Donald Trump: The Bible of Politics

The colleague that I greatly respect has argued with me repeatedly about Trump. Despite not really following politics, not watching any of the debates, and not even really knowing what Trump has said, he is a Trump supporter. He probably won’t vote (I’m not sure he bothers to), and I don’t think “supporter” is really accurate–“advocate” would be better. On several occasions, I’ve been extremely frustrated on the matter, because this colleague, realistically, has no idea what’s going on in the political world–the details, I mean. He doesn’t know what Trump has said, what Trump believes, or anything else, yet he’s more than willing to essentially be a Trump advocate anyway, and the reason is entirely that Trump is an outsider.

So is Charles Manson, but I don’t think we should elect him to be the President of the United States…

Anyway, today he sent me a clipped message from something someone forwarded him, and I’m going to share it with you in its entirety–and then I’m going to rip it apart mercilessly in the way that I do. 😀

Who is Donald Trump?”

 The better question may be, “What is Donald Trump?”  The answer?  A giant middle finger from average Americans to the political and media establishment. Some Trump supporters are like the 60s white girls who dated black guys just to annoy their parents.  But most Trump supporters have simply had it with the Demo-socialists and the “Republicans In Name Only.”  They know there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Hillary Rodham and Jeb Bush, and only a few cents worth between Rodham and the other GOP candidates. Ben Carson is not an “establishment” candidate, but the Clinton machine would pulverize Carson; and the somewhat rebellious Ted Cruz will (justifiably so) be tied up with natural born citizen lawsuits (as might Marco Rubio).  The Trump supporters figure they may as well have some fun tossing Molotov cocktails at Wall Street and Georgetown while they watch the nation collapse.  Besides – lightning might strike, Trump might get elected, and he might actually fix a few things.  Stranger things have happened (the nation elected an[islamo-]Marxist in 2008 and Bruce Jenner now wears designer dresses.) Millions of conservatives are justifiably furious. They gave the Republicans control of the House in 2010 and control of the Senate in 2014, and have seen them govern no differently than Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  Yet those same voters are supposed to trust the GOP in 2016?  Why? Trump did not come from out of nowhere.  His candidacy was created by the last six years of Republican failures. No reasonable person can believe that any of the establishment candidates [dems or reps] will slash federal spending, rein in the Federal Reserve, cut burdensome business regulations, reform the tax code, or eliminate useless federal departments (the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, etc.).  Even Ronald Reagan was unable to eliminate the Department of Education.  (Of course, getting shot at tends to make a person less of a risk-taker.)  No reasonable person can believe that any of the nation’s major problems will be solved by Rodham, Bush, and the other dishers of donkey fazoo now eagerly eating corn in Iowa and pancakes in New Hampshire.

Many Americans, and especially Trump supporters, have had it with:

    Anyone named Bush

·     Anyone named Clinton

·     Anyone who’s held political office

·     Political correctness

·     Illegal immigration

·     Massive unemployment

·     Phony “official” unemployment and inflation figures

·     Welfare waste and fraud

·     People faking disabilities to go on the dole

·     VA waiting lists

·     TSA airport groping

·     ObamaCare

·     The Federal Reserve’s money-printing schemes

·     Wall Street crooks like Jon Corzine

·     Michelle Obama’s vacations

·     Michelle Obama’s food police

·     Barack Obama’s golf

·     Barack Obama’s arrogant and condescending lectures

·     Barack Obama’s criticism/hatred of America

·     Valerie Jarrett

·     “Holiday trees”

·     Hollywood hypocrites

·     Global warming nonsense

·     Cop killers

·     Gun confiscation threats

·     Stagnant wages

·     Boys in girls’ bathrooms

·     Whiny, spoiled college students who can’t even place the Civil War in    the correct century… and that’s just the short list.

Trump supporters believe that no Democrat wants to address these issues, and that few Republicans have the courage to address these issues.  They certainly know that none of the establishment candidates are better than barely listening to them, and Trump is their way of saying, “Screw you, Hillary Rodham Rove Bush!”  The more the talking head political pundits insult the Trump supporters, the more supporters he gains.  (The only pundits who seem to understand what is going on are Democrats Doug  Schoen and Pat Caddell and Republican John LeBoutillier.  All the others argue that the voters will eventually “come to their senses” and support an establishment candidate.)

