#NeverTrumpers come in all sizes and shapes, but at the top of that pyramid isn’t George Will because his reserved seat around the Washington Post’s Members-Only swimming pool isn’t as glamorous as it once was.
The kings of Trump-haters have been the Karl Rove political consultancy class and their networks. Since the Reagan years they’d pumped billions into political campaigns (with the expected in-kind return for the investors”). And they’ve made more millionaires out of hack lawyers than all the owners of Burger King, McDonald’s franchises and beer distributorships combined.
Two best recent examples; the Obama’s investment of $15 million into a beachfront mansion which the second tenet of his party’s Creed states will be underwater in ten years, and the return of the native, Paul Ryan, who had to be pushed into taking McCain’s second for VP in ’12, (for family reasons) then again as House Speaker in 2015. It was not until Ryan announced he was moving (back) to Washington last week that his voters in Wisconsin finally figured out that his allegiance to the voters back home had dried up years ago. He will soon be a millionaire influence peddler, just like Dick Gephardt and Harry Reid, among several others, who went from $250K/year government job to 8-figure millionaire status when they retired…without ever having held a real paying job.
Trump cost this consultant class millions in 2016 just by financing his own campaign. But worse, he owes no favors to a single deep pocket. Not even in Russia. He could cost this bunch far more in 2020.
But the real doomsday event for the consultant class, and the power of big money in politics, would come if Donald Trump should draw up (or reinstate) some rules of political allegiance between candidate and voters, such as what once controlled the culture of electioneering during that first classical period of American history, from 1787-1828. This period was defined as much by the integrity foundation laid by George Washington as the legal one set by Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Adams et al.
It Trump can show new candidates how they can feed the current hunger most voters have for genuine honesty, integrity, a love of country, and keeping America great, based on Washingtonian values, and show them how to get over the hurdle of having to sell their souls in order to get that message out in a convincing way…
… he could just about destroy the whole payola scheme of American politics, not just taking us back to the 1980s, but the 1880’s, when corrupt politicians could only extort a few hundred dollars.
Every candidate knows what the people want. And every new term the newly-elected then largely fails to deliver it, because of their deep pocket backers. Those pockets have gotten progressively deeper over the past 40 years, 50 years if you throw in Black America’s still waiting for Democrats to pay on their original pledge to rescue them in 1968. (When, instead they gave them Baltimore.)
What we didn’t know then that we know now is the notion of a Super-state fashioned along the lines of the EU, only with real corporate business people in charge. Many of us have had to go back and reassess a lot of beliefs we’ve had in the deeper motives of good men, from George W Bush to Paul Ryan, both apparently owned by big cartels (not be confused with free-market capitalism…another term better applies….) over some issues that were, and are, very important to most working Americans.
In three years Donald Trump has proved the absence of humanity in the Super state’s business model, having brought home thousands upon thousands of jobs that were pilfered.
Democrats don’t even bother to pretend to be for American values anymore…and I mean any and all of our values. This incites one kind of hostile reaction by citizens.
But for Republicans who still try to appear pious in their belief in things their actions indicate they are cynically indifferent to, invites a different kind of revulsion among men and women of good will.
When Trump won in 2016, many Republicans in Congress had to put their votes where their mouth had always been. And couldn’t. Many of them are now gone, having hung it up in 2018, before the people could form their lynch mobs. A few more will leave this term. Sky determines how many still want to risk another term, but money probably has something to do with it.
Trump’s party (I sort of wish it would change its name, for the party long ago abandoned its original brand,)needs to win back 20 seats in the House, but from the mood of the country, they should sweep 70, even in Brooklyn, if they’ll just fashion a message that resonates and can be hand-delivered to voters as Trump was able to do.
In 2016 Trump not only handed the Democrats a huge defeat, but the GOP establishment as well, actually severing the “Washington establishment” façade the Democrats had been able to hide behind for several years.
Trump laid the Democrats true nature bare, so what the hell, they went into their wood nymph role-playing whole hog.
And have been ever since, screeching filthy words as if Margaret Sanger were still alive.
Forget the cynical money-grabbers of the Left who still believe they can run an authoritarian state from a royal castle on a mountain top, for their kinds of dreams, part royal entitlement and part getting-even, will be forever with them. All we can do is consign them to their cellars.
To replace them we need an army of elected members who still hold to the original compact of America and the sort of common sense “conservatism” that resonates with voters in every district, even Brooklyn.
But first we need candidates, even unknown candidates, not necessarily drawn from the local GOP establishment pool.
A strong perceptible belief in God, a la Ted Cruz, and an almost childlike belief in the wonder that is America, a la Jefferson Smith (James Stewart, 1939) could help not just grab an audience, but educated younger ones.
Yes, they’ll need money, but not near as much as you’d think, or as much as Karl Rove & Co will insist they’ll need. In short, they won’t have to sell out to get elected. A shout-out by President Trump on Twitter will save them tens of thousands of dollars, as will appearances by any of a number of well known personages from Congress and the Freedom Caucus, who voters will immediately recognize.
Donors will come in by the thousands, just not large quid pro quo promises.
When Donald Trump sunk his own money into his campaign…cutting out millions of dollars’ of greased palms in putting together his “rallies” around the country, and probably at a tenth of what it would have cost had he hired a major league campaign team, he also wrapped this success around something that can be bottled based a few simple laws.
I think Donald Trump knows the Left and GOP establishment have to believe that he is a fluke, an anomaly, and once he departs nothing he has created will be kept standing but a find memory, much like Reagan. Every success he had, the Democrats claimed as their own…the economy well into the Clinton years, and the fall of the Iron Curtain.
My one regret was that Ronald Reagan selected George HW Bush, a really nice man, but legacy ended right there. We won’t be able to endure that kind of nice for at least a generation.
Karl Rove hates times like these and will work hard to see the Trump legacy erased as quickly as possible.
Let’s just say the road to hell is paved with these sorts of intentions, and while, in 1940, when Mr Smith went to Washington, a few thousand dollars could buy a favor, but rarely a soul, now they come in a package, thanks to men like Karl Rove.
Trump’s done an amazing thing without the help of either chamber of Congress except in a few matters, such as judges’ confirmations, which Mitch McConnell has taken a personal hand in making come to pass. (God, how I hate having to admit that.)
Make no doubt about it, take money (and greed) out of it….and add an absolutely unforgiving (and better educated) voter base, and we can return to a time when the dark cynicism of today will be replaced by a clear, frank, honest relationship.
We need this “new” type of government, not for the next 4, but 40 years. I think Donald Trump knows this, and has this as his legacy dream-quest. Like Washington in 1788, he knows he must lay a foundation that will last for more than a generation. My children are Gen-Xers, and in their 40s now, so I will can they will carry the Trump foundation at least 30 years of the way.
