Donald Trump/Michael Vadon at Wikimedia Commons
Commentary
Calm the hell down my good liberal friends.
America is not overnight going to be transformed into “The Apprentice,” let alone Nazi Germany. No matter how much President-elect Donald Trump wants to change things (if indeed he does), it won’t be easy.
No matter how much your not-so-liberal neighbor would like to see Trump fire a bunch of pissant bureaucrats like Walter Peck, the environmental enforcement agent from the third district who let loose the demons in the movie Ghostbusters, or send the Muslim neighbors down the street back to the Iraq, it ain’t gonna happen.
What many, maybe most of us, hate about government in this country – the entrenched, pencil-pushing, sometimes insensitive, sometimes seemingly brain-dead bureaucracy – is going to stall and frustrate him.
Nearly everyone in that bureaucracy is guaranteed to fight a fifth-column, rear-guard action to stop any change Trump wants to make simply because the ‘crats are human and humans, by and large, hate change.
No matter how much we might talk about wanting change, what most of us want is to wake up tomorrow knowing that the new day is going to be a lot like the old day. It’s not wrong or right. It’s human nature.
Given this reality, Trump’s most rabid supporters are the ones sure to end up disappointed with how little the new President accomplishes just as the most rabid supporters of President Barack Obama ended up so disappointed.
Angry constituents
Consider the good, liberal view of Alternet.com leading into Obama’s fifth State of the Union address:
“Obama’s sweet talk has begun to turn sour—he has a long pattern of soaring rhetoric and empty promises followed by some fundamental failures to deliver. It is the lack of action, the hypocrisy, the talking the talk without walking the walk, that have made many progressives and liberals frustrated and angry.”
Not just frustrated, mind you, but “angry.”
The website actually put together a top 10 list of Obama actions that made liberals and progressives, whatever the latter term means, the angriest. It was headed by his “caver-in-chief leadership.”
Rest assured, we will hear something similar from conservative supporters of Trump before long. It’s inevitable. Not even a U.S. president can fight everyone all of the time. Battles must be chosen; compromises sometimes accepted.
It’s the Art of the Deal.
Trump has already hinted at this with his comments on the not-so-affordable national health insurance requirement strangely named the “Affordable Care Act,” or Obamacare as the critics of the still-sitting presidents like to call it.
Trump has several times now said he wants to save parts of the act, including guaranteed coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. While that provision is commendable, throwing those with known health problems and predictably higher medical costs into the actuarial pool drives up the cost of insurance for everyone else.
It’s a sad reality that had today’s FoxBusiness.com headlining “Did Trump Just Endorse Obamacare’s ‘Most Harmful’ Provision?” The answer in the story below the headline was a simple yes, because that answer is unavoidable. Accepting all of the relatively few people with pre-existing conditions, means the majority of people will have to pay higher premiums.
But Trump is for maintaining a national health insurance requirement that protects them. He has now back pedaled enough on Obamacare that the Washington Times was today headlining “Donald Trump’s Obamacare stance in-line with GOP consensus, not a ‘flip-flop.'” Trump isn’t even in office yet and his mainstream defenders, few though they are, feel the need to protect him from the inevitable charge of hypocrisy.
That’s the way it goes for presidents.
Never good enough
Obama had a lot of liberal supporters in the American mainstream media. (As an aside here to media friends who want to argue that the media isn’t liberal, just shut up. The conservative or two to be found at your local newspaper, if one can be found, is a token of your “diversity,” not a representative of your group think. And if you can find me a conservative reporter (not a token commentator) working for your local public radio and TV station, I’ll happily buy you beers for a week.)
Obama’s mainstream media support probably helped create that idea among many that he was a hard-left, card-carrying liberal. The real view from the folks on that side?
“…Obama Was a Bad President for the Left…”
This comes from PasteMagazine.com, a left-leaning online arts and lifestyle publication.
Writer Jason Rhode took the Democratic National Committee to task for a video lauding Obama’s achievements as presidents. Rhode’s view?
“To be fair, he (Obama) was not without accomplishment: under the Pope of Hope, corporate profits scored a neat $1.7 trillion in the first quarter of 2016 alone and 2.6 million people, including women and children, had been deported by the Department of Homeland Security.
“If (the DNC) really wanted an accurate video record of his administration, they should have filmed two minutes of him sitting on his spineless ass doing nothing, then given the rest of the documentary time over to the Republicans to direct. The movie would be occasionally interrupted by Obama making a plaintive speech about bipartisanship, as unjailed bankers, Guantanamo guards, NSA workers, and drone pilots applauded and wept silently in the background.”
Oh yeah. Get down.
Obama’s standard-bearer
In all the post-election Trump-anoia has everyone forgotten who came before Trump?
Bernie Sanders, who ran way left of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and almost beat her. The DNC apparently had to engage in some shenanigans to keep him off the ticket.
Sanders was Trump the First. He went so far around the political globe to the left that he almost met up with Trump speeding around the globe to the right. Admittedly, Sanders never specifically expressed a plan to “Make American Great Again,” the Trump pitch.
The plan of Sanders was “Save America.”
Save America from what?
Do you really need to ask that question? You know the answer:
The people running the country now.
Enough Americans believed enough in saving the U.S. from the existing leadership that they voted Trump into office. Now, it will be up to him to try to steer the supertanker of America onto a new course.
Good luck with that president-elect Donald Trump.
As for my good liberal friends, if you really want to do something here among your claims that Trump is a “bigot and a racist,” the best thing you can do is prepare to stand by anyone the Trump government decides to unfairly attack.
Kristallnacht, horrible as it was, didn’t succeed because of the Nazis. It succeeded because average Germans refused to stand up for their country men. If anything even close to that atrocity happens in this , I will join you in the streets.
I love a good fight.
Until then, calm the hell down. You’ve got a new president. He’ll likely end up being more like the old president than you ever imagined for one simple reason:
This the way things have worked in American politics for a long time now.