I will take a Trump over anyone because no one else will put America First and pledge his life, fortune and sacred honor to save ourselves from ourselves.
Trumpism without Trump is like Diet Coke without the Coke. Comportment doesn’t matter. Results do. To get those results, you need Donald Trump, not some spelling bee champion or a groovy governor. Maybe in 2028 we can elect one of them president but we need Trump now to remove the bananas from the Republic.
I want my country back. I want 1.4% inflation back. I want the car dealership in Kenosha back. I want my no wars back. I want my liberty back.
And I want those 20 million illegal aliens sent back.
If it takes a madman to do it, elect him. Out of chaos, freedom. If we must, we should build a pipeline from the Diet Coke plant to the White House and get it done.
The case for Trump.
I am so frustrated I think I am in that camp. I wish though that he had a more conciliatory personality. I doubt he would be facing the BS he has if he had a more pleasant personality.
OTOH he is the first politician I have ever seen that when his detractors dish it out to him, he dishes it right back. The first one I’ve seen that will fight back.
Maybe that is what we need.
If thinking Trump is carrying some magic wand is your best case, you’ve really got no case. Without discrediting the fact that one of the best things the FedGov can do is simply get out of the way of the American people, a lot of the good that Surber is referencing was contingent, and abetted by the fact that a significant portion of the FedGov was spending most of its energy trying to eject Trump before he could be re-elected. He will be automatically term-limited if elected in 2024 (that didn’t officially apply to Cleveland when he served his discontinuous second term). Even the best Presidents struggle in their second term. Trump will be largely ignored, routed around, and lawfared into irrelevancy, and the bureaucratic elite will continue their war on the general population.
We need a mass, not a man. We need thousands of sane people putting in time at school boards, town councils, state legislatures, and state governments. Maybe Trump can spark that movement but I’m just not seeing it. He generates far more heat than he does light.
I will certainly vote for Trump if he’s the nominee but he will be at best simply a holding action that might blunt some of the crazy that’s infecting the country. Biden might not have gotten 81 million votes but he certainly got a lot, and state governments like those headed by Whitmer, Newsom, and Pritzker indicate we’ve got a significant population that is either benefiting from the way the country is heading, or just not connecting their behavior in the voting booth with what they see happening.
He is a poor candidate, and re-electing him (if it’s even possible to do so in the face of media censorship, vote-rigging and outright fraud by the Democrats) would not be sufficient to solve the country’s problems, but it would be a start. And the other candidates, DeSantis perhaps excepted, are worse.
Trump is also a target of official persecution. Voting for him is an act of defiance against the governing establishment and its abuses of power. The abuse of power is one of if not the main issue in this election. That the other candidates ignore it disqualifies them from serious consideration.
I am on record here as wishing Trump would stand down strictly on the basis of his age. I’m not comfortable with an 80+ year old in a job that tends to age people years in a few months.
DeSantis Is the only remotely acceptable alternative. His record in Florida is first rate, especially his tendency to tell the feds to go pound sand. However exceptional he has been as Governor, he has proven to be a poor Presidential candidate. It’s as if the last half dozen election cycles never happened. He needs to realize that he’s never going to get fair representation from the media and needs to simply ignore and go around them, like Trump. He’ll have to just accept that any thing he says that might be interpreted as criticism of Trump will produce one of Trump’s childish comebacks and will just have to trust us, the voters, to see it as it is rather than to reciprocate. He needs to realize that the more successful he is as a candidate, the closer he becomes to being “literally Hitler” to the media and that there is no explanation he can make or position he can endorse that will change that. Again, he’ll have to trust us to see through that, as hard as that will be.
The Republican candidate needs to be the one that can convince me that he has what it takes to win what will be a very dirty, unfair fight, not who is best at tearing down the other Republican candidates. That’s the game the media wants them to play that leaves the “winner” so wounded he can’t survive the real election. So far, the only one that has shown evidence he has what it will take is Trump. And if that is how it remains, so be it.
