell right into line and roasted Trump for the comment.

  “Breaking with two centuries of political tradition, Donald Trump didn’t ask Americans to place their trust in each other or in God, but rather, in Trump,” was the headline used by one magazine.

  For somebody like Donald Trump, such criticism is not just silly, it is self-defeating. If you are offering yourself up to do a job and you are not the only person qualified to get the job done, then why are you running for office?

  It is a question, apparently, that never occurred to the Clintons in their twenty-five years terrorizing the national political scene.

  Perhaps an even better way to understand just how much contempt these lazy reporters have for President Trump is to consider their everyday coverage of him, as compared to other politicians who have served in recent times in Washington.

  Imagine, for instance, if Donald Trump had once belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. Do you think that would be a story? How long do you think he would have lasted in public office if he had once been an officer in the Ku Klux Klan? Well, I can tell you that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was most definitely in the Ku Klux Klan and to this day he holds the record for being the longest-serving senator in U.S. history. For more than fifty-one years, Byrd served in the august United States Senate as a Democrat, having previously served as Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. And when he finally quit office, Byrd was not run out on a rail, tarred, and feathered by the Trump-hating media. The only reason he left office in 2010 was that he died.

  Or, consider this. What if President Trump had left a boozy party near his vastly wealthy father’s family compound, drove off a bridge, and turned the car over in the water. Instead of rescuing the young woman who was riding with him, he got himself out and fled. Instead of immediately calling for a rescue, he slinked home in a rowboat to concoct a web of lies in order to protect his political future. How long do you think Donald Trump would last if the media found out he did something like that? Well, if his name was Kennedy, he would last in public office more than forty-five years. And like Exalted Cyclops–turned–U.S. senator Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy would only leave office due to death.

  What if President Trump went into heat over an intern working for him in the White House while he was president? What if the intern was barely the age of consent? Much younger than his own daughter. What if he and his cigar had repeated illicit relations with the young woman while his wife was in the residence?

  What if he then proceeded to lie about the whole thing and then concocted an elaborate scheme to make the young, impressionable intern and his secretary lie to a federal grand jury about the whole affair? How long do you think President Trump would survive if he did something like that? While in office?

  Or, how about this one? What if Donald Trump gave an attractive nineteen-year-old intern a “personal tour” of the White House. The teen was a virgin, at least before the tour. “Haven’t you done this before?” he asked, to which she replied, “No.” He proceeded “more gently.” And when he was done, he pointed her to the bathroom.

  This, of course, was not Donald Trump. It was the King Creep of Camelot, the vaunted, revered, and still-beloved John F. Kennedy, assaulting a teenage intern moments after meeting her and conducting his vile business among the paintings and busts of his own children.

  That heinous episode—only revealed in recent years—was positively romantic compared to what he made the poor, nineteen-year-old girl do later, when the two were splashing around in the White H
ouse pool, the tiles of which can still be seen in the basement below today’s White House Briefing Room.

  Kennedy aide David Powers was sitting on the edge of the pool, pant legs rolled up, lolling his feet in the water. The president of the United States slithered up to his intern and said, “Mr. Powers looks a little tense. Would you take care of it?”

  “It was a dare,” the teen later recalled. “But I knew exactly what he meant. This was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don’t think the president thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did.”

  As if that were not repulsive enough, JFK then surrendered all pretenses of being anything other than a lowlife dirtbag: “The president silently watched,” the teen recalled.

  Of course, Kennedy would go on to be assassinated in Dallas, which preserved the myth of Camelot, as if in amber, to never be questioned or doubted. The dishonest myth would extend to Kennedy’s little runt brother, Teddy, and an infestation of the whole Kennedy clan in American politics for a half century.

  Yet, somehow, the political press reserves all their disdain and indignity for Donald Trump.

  In their gargantuan sense of entitlement, they actually believe that Donald Trump is unfit, simply because they do not like him and his style. He is not Camelot, no matter how disgusting and lecherous “Camelot” actually was. And because they despise Trump, he should be eliminated from politics.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  President Trump with newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

  IN TRUMP’S COURT

  For a half century now, American self-governance has been under relentless, coordinated assault by a cabal of leftist establishment politicians hell-bent on destroying the republic the Founders fearlessly envisioned, painstakingly fashioned, and ultimately bequeathed to us. With a deep and undeniable affinity for socialism and unmistakable strains of totalitarianism, these modern-day Marxists aim to destroy the closest approximation of justice and equality ever known on earth. They want to replace it with a demonic dystopia where equality is replaced by government-picked winners, where individual freedom is squelched by the cultural whims of the state, and wealth is quashed by welfare.

  The godfather of this crusade was a scalawag promoted by liberals as the “Lion of the Senate.” Edward M. Kennedy was the runt child of the American political family that came to wealth and power in the early twentieth century. Senator Kennedy began this assault on America in 1962, seven years before he killed Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick, an island a few miles from his family’s compound on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

  Though Ted Kennedy shared the celebrated licentiousness of the entire male Kennedy clan, he was nonetheless considered the dumbest of the whole lot. Horny, stupid, and without regard for human life is a pretty rough mix. The only way to get through life with that toxic combo is if your daddy has lots and lots and lots of money. Mob connections help, too.

  When I first began covering Ted Kennedy, he had been retired to the U.S. Senate after a failed political career on the national stage. In those days, Kennedy could be found almost every day in what we called “Lower Senate Park,” just across from the old Russell Senate Office Building, where his main suite of offices was located. Several times a day he would be out in the park, throwing a tennis ball to his beloved Portuguese water dog.

