Why Do We Support Trump?

WHY DO SOME OF US SUPPORT TRUMP—-EVEN WHEN WE DON’T LIKE HIM PERSONALLY?

I’ve never, ever in my life seen a man endure so many lies and attacks by so many maligning forces arrayed against him—so much subterfuge, slander, political intrigue, an attempted coup, deliberate misrepresentations—all for fighting to do what seem the obvious right things to do.

Yes, he’s arrogant, foul mouthed, has bad taste and in many ways constitutionally illiterate. And even if I don’t much like him—I don’t have to. I’m an adult. We’re dealing with issues that transcend my particular preference in personality.

As best as I can see it—all he wants to do is build a wall, reduce illegal immigration, support Israel, get us out of stupid wars, increase the strength of our neglected military, lower taxes, reduce regulation, protect the unborn by recognizing their basic human rights and legal protection, protect religious rights and get a hold on the processes of law and return them from the “invisible” administrative state to the people.

Okay, perhaps there is tension, even incoherence in his policies.

But—right now— he’s all we got.

And right now—RIGHT NOW—he is what we need and cannot do without.

Mike Pence, God bless him, couldn’t do it, or Ted Cruz or any Republican member of Congress or any Republican Governor.

Question is, to keep the ball rolling, where do we get the next fighter?

It is absolutely necessary that the GOP somehow reform itself and the idea of conservatism.

We cannot proceed any further operating with the tired approach of typical conservatism. We need to become aggressive and “pro-gressive” insofar as we can retool that word and our ideas into something to fight “for” rather than to “defend” against.

The challenge for our side is this: how do we marry the natural self-restraint and courtesy of being “right wing” with the “pissed off-ed-ness” necessary to fight the Left’s propensity toward slavery, autocracy, racism, violence and lies?

How do we declare war on the Left without becoming insensitive brutes like them? It is they who have declared war on us. We didn’t start the fight. We want our country, our law and our moral center back. How do we get intense and resolute and uncompromising without losing our moral compass?

That’s the challenge.

Remember that in fighting the bad guys–Hilter and Japanese Imperialism, we had do to some pretty troubling things.

The world just marked the burning of Dresden 75 years ago last week. We burned out the center of that beautiful city. We burned Berlin and Tokyo with horrendous costs to people who’s only crime was to born under the dictatorship of monsters. We dropped atomic weapons on Japan.

Nothing to be proud of.

But it was necessary—absolutely necessary for the preservation of the good over the triumph of wickedness—over a growing cancer of grotesque moral confusion.

To speak as an historian—the only revolutions that succeed are “conservative” revolutions:

The Reformation, the English Civil War and The American Revolution, the American Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement were all CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONS. They were revolutions that fought to acknowledge what law and moral conscience had already established in the continuity of our civilization.

There were corrupt forces, there are always corrupt forces that set their faces against decency and the plain meaning of words— against law and justice.

CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONS arise when ordinary reluctant men and women are forced to fight to preserve the sanity and moral rectitude of civil and religious society— rather than allow others to rewrite and redefine the decency out of our laws.

All CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONS and the personalities that lead them were “pissed off” about how liars and manipulators bend morality and truth and law and interpret it contrary to plain meaning.

Whether we speak of Luther, Cromwell, Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Wilberforce, Lincoln, MLK, or even Churchill— all fought to “preserve” the good, not to redefine it.

Jesus, especially Jesus—most importantly Jesus— came with a conservative message. He “came not to destroy but to fulfill”. He came to retrieve the plain meaning of scripture from the decaying commentaries of the Pharisees. From those who confused their own interests with truth.

Luther came to “restore” the obscured and hijacked meaning of the Gospel from the corrupt monopoly of avaricious Popes.

Oliver Cromwell fought a king to “preserve” the long established institutions that only the Parliament can make laws and raise taxes.

The American founding fathers fought to “preserve” our English liberties that were being stolen from us an overreaching British King and Parliament.

Wilberforce fought to “preserve the Christian idea that people are not property by ending the slave trade that had not even existed in Europe until the early 16th Century.

Churchill, a Tory/Conservative, “preserve” civilization against the diseased National Socialist madness that nearly devoured the world.

All these men “came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it”—to preserve it.

That’s what we “conservatives” need to remember and become. Trump represents SOME of this instinct and temperament, but certainly not all of it. Temperamentally he is nothing like a conservative. But that is why he is at the vanguard. He’s teaching us how to fight again.

He is fighting a conservative battle against a regressive Left. The same kind of spiritual illness that argued that indulgences are acceptable within our understanding of the Gospel. That government is whatever the sovereign says it is. That slavery is a positive good. That the 14th and 15th Amendments didn’t mean what they said. That babies can be murdered even after birth.

