Salena Zito gets it:
This new conservative populist coalition is not the fluke the political class hoped it was. Donald Trump did not cause it, he is just the result of it, so no matter what he does, it continues. It is predicated on them, not him.
The coalition is a strike at not just tone deafness in both Congress and the White House but also high levels of incompetence, negligence and shoddy performance at agencies, as well as inept social services, a bloated and incompetent bureaucracy, endless wars and multinational agreements and treaties that don’t benefit average people.
These voters knew who Trump was going in, they knew he was a thrice-married, Playmate-dating, Howard Stern regular who had the morals of an alley cat. They were willing to look past all of that because of how institutions had failed their communities for three consecutive presidencies.
Right now the value of Trump to the Trump voter is he is all that stands between them and handing the keys to Washington back over to the people inside Washington. That’s it. He’s their only option. You’ve got to pick the insiders or him.
Go here to read the rest. I might add that Trump supporters, and I find myself somewhat reluctantly in that category, understand what a weaponized instrument the law has become. Members of the ruling elite, a prime example being Hillary and Bill Clinton, can get away with any crime, while an outsider who is a threat to the system, and Trump, ironically an insider for most of his career, is now the archetype of an outsider for the “Swamp”, will face endless attempts to take him down for any infraction, no matter how minor. The system in Washington is corrupt and completely rigged, and Trump has shattered the curtain to reveal that fact to all sentient citizens of this great land.
Every Democrat and every establishment Republican is thoroughly corrupt. President Trump really is about the only thing standing in the way. Over the years voters expressed their desire for an outsider candidate who was not beholden to the Swamp, kind of like a modern Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Well, President Trump is what modern America is capable of producing as far as that guy is concerned. He’s not ideal, but is far better than any other option we have. God Bless President Trump!
We the deplorables get it.
The political class (including dems/liberals, establishment GOP, never-Trump conservatives), academics/intellectuals, lying liberal [redundant] journos, et al will never get it.
They are isolated and insulated. Practically, none is a veteran, a gun owner, a hunter, a person that worked at a real job.
Liberals’ “discourse” is confined to the echo chamber of their idiotic ilk. It is akin to mangy dogs curs eating each others’ vomit. It is that stupid.
Ergo, corrupt, incompetent, and politicized CIA, DoJ, FBI, IRS, et al purge and run state-show trials against GOP employees/supporters, while burying Hillary’s and Obama’s national, outrageous crimes. People outside the liberal/dem, academic, journo kennels know and are mad as Hell.
T. Shaw, Strong message to follow? The pity is not only is your message the ruth, it is not strong enough. We the People, unfortunately, no longer have the power to deal with this. Alluding to something I just wrote here, again and again in America we DO have Stalin running against Hitler for elected office.And we cannot vote for either. I periodically envy my parents and parents in-law who never once intheri lives used a cellphone and never turned on a computer – and never had to deal with an America that has gone down the moral sewer and a church that has gone down the demonic wormhole, Like JC did for us, hang in there and never stop saying truth and Truth. Guy McClung, Texas
This may be of interest to many here.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/18/6-revelations-swamp-documentary-show-just-dirty-dc/
Victor David Hanson put it well when he compared Trump to characters like Shane or the 7 Samurai. Less respectable men who have to an ugly job. I blame him far less than a society and culture that has permitted things to get so bad that it takes a man like Trump to fix it.
I would add another reason: the growth of the radical Left and its influence in the very institutions (entertainment, journalism, education) that are supposed to protect us from such radical and extremist threats, no matter which side they’re on.
I have tried to explain this to “Never Trump” types who have OD’d on the Neocon Kool-aid, usually without success. They really think if they can take down Trump all will be jolly again for the swamp dwellers. And they are being egged on by pseudo-intellectual idiots like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg. The Trump phenomenon has truly been educational for me, because now I know I will never again trust any career politician of any party. I also will never again pay attention (or money) to any bloviating pundit who drinks from the DC trough or it’s state level counterparts.
I think we’re seeing that the linchpin is really the federal courts. I doubt the Republicans in Congress will do a blessed thing toward defanging them, but one can hope.
Dang, missed the stupid auto-correct that messed up the word “its” in my last sentence above. Sorry. Using apostrophes incorrectly is one of my pet peeves, and here I did it myself. Groan.
These voters knew who Trump was going in, they knew he was a thrice-married, Playmate-dating, Howard Stern regular who had the morals of an alley cat. They were willing to look past all of that . . . .
No, to a large extent, I think that was a feature, not a bug. The “squeaky cleans” of the eGOP could not get done what needed doing. True, you fight fire with water – but when there is no water around, you fight it with fire, not dried out kindling.
The “squeaky cleans” of the eGOP could not get done what needed doing.
They weren’t squeaky clean. They were in the habit of listening to their donors and not to their actual voters, and many of them actually despise those voters.