Looking at the candidate field, and looking at the state of our political system; like it or not and successfully or not Donald Trump is the only person available who may stand up and fight for our former Social Contract. It is him or nothing.
If he fails, in or out of office [and I admit that I expect that the election will possibly be determined by the application of illegal force] then we will move from the founding fathers to Clausewitz. This is not a good or desirable place for us to be in, but we cannot choose the reality we live in. Those who mean us ill get a vote.
YMMV
Subotai Bahadur
While past isn’t prologue, I do think a person’s history can provide a framework for their current behavior. Before assuming the presidency, Biden had spent nearly half his entire life in the Senate and between the lack of executive ability and blow-hardness it seems he never left that chamber. Trump had spent a lifetime not only as businessman but a brand manager and his presidency was characterized by his image of pugnacity and “Art of the Deal”
After so many Republicans that the only they showed were their bellies, I loved the fact Trump fought back. I just hope (and wonder) if he understands that one of the lessons from his presidency that he needs to do more than just occupy the bully pulpit, To win you have to engage in the nitty gritty details of personnel and electoral organization. I’m not seeing that he gets it, I hope I’m wrong
To Christopher’s earlier point about grass roots organizing, I’m fairly optimistic about the overall direction though it is very late in the day . The spirit of parental revolt in K-12 has found its organizational face in Moms4Liberty which just had a national conference heavily focused on grassroots organizing. What worries me is the lack of grassroots response to the NM Governor’s suspension of gun rights. Given our passion for the 2nd Amendment and what’s coming over the next 6 -24 months, we should be doing more than a lawsuit and a small protest.
Following groups events such as the 2nd Amendment Foundation and last week’s 2023 Gun Rights Policy Conference in Phoenix, we seemed way too focused on fighting our key battles through the courts and not local organizing. We can speculate why NM Governor Grisham did what she did but the result looks like a probing attack by people who will try something much larger next summer.
DeSantis is this electoral cycle’s Scott Walker. It was irrelevant that Walker was an excellent governor because as soon as the billionaire paymasters of the GOP started funding his campaign they put constraints upon him that rendered him completely irrelevant and utterly unable to respond to Trump. The same thing seems to have happened to DeSantis. He was doing very well and appeared likely to be a serious rival to Trump- and then Jeb! Bush and the rest of GOP establishment stuffed a couple hundred million dollars into his bank acc- I mean his campaign coffers- and suddenly he started flailing miserably.
One example. Trump was president during the recent pandemic catastrophe. This is an obvious vulnerability. But DeSantis can’t exploit it, because to do so effectively requires that he attack such entities as the pharmaceutical companies, the CDC, Anthony Fauci, etc. And the people funding DeSantis won’t let that happen, because he would effectively attacking them.
But it’s worse. If Scott Walker had been elected president in 2016, I would have assumed he was a president in the traditional sense and likely not thought too much about who funded his campaign. Not now, partially because of what actually happened to Scott Walker. If DeSantis somehow gets elected president, I will assume he is a puppet dancing on a string beholden to shadowy unknowns.
For all his faults, I don’t believe that about Donald Trump. It’s Trump, or no one.
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Most of the reactions to Trump are emotional in nature, Surber and most of the rest are letting their emotional response take over. Oh, sweet revenge when the poor persecuted Trump once again triumphs in the Electoral College!
Balderdash. Revenge is necessary, but not sufficient. Trump elected again is utterly incapable of delivering on the promises, reality is different from the feelings, and it is time to man up. He will be an overaged lame duck surrounded by sharks, with poor management skills and a team of third and fourth rate grifters surrounding him. Big changes happen in this country with a majority popular vote and a united Congress, he will have neither. It will be a disaster of sufficient magnitude that we would really be better served with a loss.
Trump has shown these last two years that he can talk all he wants, but is not a fighter for the MAGA agenda, only for himself. A country that finds him as its last hope is already gone, time to build something new, and better. No more “leaders” past the age of Medicare!
As of today, the alternatives appear to be Trump elected again or another Republican losing.
I agree with this.