But America does not need a tune-up at the same old garage.  It needs a new engine installed by experts – and neither Rodham nor Bush are mechanics with the skills or experience to install it.  Hillary Rodham is not a mechanic; she merely manages a garage her philandering husband abandoned.  Jeb Bush is not a mechanic; he merely inherited a garage.  Granted, Trump is also not a mechanic, but he knows where to find the best ones to work in his garage.  He won’t hire his brother-in-law or someone to whom he owes a favor; he will hire someone who lives and breathes cars.

“How dare they revolt!” the “elites” are bellowing.  Well, the citizens are daring to revolt, and the RINOs had better get used to it.  “But Trump will hand the election to Clinton!”  That is what the Karl Rove-types want people to believe, just as the leftist media eagerly shoved “Maverick” McCain down GOP throats in 2008 – knowing he would lose to Obama.  But even if Trump loses and Rodham wins, she would not be dramatically different than Bush or most of his fellow candidates.  They would be nothing more than caretakers, not working to restore America’s greatness but merely presiding over the collapse of a massively in-debt nation.  A nation can perhaps survive open borders; a nation can perhaps survive a generous welfare system.  But no nation can survive both – and there is little evidence that the establishment candidates of either party understand that.  The United States cannot forever continue on the path it is on.  At some point it will be destroyed by its debt.

Yes, Trump speaks like a bull wander[ing] through a china shop, but the truth is that the borders do need to be sealed; we cannot afford to feed, house, and clothe 200,000 Syrian immigrants for decades (even if we get inordinately lucky and none of them are ISIS infiltrators or Syed Farook wannabes); the world is at war with radical Islamists; all the world’s glaciers are not melting; and Rosie O’Donnell is a fat pig.

Is Trump the perfect candidate?  Of course not.  Neither was Ronald Reagan.  But unless we close our borders and restrict immigration, all the other issues are irrelevant.  One terrorist blowing up a bridge or a tunnel could kill thousands.  One jihadist poisoning a city’s water supply could kill tens of thousands.  One electromagnetic pulse attack from a single Iranian nuclear device could kill tens of millions.  Faced with those possibilities, most Americans probably don’t care that Trump relied on eminent domain to grab up a final quarter acre of property for a hotel, or that he boils the blood of the Muslim Brotherhood thugs running the Council on American-Islamic Relations.  While Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s greatest fear is someone giving a Muslim a dirty look, most Americans are more worried about being gunned down at a shopping mall by a crazed [islamic] lunatic who treats his prayer mat better than his three wives and who thinks 72 virgins are waiting for him in paradise.

The establishment is frightened to death that Trump will win, but not because they believe he will harm the nation.  They are afraid he will upset their taxpayer-subsidized apple carts.  While Obama threatens to veto legislation that spends too little, they worry that Trump will veto legislation that spends too much.

You can be certain that if an establishment candidate wins in November 2016, … [their] cabinet positions will be filled with the same people we’ve seen before.  The washed-up has-beens of the Clinton and Bush administrations will be back in charge.  The hacks from Goldman Sachs will continue to call the shots.  Whether it is Bush’s Karl Rove or Clinton’s John Podesta, who makes the decisions in the White House will matter little.

If the establishment wins, America loses.

It’s well worth reading completely, though it is kinda long for a forwarded email. And it has the appearance of reason and logic to it, though a look beneath the surface reveals that… something else is going on. So let’s start at the beginning.

Some Trump supporters are like the 60s white girls who dated black guys just to annoy their parents.

Okay, so we’re pretty much starting with a racist thought by alleging that white girls in the 60s would only have dated black men to annoy their parents. Maybe they just liked black men? This is a ridiculously generalized statement, and I’m only calling attention to it so that I can point out: clearly, this is an email circulated by white people. That’s a distinctly “white” thing to say. So we’ve already eliminated all black people from this email–it’s pretty much “whites only” because of this statement. While I’m not interested in making a judgment call about this, it’s going to get more and more restricted and group-based until we’re left with a very, very, very small minority of people. Anyway.

