In 2016, Hillary Clinton called Trump voters Deplorables.
The year 2020 finds Jon Meacham likening us to lizard brains. Meacham, one of the left’s favorite historians, mused that white America has retreated into unthinking limbic mode.
A patrician from Texas, an oil man, responded politely, on Martha MacCallum’s Fox News show: "If putting food on my family's table and worrying about my employees makes me a lizard brain, then call me iguana."
Iguanas-cum-deplorables are with Trump, and he with them. And he, President Donald J. Trump, is leaving everything he’s got on the
battlefield.
Trump is not merely showing up, standing prone, looking out nervously upon a few oddly encircled, masked supporters, as his rival, Joe Biden, is doing.
Oh, no! Be it in Bullhead City or Goodyear, Arizona, or Circleville, Ohio, or Lansing, Michigan—Trump has been turning in the kind of performances that come from the heart, cocking a snook at the media establishment, while throwing himself into each and every rally with as much joy, exuberance and optimism as went into the rally before and the one to follow.
Here is a president who loves the thousands upon thousands of constituents who cling to him, to their guns and their God. He draws his strength from them and engages in repartee with them.
America will … be the first … to land an astronaut on Mars … maybe we will make that a woman,” taunted POTUS, in Arizona.
“Make it Nancy Pelosi,” came a retort from the crowd. Trump thought this was peaches: “Who said that? That's pretty good. Stand up, please. Look at this guy. That's pretty good,” came the president’s happy-warrior reply.
Breaking protocol with the colluding quislings of cable news, Michael Smerconish, a CNN commentator, could not contain his admiration for the president’s energy and stamina, following the commander-in-chief’s bout with COVID, as he charged headlong into battleground states. The anchor gushed spontaneously about the four rallies a day POTUS has been putting on: Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Florida, on and on, while Biden tiptoed in and out of the basement.
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While Trump riffs easily about football with His People; “Sleepy Joe” carries on about COVID, which is a bit of a downer, wouldn’t you say?
"We're not living with it; we're dying with it. We're not profiting from it; we're croaking from it," he keeps yelling.
(Actually, the Bidens are profiting handsomely. “Sleepy Joe’s” experience as a "blue-collar" type was short-lived. Once he headed for the fleshpots of Washington, D.C., Biden, it would appear, morphed into an oligarch. By the looks of it, he parleyed his political influence into a wealth-making juggernaut.)
If Biden’s miserable message works, America is no longer America.
POTUS’s message is positive in the way only he can be. To Biden’s “dark winter” warnings, Trump offered the prospect of “a great winter” and “a great spring”: “No, it’s not going to be a dark winter. It’s going to be a great winter. It’s going to be a great spring.”
"We can't lock ourselves in the basement like Joe does,” countered the president during the second and last debate, on Oct. 22, calmly, forcefully, and substantively. “We can't close up our nation or you're not going to have a nation," he declared.
And always the humor, so hated by maudlin media, who subject the Great Communicator to a critical mauling with each fabulous joke he tells.
"If a plane goes down with 500 people [God forbid], CNN, MSNBC are talking about ... COVID."
Or, Biden is the first presidential hopeful in U.S. history to run on “raising your taxes.”
About racial scold and president-in-waiting Kamala Harris:
"We're not going to have a socialist president, especially a female socialist president. We’re not going to have it. We’re not going to put up with it,” roared Trump in a rally in Florida. When he's right, he's right. A socialist who is also a woman is a double whammy.
The Associated Press has framed Trump's record as one of "four years … of unfinished business." To read the article is to be struck by the magnitude of the finished business:
By the AP’s own lamentations, Trump has significantly scaled back the number of soldiers stationed abroad. Not the U.S. media, but the liberal British Economist, has, in fact, credited President Trump for trying to bring an end to America’s “unproductive conflicts.”
Also by the AP’s telling, a good section of the Wall has been built, and the courts have been stacked with constitutionalists.
As I see it, Trump has brokered much more than a peace agreement in the Middle East. He has set in motion a regional dynamic. Listen:
In the past, America imagined it must and can be a decisive force for good in the Middle East. It can’t. The region’s players march to their own drumbeat, which is why America ought to foster regional politics, or geopolitics, in the Middle East.
By shifting the emphasis away from the dysfunctional Palestinian-Israeli axis, Trump has done just that: He has returned power to the players in the region.
Currently, three Arab states are normalizing relations with Israel. What do you know?! This healthy shift away from one stagnant Middle Eastern mire has created a demand among other warring nations. Kosovo and Serbia are clamoring to get on the peace train.
But, but, “Trump’s a threat to national security,” screeches ventriloquist dummy Joe Biden, who represents not the war-weary people, but America’s anti-Trump, never-won-a-war, treacherous general officers and admirals and the military-industrial-complex.
In “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” my June 2016 book, I made the case that understanding President Donald Trump demands a shift to process mode.
It means jumping a level of abstraction to look, not at a particular Trump tweet, claim, or verbal thrust and parry. Rather, consider you must their combined, devastating effects on oft-subversive, extra-constitutional, managerial and administrative state structures, to say nothing of the media mafiosi.
Our president was the candidate to kick the crap out of the political class. He never embarked on that apology tour. And like lizard brain Trump Nation, the president reflected just how sick and tired we all are of racial sadomasochism. Trump is synonymous with testosterone. We like that.
On a personal note: POTUS is why I became an American Woman. I naturalized because of Donald J. Trump. Naturally, I had always been down with the founding documents and the Founding Fathers. But because of Uncle Sam’s depredation and unjust wars, I wasn't feeling it.
Until ... POTUS.
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Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Gab, YouTube, Twitter & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook.
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