“Trump is also a target of official persecution. Voting for him is an act of defiance against the governing establishment and its abuses of power. The abuse of power is one of if not the main issue in this election. That the other candidates ignore it disqualifies them from serious consideration.”
One of the challenges facing the Republican field (similar to what happened in 2016) is that most of the Republican presidential candidates were relatively indistinguishable from one another. The fact that Trump carved out his own space distinctly separate from the other candidates made it easy for him to gather more support than any other single candidate.
If anyone is going to replace Trump as the GOP front-runner for 2024, they need to start projecting a unique, forceful and independent voice. They can’t be like everyone else who is running. They need to stand above and apart from the rest of the pack.
Ed:
It’s rough when the proles won’t shut up and vote for who they’re told to vote for, isn’t it?
Trump elected again is utterly incapable of delivering on the promises, reality is different from the feelings, and it is time to man up.
Time to man up? Reality is different from feelings? Trump can’t deliver?
In other words, give up on Trump and vote for whatever hapless nullity the witless Geee Ohh Peeeeeee establishment settles on this time.
No. What I recall from the Trump administration is that he accomplished a great deal, despite the endless backstabbing from the gop establishment. What I expect from another gop establishment endorsed president is a long list of excuses about why nothing could be done and soon thereafter a return to a government by the left.
He will be an overaged lame duck surrounded by sharks, with poor management skills and a team of third and fourth rate grifters surrounding him.
I agree that the sharks of the GOP have poor management skills and comprise a team of third and fourth rate grifters. I also recall that the party establishment ran a full page ad during the 2016 campaign threatening any Republican congressperson if they endorsed or co-operated with Trump- and also that same party establishment was taking resumes from Trump supporters and throwing them in the trash, to be replaced by the establishment grifters you mention. I shouldn’t need to say that these folks didn’t want Trump to succeed, and surely worked to ensure that he did not.
Big changes happen in this country with a majority popular vote and a united Congress, he will have neither.
If only the GOP had done something about the endless vote fraud in this country when it had the chance. But no, it was too busy attacking its political base and trying to sabotage the terrible orange man.
Trump has shown these last two years that he can talk all he wants, but is not a fighter for the MAGA agenda, only for himself.
1) Trump isn’t president, 2) something tells me you aren’t really that interested in the MAGA agenda.
A country that finds him as its last hope is already gone, time to build something new, and better.
I agree. If Trump somehow wins, then antifa takes to the streets and starts burning cities again. Every problem the country faces will be blamed on him, and the Deep State will do everything it can to make the country fail, to be rid of him, if they don’t simply arrange an assassination. If Trump loses, then the Deep State will do everything it can do to ensure there will never be another challenge to the regime. Expect everything from court-packing, extreme censorship, gun-banning, and much more.
And things will get really bad. Either way, it will be the end of the present regime.
No more “leaders” past the age of Medicare!
I think I detect the next Deep State attack line against Trump, after Biden gets flushed.
Trump is just too old!!!
Pathetic.
I was a bit surprised at how much Trump was able to accomplish while simultaneously fighting off the backstabbing attempts of the GoPee’s army of Flying Squish Monkeys. However, too much of it was from executive actions that could, and were, overturned by the following administration. That adage about alligators and draining the swamp comes to mind. Any president, to accomplish much, needs a team of people he can rely on. Diogenes had something to say about finding even one honest man. Now try to do that in D.C.
Congress was not help for the first two years of the term. Perhaps operating under orders from the RNC to deny any co-operation and block any initiatives.
Add in the harassment created by HRC funded ‘russian dossier’, and you have a recipe for a non-productive term. It is somewhat surprising what was accomplished. Realizing executive orders are valid as long as they are valid, what was the alternative given to Trump during his administration?
The bozos did not even want to fund the southern border wall, which it seems was favorable in most peoples’ minds. I think. The late Senator even gave the people essentially a finger as he stiffed them and DJT in the objective of poking a fatal hole in O’care. The Maverick would rather turn on his supporters and give DJT a jab than do what he promised. He can consider that forever now that he’s no longer above ground and vertical.