  Throughout the Capitol, that dog was treated like royalty. There was no place the dog could not go. His name was—and I am not making this up—“Splash.” Yes, as in the sound a 1967 Oldsmobile makes when it careens off a bridge and lands in the water upside down with a twenty-eight-year-old woman trapped inside, who agonizingly suffocates to death after the thirty-seven-year-old driver has fled the scene in order to concoct a story to protect his own political future.

  Like I said, it’s a lethal mix: horny, stupid, and no regard for human life. Add to that a profound sense of entitlement and it’s like splashing gas onto a fire.

  Emboldened in spite of these dubious qualities, Ted Kennedy still thought he should be president. But even Democrats around the country understood that Teddy’s glib charade would not work anywhere outside of his home state of Massachusetts, where voters were still wallowing in the afterglow of President John F. Kennedy, Teddy’s older brother, who was assassinated in 1963. Teddy permanently proved his damaged-goods label in 1980 during his final, spectacular face plant on the national political stage when he lost in the primaries to Jimmy Carter.

  Prior to that, political scientists believed such a feat as losing to Jimmy Carter was impossible—especially for a pretty face named Kennedy. But, as has been noted, Ted Kennedy was born on third base and stole second base before getting thrown out on first.

  But the Massachusetts Senate seat—the same seat held by his illustrious brother, JFK—was his. It would take something even worse than his lies about the death of the girl in his car to hound him out of it. So, with no other future prospects, Kennedy was left to carry out his demonic visions from his comfortable perch in the U.S. Senate—not a bad perch at all. Kennedy was always a club man, so in that respect Congress was the fanciest club he could join. Few clubs reward licentiousness, stupidity, and arrogance more handsomely than the United States Senate.

  But, with Ted just one of one hundred, the task of destroying the American spirit would take a lot of schmoozing and a lot of ball-tossing in the park to Splash, and the process would take that much longer. But Kennedy and his cabal of dedicated anarchists were in it for the long game. Most important, they seemed to be having fun.

  ALIENS AND JUDGES

  In order to carry out their assault on the American spirit, Kennedy and his cronies chose a two-pronged attack—each of which would subvert the clear will of the American voter. If successful, they would radically alter the landscape not just of the American political world, but of just about every aspect of American life.

  Already, in his Immigration Act of 1965, Kennedy had prepared the way to usher into the country a steady stream of unskilled foreign-born people. These people, once given a front seat at the public trough and registered to vote as faithful Democrats, would advance the agendas of Kennedy and his elites. The bill abolished the quota system—which limited the number of immigrants that could come from various regions of the world—and allowed naturalized citizens to sponsor relatives in what would be known as chain migration. Skilled workers had previously been exempted from the quota, but subsequent reforms put highly skilled workers in a newly designed preference system.

  The other prong of attack was more subtle and far more insidious—one that would extend the kleptocratic hand of the federal government more deeply into every aspect of American life. Kennedy and his cohorts must have cackled with delight as they envisioned their end run around the voters by hijacking the unelected federal judiciary.

  In 1973, the Supreme Court, in one of the most controversial rulings in its history, had provided a spectacular example of how courts can accomplish rules that could not be accomplished through traditional legislative channels. The key to it, of course, is a very loose interpretation of the Constitution. In this case, the Constitution says not one single word about abortion. In fact, the Founders could not have imagined legalizing such a medical procedure, let alone found some constitutional protection for it.

  Yet, in the landmark case Roe v. Wade, the highest court in the land—a bank of unelected justices—found a constitutional right guaranteeing unfettered access to abortion. This right, they ruled, emanates from “the penumbras” of the Fourth Amendment’s right against unlawful search and seizure. Left unexplained by the majority’s 7–2 ruling was whatever happened to an unborn citizen’s right against a brutally lethal search and seizure. But, whatever.

  According to these robed arbitrators, this constitutional right to abortion was found in “the penumbras”—the eerie shadows around the ghostly light of a half-lit moon. In other words, it is an optical illusion—an optical illusion good eno
ugh for the black-robed arbiters to set the stage for millions of legal abortions across the land—all without a vote of a single representative of the people.

  As controversial as this unquestioned edict by the high court is today, it was even more shocking and controversial back then. Gallup’s polling at the time found support for abortion around 46 percent—hardly the kind of groundswell to get such a proposition pushed through the elected members of Congress.

  Today, when you step back and put Roe v. Wade into the larger “arc” of justice in America, I can see how the Supreme Court might have ruled in that case that an unborn child had a constitutional right to life. That is the kind of right the Supreme Court is supposed to protect. But I will never understand how the court found this supposedly Constitutional right to extinguish the life of an unborn child.

  In the forty-five years since that ruling, legal scholars across the entire political spectrum—and, specifically, both sides of the debate about abortion—have found that the majority ruling in Roe v. Wade is a disaster of legal thinking and could not possibly withstand genuine and rigorous scrutiny by any legitimate court of American legal scholars.

  As rickety as the ruling is for federal judicial precedent, it has been even more corrosive in American politics. Here you have a court of unelected judges declaring by fiat some constitutionally guaranteed right floating in “the penumbras” that no ordinary, commonsense voter could imagine. And by forcing that odious ruling onto the American people, the Supreme Court ripped the hot-button issue out of the hands of voters and the elected legislatures and arbitrarily and capriciously gave it a status beyond any mortal appeal.

  But the high court had ruled. Therefore, voters and the legislature were supposed to shut up and obey.