(the nation elected an[islamo-]Marxist in 2008 and Bruce Jenner now wears designer dresses.)

Oh goody!

I would advise people to learn what a Marxist is, and what Marxism is, before calling the President of the United States a Marxist. And I assume they meant to call him a Muslim, and not “islamo-” but whatever. So we’re back to racism, a point I definitively made here on Quora–the only people still harping on about Obama, Islam, and a birth certificate are racists. The non-racists who were simply concerned and had to adjust to the Brave New World have long since stopped calling him a Muslim and Marxist. So I don’t feel bad, particularly after the first remark I called attention to, for calling this race-based. It is. We’ve been over this, and you can read my answer on Quora–and the comments to it–if you want to see my reasoning. Warning: Contains logic.

They gave the Republicans control of the House in 2010 and control of the Senate in 2014, and have seen them govern no differently than Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.  Yet those same voters are supposed to trust the GOP in 2016?

There’s nothing here to dispute; they’re absolutely right. Conservative officials pulled the same shit here that they pulled the last time Republicans ousted them. I don’t think conservatism is the answer, but the fact that Republicans control both the Senate and the House, yet the Affordable Care Act still stands, is abhorrent. Conservatives absolutely were betrayed, and they should be angry.

No reasonable person can believe that any of the establishment candidates [dems or reps] will slash federal spending, rein in the Federal Reserve, cut burdensome business regulations, reform the tax code, or eliminate useless federal departments (the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, etc.)

It’s here that we start having serious problems with the reasoning. For one, as I’ve pointed out, Trump has absolutely no desire to rein in the Federal Reserve. By his own admission, he wants them to simply print whatever money the U.S. Government needs. Telling the Fed to “Just print more money” is not going to rein them in.

http://ariadimezzo.podbean.com/e/rr-ep-11-interest-rates-the-fed/

There’s a handy crash course on the Fed, Interest Rates, printing money, and the long-term consequences. Everything I said is 100% verifiable–I would play that podcast for the Chairperson of the Fed. Ron Paul for 27 years stood on the House floor and said exactly these things; they are sound statements and absolutely true.

I’ve watched all of the GOP debates, and I doubt that anyone who doesn’t work in a campaign has followed the races more closely than I. Cutting departments from the federal government… That’s not one of Trump’s primary principles, and neither is reforming the tax code. He only recently proposed any sort of concrete changes to the tax code, in fact. I won’t deny that Trump has discussed cutting wasteful departments, but it’s bluster–it’s clearly bluster.

Of course, getting shot at tends to make a person less of a risk-taker.

Then someone needs to gain some principles. Danger is no excuse for abandoning principles. Martin Luther King didn’t abandon his principles when someone shot at him. Jesus Christ didn’t abandon his principles when the Pharisees went after him. Bob Marley didn’t abandon his principles when he was shot. FDR gave a speech after someone shot him. Kennedy knew someone was going to kill him. He told his wife that it was inevitable. And yet he persisted. He continued fighting. So fuck anyone who would abandon their principles just because it gets dangerous. That’s cowardly.

But it’s the bulleted part where things get fun. These are the issues that Trump supporters have; this is what they’re tired of:

• The Clintons
• the Bushs
• All current politicians
• Political correctness
• illegal immigration
• unemployment
• fake numbers
• welfare waste and fraud
• people faking disabilities
• VA waiting lists
• TSA groping
• the Affordable Care Act
• the Fed’s schemes
• Wall Street crooks
• Michelle’s vacations and food police
• Obama’s “hatred of America”
• Valerie Jarrett (I don’t even know who this is)
• “Holiday trees”
• Hollywood hypocrites (Is this like a “One of these don’t belong” game?)
• Global warming “nonsense”
• Cop killers
• “They’re gonna take away our gurns!”
• Stagnant wages
• Boys in girls’ bathrooms
• Millennials

It’s quite a list, isn’t it? In fact, the entire list can be erased and replaced with a single statement: “We’re white Christian conservative men.”

