What if I told you that Trump’s greatest asset, the most powerful tool in his arsenal, was not his Twitter account, or his brook-no-criticism supporters, or the swathes of Middle America that feel abandoned by the political and cultural elite, but rather the Left itself? Or, more specifically, the batshit-crazy wing of the Democratic Party, which is working diligently to take over the asylum?
If you’re not already in that wing, even if you’re in the asylum, you might ponder for a moment and nod your head. After all, it seems that the Left’s reaction to anything perceived as a Trump excess or WTF moment has been “hold my beer” one-upmanship that makes sane people recoil away in horror.
A quick survey of the political landscape adds plenty of foundation to this idea.
Trump nominates the eminently qualified and rather vanilla Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and the Left, in raging impotence, not only goes into hyperdrive to make a show of opposing him, but Senator Cory Booker, whose presidential aspirations aren’t exactly secret, calls Kavanaugh’s supporters “complicit in evil.”
Seattle and other major cities, attempting to address a problem (plastic waste in the oceans) that’s overwhelmingly caused by not-us and a non-solution to an elsewhere problem, have banned plastic straws and utensils, with one town even threatening jail time, and no matter (in some cases) that some people with disabilities need straws.
San Francisco is proposing legislation to actually ban company cafeterias, in order to “encourage” workers to patronize local restaurants. Lest we forget, San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $15, and the wholly predictable die-off of restaurants and other small businesses ensued. Normally, when you injure something, you’d think to undo that which caused the injury. Not government. The knife to the gut that is the minimum wage is treated by efforts to force-pump other people’s blood into the injured parties, even as they continue to hemorrhage from the initial injury.
And, then, there’s today’s lulu: Seventy, 70!! House Democrats have endorsed a plan to outlaw private health insurance in America, and cover everyone with “Medicare-for-All,” the latest euphemism for socialized medicine. Note that this is a plan that goes above and beyond the socialized medicine systems that we are told the rest of the world benefits from and we should emulate. Most of those countries have a two-tier system, where publicly funded health coverage can be supplemented by private insurance plans or out-of-pocket care. Not so from the bat-shits. They want to take complete control of your health care, and in essence turn every doctor, nurse, lab tech, orderly, health care administrator, etc into a government employee. Sure, “Medicare-for-All” doesn’t actually make all those people government workers, but it puts them entirely under government control, save for those who choose to work solely for direct payments from patients.
That plan is dead-on-arrival, at least for now. It’s one of those things that, were it to come to a vote that had an actual chance of passing, a bunch of the sponsors would vote against, the way that a number of sponsors of the bill to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency declared they’d vote against their own bill. This makes it nothing more than a giant virtue signal. But, to who? Who do the 70 sponsors of this “Medicare-for-All” bill think would support this lunacy? Not the unions, certainly. Their benefits packages are so solid-gold that ObamaCare sought to tax them. Not big company employees, who are in all likelihood happy with their insurance. And certainly not members of Congress itself, who wrote themselves a carve-out to ObamaCare.
Countless other examples abound.
This nuttiness is meant to appeal to the nuts, to the fanatics and the unrepentant socialists who can look at the disaster of socialism in Venezuela and blame it on falling oil prices rather than on an utterly failed and murderous ideology. The Left is afraid of its nuts, because they’ve taken over the forum of public discourse. If you’re not already on the outs, you cross that crowd only at your extreme peril (behold, the countless public figures who’ve had to grovel for forgiveness over a comment or tweet that breaks the ever-stricter rules), and so the saner voices on the Left have been cowed into quiet submission. A few, recognizing peril in the rise of the nuts, are starting to sound alarms within their ranks. Former Senator Joe Lieberman, who can say stuff now because he’s safely retired, has warned the party against the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an earnest, socialist dunderhead who sent shock waves through the Democratic establishment with her primary victory over a ten term incumbent. Ocasio-Cortez has delivered the goods, both to the bat-shit wing that’s all in on her platform of powered-by-unicorn-farts giveaways, and to the Trump-o-sphere that has been having a rollicking good time meme-ing the bejeezus out of some unfortunate candids.
In a sane time, Donald Trump’s uncivil bluster, verbal and tweeted gaffes, and subset of policy moves that run contrary to traditional conservatism would be an opportunity for the opposition party to calibrate a message of measured rationality, aimed at the voters who chose Trump as the “lesser of two evils” and who could probably be courted into backing a centrist platform. Clearly, this isn’t such a time. The Left’s antics have driven countless Trump skeptics away in disgust, and many (myself included) have found themselves saying “I can’t believe they’re forcing me to defend this guy.”
Indeed, if the Left keeps this craziness up, it will continue providing cover for whatever excesses Trump wishes to indulge in, by making them look, if not Solomon-esque, at least sane by comparison.
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I can’t disagree with any of that, all the RNC needs to do this fall is run ads recapping this madness and they will win. I would say Trump’s second biggest asset is his energy, he’s like the Energizer Bunny with orange hair. By the time the left winds down over the last outrage, Trump is five moves ahead. I can’t understand the techniques, if you can call them that, to move policies forward, but damn if he don’t move them forward. I think one of his off putting habits is the way he always talks about himself in the third person, but this is what he’s done his whole like, promoting the Trump brand, the brand is a separate thing than the man himself. My guess is that in front of the cameras he is the brand and in private meetings, he’s the (Stable genius, lol) behind the the Trump brand.