Fans of the rock/heavy metal band Black Sabbath will likely recognize the title’s reference, a play on the full title of the band’s magnificent anti-war opus. The song, commonly known as War Pigs, has as a full title War Pigs/Luke’s Wall and the latter half of the title refers to the long instrumental outro. While Sabbath, as fans often refer to the band, had a couple bigger commercial hits, most fans will agree that War Pigs is their greatest song. Those that have experienced it performed live (as I have several times, and most recently last week at Madison Square Garden, with 18,000 fans singing in unison), know it borders on being a religious experience. The song is also a hard indictment of those in power who pursue and send others off to war.
The wordplay in this essay’s title is my answer to the question “how the hell did we end up with presidential candidate Donald J. Trump?”
Over the past couple years, as political discussions started to focus on the 2016 election, I noticed an interesting phenomenon among conservatives and GOP loyalists. Among the countless issues facing the nation, among all the things going on in D.C., amidst ObamaCare, overregulation, energy policy, massive expansions of welfare programs, the runaway national debt, the moribund economy and countless other issues, the one issue that coalesced as the hot button, as the “poke and you get screams” rage inducer, as the litmus test for all candidates, turned out to be illegal immigration. I’ve written in the past about how it makes no sense to focus on this issue over those other, much bigger ones, and how it’s politically unwise, grossly offensive to liberty and politically impracticable to make a hard-line stance on immigration the signature issue of this campaign.
But, it happened. The immigration debate devolved into a binary screaming match about amnesty, and any in-between discussion was not only drowned out, it became a scarlet letter of sorts (as Marco Rubio has discovered). There was a deep itch that many Americans were feeling, an itch compounded by Obama’s stances and actions regarding illegals, and one exacerbated by cynical opportunists poking at the itchy area in order to make people even itchier.
Early on, when most of us thought Trump was just clowning around and/or not likely to last in the primary process, he differentiated himself from the pack with stark and shocking declarations about immigrants, about building a wall on the southern border. That put him on the map, and scratched the immigration itch.
Trump has also gone “all in” on war. He started talking about bombing “the shit out of ISIS,” bringing back “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” killing the families of terrorists (a war crime, by the way), and more in that vein. People have, to my horror, been eating it up. This is at least in part due to Obama’s fecklessness regarding terrorism, with political correctness run amok preventing him and his from even suggesting what we all know – that the primary terroristic threat in the world today is from radical Islam. It engendered a backlash among some voters, who are lapping up Trump’s war pig promises to torture people, kill families and engage in large-scale bombing efforts.
More than his bluster about his business acumen, more than his giant thumb in the eye of the GOP establishment, more than his “make America great again” jingoism, his positions, statements and beliefs on immigration and war are what I believe are the source of his lasting success. Many are quite happy that Trump is promising to build a wall. And to make Mexico pay for it (the absurdity of that notion doesn’t matter). And to bomb the shit out of ISIS. And to throw any semblance of morality out the window by torturing suspected terrorists and killing their families.
Unfortunately, the mindset that puts forth such proposals doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the sort of person who’d put them forth isn’t one who’d exercise restraint or show respect for the Constitutional limits imposed on the Presidency in other policy areas. In short, ask for a thuggish dictator on a couple issues, you get one for all issues.
It is said that every president is the product of the previous one. George W. Bush gave us Obama. Obama is now giving us Trump. By trying to force the nation in a certain direction, rather than acting as a representative of its citizens’ desires, Obama has birthed a hard-line anti-illegal position that the Right has elevated to cornerstone status and and fostered the callous “kill em all let God sort em out” mindset that has arisen in response to Islamic terrorism. Both have expanded into a nativism that’s at odds with the nation’s history and fabric, a nativism that has elevated Trump to front-runner status.
If you’re horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency, ask yourself if you’ve been among the hard-liners who spawned it. If you cheer at the prospect of a Trump presidency, as yourself if you really want a dictator without even a vestige of a guiding compass running the nation.
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