Left-Wing Invective Drives Trump Right

Member Group : Reflections

"The conservative base of the Republican Party is ready to follow leaders who it knows will fight. Unfortunately, most Republican leaders today are go-along-to-get-along collaborationists awaiting their return to the head of the public trough. Because they ran such candidates in 1992, 1996 and 2008, Republicans were beaten four times by a self-admitted draft dodger and an articulate but inexperienced naïf whose past remains a cypher." – J. Shenk, December, 2013

The 2016 primaries and presidential election validated that hypothesis. A fighter won.

Having written critically about him during the early primaries, President Donald Trump wasn’t among my top dozen preferences. But after it became clear he would be the Republican nominee, I wrote about Trump only in passing, usually in the context of his opposition’s unhinged behavior. Not once during the presidential campaign did I urge anyone to vote for him. Clearly, Trump didn’t need my overt support.

I voted for Trump, albeit reluctantly, because the alternative was unthinkable. Serial felons don’t belong in the White House.

In the overall scheme of things, Donald Trump has been a Republican for about fifteen minutes; he donated money to the Clintons and other Democrats; and, over time, some of his publicly-expressed political sentiments were similar to Hillary’s. So, interestingly, there was always a plausible case to be made that Trump might be worse than Hillary, because, while Republican majorities in Congress would likely stonewall another Clinton’s agenda, they’d feel "obligated" to support a Republican.

Conservative skeptics are reassured by President Trump’s cabinet picks, his Supreme Court nomination and his early executive orders on immigration, national security and regulation, and they’re encouraged by Trump’s efforts to replace Obamacare, to cancel Barack Obama’s numerous extra-legal orders and on tax and regulatory reform.

Based on his history, though, one worries that reasonable Democrats could coax President Trump to the left. Luckily for conservatives, there are few reasonable Democrats to be found anywhere, and Donald Trump is a fighter.

The New York Times reported: "Reduced to their weakest state in a generation, Democratic Party leaders will gather…to plot strategy and select a new national chairman with the daunting task of rebuilding the party’s depleted organization. But senior Democratic officials concede that the blueprint has already been chosen for them — by an incensed army of liberals demanding no less than total war against President Trump."

Ironically, the Times and other national media are among the liberal anti-Trump combatants. Granted, it’s pretty much the same posturing out-of-power progressives do every time there’s a Republican president, but, in my lifetime, the rhetoric has never been so loud, abusive or violent.

But, the more "total" the war, the more incendiary the media’s coverage, the noisier and nastier left-wing demonstrators become and the longer they persist, the more likely it will be that President Trump sticks to a conservative agenda, if for no other reason than to poke a fighter’s finger in his adversaries’ collective eye.

So, puh-leeze, Democrats, stay "total." Conservatives are counting on it.

http://www.ldnews.com/story/opinion/2017/03/02/left-wing-invective-drives-trump-right/98668110/