They’re sick of “Boys in girls’ bathrooms”? And yet… they support Donald Trump, who recently said that he’s okay with transgender people using whatever restroom they want? I’m deeply perplexed how you can support Donald Trump when he is explicitly okay with this, and even had Caitlyn Jenner obnoxiously go to one of his buildings to prove it. If you want Christian values in the government, then you probably shouldn’t support the guy who talks about “eating the little cracker or whatever.”

I find it funny that “holiday trees” were explicitly mentioned. In fact, “Yule Tree” would be more accurate and not politically correct, because using evergreen trees is a Pagan custom that Christianity simply adopted to help convert pagans. It’s kinda like their “traditional marriage” argument. Sure, you can stop at 200 years ago and say “That’s the traditional one!” but I can also point to 2000 years ago and say, “No, this is the traditional one.”

More importantly, this is the remark that unequivocally marks them as Christian, because Christians are the only ones who are upset about this. No one else cares.

“No boys in the girls’ restroom!” marks them as men. Presumably, girls have to be protected, but there’s no need to worry about girls using the boys’ restroom. At the very least, that’s chauvinistic, and also demonstrably sexist. It’s also fucked up toward transgender people and shows their total unwillingness to accept that transgenderism is real.

Earlier they referred to Caitlyn as Bruce and said that he wears dresses. Bruce underwent sexual reassignment surgery. If you want to call me a male, you can still make that case. I do, and will always, have a penis. But Caitlyn doesn’t. There is nothing that marks Caitlyn as a man, and referring to her as “he” is remarkably close-minded.

So this person is exactly what we would expect of someone like my dad–some fundamentalist religious nut who thinks there is a god, that he has a personal relationship with that god, that he knows what that god wants, and that he has the god-given right to force those ideas onto others.

There’s a huge disconnect here between them and what they should be saying. If they want to argue for the right of churches to refuse to perform homosexual marriages, that’s one thing. This is why I stopped arguing on behalf of conservatives: they’re not interested in living and letting live. They’re not interested in liberty and small government. They simply want to be the ones in charge and telling other people how to live. They don’t want liberty any more than Bernie Sanders wants liberty.

Why am I so alone in this? “Sure. People can do whatever they want, as long as they don’t use force, violence, and coercion.” Why am I the only fucking person willing to say that and live by it? Why is everyone else saying “Sure. People can do whatever they want, as long as they want to do what I want them to do”?

And you think Trump is going to rein in the Fed? For fuck’s sake, the man just said that they can just print whatever money we need and keep Interest Rates low! He couldn’t be less likely to rein in the Fed. I’m not putting words into Trump’s mouth–that’s what he said. I’m not projecting onto him.

His supporters are.

That’s all this email is–one projection after the next, as people project their thoughts and ideas onto Trump and fully ignore that Trump doesn’t hold those positions. They’re sick of transgender restroom issues, so they’re going to support Trump? They’re sick of the Fed, so they’re going to support Trump? It’s bullshit through and through–Trump is explicitly on the other side of these issues.

The correct answer to “What is Trump?” would be:

A slate onto which his supporters are projecting their own ideas.

But Trump isn’t a blank slate. He has ideas and policies of his own–you’d be hard-pressed to figure out what those policies are, because he flip-flops regularly and swings freely from -500 on an issue to +500 on it. But that huge sweep of the spectrum allows people from all walks of life to support him. If pro-Choice people want to support Trump, then they can–they just have to point to his 90s era quotes about it, and then ignore all the pro-life stuff he has said since.

That’s what his supporters are doing. They’re just cherry-picking, and Trump has given them enough material so that they can attribute almost any position to him. And just as they are proud Christians despite:

• having no fucking idea what the Bible actually says
• huge swathes of the Bible with which they disagree
• and only a few verses here and there that they actually agree with

…so are they proud Trump supporters despite:

• having no fucking idea what Trump actually says
• huge swathes of Trump’s ideas with which they disagree
• and only a few statements here and there that they actually agree with.

That’s what Trump is. He’s the Bible of politics.