This is a short list of the evils that Trump is fighting. None of them are progressive. All of them are regressive.

—Apparently unborn babies and even those that are born are not persons unless the mother says so. It’s okay to kill them. Just like slavery and Jim Crow. It’s okay to harvest their organs. (Listen to Democrat Governor Ralph Northam.)

—That private human activity and commerce is significant only to the degree that it can be redistributed from those who produce it to those who vote Democrat. (This is Marx and Stalin and Mao. Listen to Bernie Sanders.)

—There are no nations, borders and distinctive cultures that need to be preserved. (Listen to the leadership of the Democratic Party that oppose simple restraints on illegal immigration.)

—The people are not smart enough to govern themselves. We need non-elected bureaucrats to run our lives through the administrative state. They should make 90% of the law independent of our elected representatives. They know better than the rest of us and should without our consent and without any realistic manner of countering their rulings. (This is Louis XIV and the Tokugawa. horrible autocrats. The Left defies every effort to reign in the administrative state.)

—That men and women are indistinguishable. That men who self-identify as women can deprive young female athletes of scholarships and the simple pride of competing as women.

—That religion is a poison and should be persecuted and eliminated by whatever means necessary. (Witness the endless law suits and personal verbal assaults against people whose only crime is to have a belief that is not in accord with the Left.)

—That humans are not equal, but some require “safe spaces” special campus housing, and status that gives them “more equality.” (John C. Calhoun would be proud. So would Jeff Davis. Read Animal Farm.)

—That Israel is always the bad guy. That the Jews are the enemy. (Read AOC, Omar, Tlaib and Pressley). That terrorists are victims. That terrorists should be treated with the same legal deference as uniformed soldiers in war (protected under international law).

—That it’s fine to riot and deprive speakers and demonstrators of their freedom of speech, if you disagree with them. (Witness Antifa, riots on campuses, destruction of property, attacks on members of Congress, the persecution of Jordan Peterson. These were the tactics of Hitler’s Brown Shirts)

—It’s just fine to re-write the Constitution and ignore it. It is not
necessary to “amend” the Constitution, the Left need only to own judges and justices to decree that a ‘living Constitution” is whatever they say it is. Words have no clear or common meaning. (Witness the language and legal reasoning of Ginsberg and Breyer and Kagan on the Supreme Court.)

—It’s okay to confiscate weapons, even though the Constitution and the Supreme Court acknowledge gun ownership as a personal right. (Watch the newly elected Democrat government of Virginia threaten people who will not give up their right to defend their families, neighbors and themselves.)

—It is completely just to make A pay for the things B wants and needs simply because B wants them and A can possibly afford them. (That’s called “social justice” according to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. It’s called legal plunder by Frederic Bastiat.)

—I could go on—but the single thing that makes the Left most reprehensible is that their leaders are LIARS. They will tell you ANYTHING to get you to vote for them—things they have no right or power to promise. They deceive and manipulate emotion like all demagogues. (The MSM has become nothing but a propaganda machine for these lies. Healthcare without cost increases. They knew they were lying but it didn’t matter. They knew best. Read Greek history.)

Every position above runs contrary to law, reasoning, good faith, freedom and justice.

Trump is fighting back with bare knuckles. He is not Abraham Lincoln. He is not William Wilberforce. He is not MLK or Churchill or Jefferson. But he fights.

And until conservatives can find or produce the eloquent, genteel, morally virtuous Christian man to lead us, Shane, Wyatt Earp, US Grant, Yojimbo, The Ringo Kid, one of the Magnificent Seven, or the Dirty Dozen is going to have to fight the fight that we little weak townspeople and stage passengers will not fight for ourselves.

If you don’t like Trump—if you wish there was someone better to speak truth to power, to express the magnanimity of Churchill, that will weep at the blood of his fallen soldiers— including his enemies, who wants to be painted “warts and all”, who will write in “war, enemies, in peace friends,” who will stand before the awesome power of his enemies and say, “here I stand, I can do none other.” –Then shut up and find that person or help prepare him for that moment and for this struggle.

You have no one to blame but yourself. You either need to “take up arms against a sea of trouble,” or find someone who will.

And God knows, and I do too, that most of us Americans will do nothing more than scorn the man who rode into town to clean up the mess.

I would, I wish, that all of us, all of us little cautious, careful people, would march down to the Waterfront together and help Terry Malloy beat the hell out of Johnny Friendly. But that’s not the nature of little cautious conservative people. Yeah, he threw a fight. But damn, he’s on our side.

And until he tries to steal an election or accepts a bribe–until he breaks the law (and I don’t believe he has)—shut up!

He rode into town with a sullied past. He’s rough and maybe even a little sleazy.

But inside there’s something very much like character. And most important—he’s fighting for you!