ANOTHER CRAZY WEEK FOR TRUMP V. WASHINGTON
One by one, Trump is working on the campaign promises that got him elected: tightening our borders, working on cutting taxes, overturning Obama’s executive orders on regulations, fixing Obamacare, appointing one of the right-of-center judges on his list for the Supreme Court, etc. He has Washington, D.C., politicians on both sides in a tizzy. They just can’t figure this guy out; they are not used to someone who keeps his campaign promises.
The Democrats are still struggling to get their footing. They have no real bench, just old political hacks like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer who carp at Trump 24/7. As quirky as Trump is, the nation knows that handing control of the nation back to those two liberals would be about as smart as handing the keys to Air Force One to Harrison Ford.
In a very weak response to Trump’s fine speech before Congress, the Dems thought they would fortify the Mason-Dixon line by having Steve Beshear, former Democrat governor of Kentucky, give the rebuttal. He is a rare bird these days, a white Southerner who is an elected Democrat. Obama put them on the endangered species list in 2009.
Sadly, the ex-governor messed up his speech when he said he was a “Republican Democrat.” To figure out this guy for fellow Southerners, I looked into his past. It turns out the ex-Kentucky governor inherited his family-owned funeral business and graveyards. Graveyards are an important voting constituency for Democrats. Beshear must have made his way up the ranks in the Democrat Party by specializing in the get-out-the-vote effort for them.
There are usually just three reasons people are Democrats. One, they have been convinced they are an aggrieved and persecuted minority. Second, they work for the government — your school teachers, bureaucrats, DMV managers, etc. Third, there are the folks who did not earn their money but inherited it, and they feel guilty about it. Rest assured, the person who earned the family money was a conservative, but generations of trust fund kids get soft.
After Trump’s triumphant speech, where he actually looked presidential (in a made-for-TV kind of way), the media coordinated a hit campaign on his attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. In his role as a senator, Sessions met with a Russian ambassador, which we now know Republicans are not supposed to do. So he was forced to recuse himself from looking into himself or something like that. It was the biggest win for Democrats since the ruling that you do not have to have any identification to vote in elections.
Doing what he does best, Trump then flipped the script on the Democrats by pulling their go-to trick of diversionary slander against their opponents. He tweets out that he thinks the Obama administration had his phones tapped during the presidential campaign. I’m not sure why he did that, and what information he relied on, but it changed the conversation from the Dems’ constant drip-drip-drip of lies and half-truths on the Trump administration’s relationship with Russia to something else entirely.
Pelosi recognized this political trick; she even has a name for it. She said, “It’s called a wrap-up smear. You make up something. Then you have the press write about it. And then you say everybody is writing about this charge.” Democrats have done this to their opponents for the last 30 years. With a buddy-buddy press corps, they can start any story, have enough pundits chime in on it, and make it seem true. If you think such fake news stories are effective and won’t haunt you for life, read about Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels — or just about Richard Gere and his views on gerbils.
What might be making Trump paranoid is the “deep state,” as it has been called: the entrenched Washington career bureaucrats in all agencies who seem to be leaking information. They are the sources, if there are any, of many “anonymously sourced” stories. Based on all the many agencies’ political donor records, 90-plus percent of such “deep state” entrenched D.C. lifers are Democrats.
So if Trump is acting paranoid, as if everybody is against him, he is wrong. Only 90 percent are.
Contact Ron Hart, a syndicated op-ed humorist, and TV/ radio commentator, at Ron@ RonaldHart.com, Twitter @ RonaldHart or visit RonaldHart.com.