I have tried to explain this to “Never Trump” types who have OD’d on the Neocon Kool-aid, usually without success. They really think if they can take down Trump all will be jolly again for the swamp dwellers. And they are being egged on by pseudo-intellectual idiots like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg.
Goldberg and Kristol aren’t idiots and they’re not pseudo-Anything. They are opinion journalists. (1) they have the wrong priorities and (2) they have a long history of overestimating their perspicacity and consequence (though, to be sure, they’re a thousand miles from the worst offenders in these respects). There is no NeverTrump constituency in the public at large, just as there was never an Obamacon constituency. Some of the contributors to National Review have figured that out.
That’s why I put “squeaky clean” and not squeaky clean. Their image (at least what they project) was/is they have no (discovered) Trump-like scandals.
Their image (at least what they project) was/is they have no (discovered) Trump-like scandals.
The offenses against family life of Dr. Gingrich and Capt. McCain, USN are well known. There is some fuzzy indication that there was more to Robert Dole’s 1972 divorce than just his brutal unpleasantness as a human being, but I’m not sure that’s been established. I seriously doubt there are any domestic scandals adhering to any other consequential Republican presidential candidate of the last 30 years or so. People have tried to claim George Bush the Elder once had an affair with an aide named Jennifer FItzGerald, but all their arguments consist of the issue of the imagination. As for other sorts of scandal, Pat Robertson’s tainted military service record is well-known and It’s a reasonable guess that George W. Bush used LSD some time prior to 1975. People were hawking pictures of Ted Cruz exiting a luncheon with a (female) aide a couple of years ago. Messrs. Cruz, Santorum, and Huckabee are just the sort of public figure the media would love to humiliate with a domestic scandal and without a doubt reporters have gone through their garbage again and again. Mitt Romney was enough of a threat that they’ve indubitably done this to him too.
Don’t think there’s much there there.
Gee, thanks Art. What would we all do without you to correct us?
@ Texas Thomist: sometimes Art Deco’s corrects are quite valuable, but all too often the delivery is snobby and arrogant. Of course, I have my own on-line defects of character in which I excel.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/us-set-to-reject-palestinian-fantasy-of-right-of-return/
One thing I like about this administration is that decades worth of humbug some of which has been subscribed to by nine different administrations is deemed disposable.
Did you catch this:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/305888/#respond
Here’s another Why Trump? moment. The data discredits the fashion choices of the elite bar, so the bar examiners conspire with appellate courts to suppress the data. (While the sociology and law academy slams the researcher in question for assembling imperfect datasets from what they cannot suppress. Check and mate).
Yes I did see that Art. Black students in the law are often allowed into schools way above their academic level and they are often left holding the bag when the bar test comes round. This rotten game happens throughout academia and Thomas Sowell has written on it:
http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-perversity-of-diversity/
Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom were writing on the issue of black law students ca. 1997. They concluded from what data they were able to assemble that about 30% of the black law students in the country at that time would not have been admitted to a 4th tier school had they been white. I had at one time a co-worker who had been a peripheral faculty member at UB Law School when AA was first implemented there. He said it followed a progression. First they were failing a great many black students. The institutional response was grade inflation. Then their black graduates were failing the bar en masse. At that point, Arthur Eve, a state legislator from Buffalo, tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade the legislature to waive the bar exam for the graduates of state law schools. This erstwhile faculty member says to me, “I know it sounds terrible, but I would never hire a minority lawyer admitted after a certain date…”
An example of this system at work is Marilyn Mosby, state’s attorney in Baltimore. The woman has considerable drive. She settled on a career choice while still an undergraduate and completed college and law school right on time. However, she was admitted to the Maryland Bar in December 2006 consequent to the July 2006 bar exam. That was the 3d time the exam was administered after she completed law school. You can noodle around with the stats on exam passage from the Maryland Bar. What you can conclude from them is that the share of those admitted to the Maryland Bar who require > 2 passes at the exam is around 9%.(N.B., about 1/3 of those receiving JD degrees nowadays do not go on to build a career as a working lawyer). She was then clerking at the state’s attorney’s office and continued working there. After about 6 or 7 years, she was hired by an insurance company. A year or two later, she runs for state’s attorney. She has what a lot of Baltimore voters seem to want in a public official: a certain threshhold of melanin and a pulse beat. She also has a certain amount of aggression. There are unconfirmed stories that on taking office she went from one desk to another and would run her finger across her neck. (The smart money says those were attorneys who made her feel inadequate during her tenure there). She looked like a malicious idiot after the Freddie Gray catastrophe, but being a malicious idiot is no bar to being re-elected in Baltimore, and she was. So, the job of supervising the prosecutor corps in the only American city which is peer to Detroit in its level of disorder is someone who ordinarily would have quit practicing 10 years ago or built a practice consisting or real estate closings and workman’s comp.