Today, I’m going to attempt to explain why people are voting for Donald Trump.
I have in mind two groups for this explanation: the people out there that like the Republican Party as it is and the supporters of Ted Cruz.
First what is the phenomenon of Trump’s rise in popularity?
Part of Trump’s popularity is that he doesn’t take crap from anyone. He gives as good as he gets. If you attack him he will retaliate in kind. Look at the penis flap this week. Marco Rubio said that Trump had a little one at a speech that he made and Trump mocked him about it on national television. Was it crude? Yes, but it made Rubio look stupid.
Marco Rubio told supporters last week that GOP presidential rival Donald Trump is “always calling me ‘little Marco.’”
“He is taller than me, he’s like 6’ 2”, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’ 2”,” Rubio joked. “Have you seen his hands? And you know what they say about men with small hands—”
The crowd erupted.
”—You can’t trust them,” Rubio said.
Rubio’s comment may come across tasteless for a presidential hopeful, but that was not the first time someone has questioned the size of Trump’s hands.
The article continues…
If you thought Rubio’s joke on the campaign trail last week would go un-answered by Trump—you were wrong.
Trump has brought up his hands up at least twice in the past 24 hours.
At a rally outside Detroit this morning, Trump said he would not sit back and be “presidential…when ‘little Marco’” talked about “the size of my hands.”
Trump held his hands up and said, “Those hands can hit a golf ball 285 yards.”
And at the Republican debate in Detroit last night, Trump said, “And I have to say this, I have to say this. [Rubio] hit my hands.”
“Nobody has ever hit my hands. I have never heard of this,” Trump continued, neglecting to reveal his repeated mailings to Carter.
“Look at those hands,” Trump said on the debate stage, holding up his hands to the audience. “Are they small hands? And he referred to my hands—if they are small, something else must be small.”
“I guarantee you there is no problem,” Trump affirmed. “I guarantee you.”
ABC News: The History Behind the Donald Trump ‘Small Hands’ Insult
Trump is taking a page out of a familiar playbook. “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”
The Untouchables 1987
Ok, so contrast this with what the Republican Establishment has been giving us since 1989; especially at the presidential level and more recently in Congress.
George W Bush would never defend his policies; especially, going into Iraq. He would not defend himself, his administration, and by extension those of us that voted for him, period. He had some weird notion of turning the other cheek and hoping God would sort it out. When he wanted to do stupid stuff domestically, he ignored his base and gave us junk like the Medicare Part D, the bail-out, and other things that the Democrats wanted.
Neither McCain nor Romney would directly engage Obama when they ran for president. They were afraid; especially of being called racists for attacking Obama’s policies. As a result, they pulled their punches.
An alternate explanation is they knew they were lying when they tried to pass themselves off as conservatives when they were not. At some point each candidate didn’t have the heart to perpetuate the lie.
Was Sara Palin brought in so she could sound conservative so McCain would not have to?
George H. W. Bush gave us the American with Disabilities Act. This is by far the largest unfunded mandate in the history of the world—at least up to that time. It was poorly written and has cost both government and the private section trillions of dollars. It has been used as a club to destroy many small and medium sized businesses. On balance, it has hurt as many or more people than it has helped. This law was like doing open heart surgery with hand grenades; you might unplug the artery but what good is that if the patient doesn’t walkout of the hospital?
Bush also famously broke his pledge of no new taxes.
Republicans have owned the House for many years now and they can’t even pass a budget; which is their Constitutional duty. They said we are only one half of one third of government, we need the Senate if we want to get things done. Well, stupid us, we gave it to them and nothing has changed. They talk and talk but every time they have a chance to stand up to the President, they surrender without a fight. They are gutless, feckless, and spineless.
It took Newt and his boys tried three times to get welfare reform passed under Bill Clinton; but low and behold, Clinton finally signed it and then took credit for the idea. The thought of doing something similar to Obama is anathema to the previous and current Republican Leadership.
In short, it has been many decades since any Republican with vision, spine, and leadership has ventured into the public square to take on the Democrats or their enablers in the Republican Party. Reagan did it. Newt did it for the first hundred days and then a few times after that in the House. Republicans have never in my lifetime had a Senate Leader that was a Conservative.
People hate the direction that this country is going and nobody will stand up for them. Trump has the reputation of looking someone in the face and saying, “F.U., I won’t do it”. Yes he is crude. Yes he gave protection money to Democrats; how else do you do business in New York. You pay off the unions and the politicians and then you get your project built. He knows how the game is played.
Trump is a scrappy guy with a New York attitude. To beat Clinton—and frankly to treat Hillary the way she deserves to be treated (like a piñata)—is not the job for a gentleman like Ted Cruz. Ted is right on more issues than Trump but we don’t want a professor for a leader, we want someone that can move the masses (low information voters) in a meaningful enough way to get them to defect from the Democrats and vote for the Republican. The electoral map is such that Democrats only have to win about three states out of fifty to win the presidency—or block the path for a Republican.
Second, it is not fair to compare Trump with other recent insurgents on the political landscape.
Trump is not Jesse Ventura, Ross Perot, Patrick J Buchanan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or other non-traditional candidates. Comparisons to these men fall short of meaningful analysis. While no comparison is totally accurate, in my mind you need to go back to Teddy Roosevelt to find some comparisons. Teddy was a populist. He loved his country and was willing to confront folks in both parties. A significant difference between the two men is that Teddy formed the Bull Moose Party and tried to get to the presidency thru a third party instead of finding a path thru the Republicans.
Trump found a path thru the Republicans. Trump was not taken seriously by the Republican Establishment until he started winning; first in opinion polls and then at the ballot box. He is not relying on the same apparatus that the Party has set-up: consultants, advertisers, polling firms, etc. Trump has spent a fraction of the money that Jeb Bush spent. (Bush spent over 160 million and couldn’t break out of single digits in the polls)
Not using the failed system set up by the Establishment, they didn’t see Trump coming. Reagan did a variation of this when he ran. Reagan got his marketing people from Madison Avenue instead of the political consulting world. As a result, Reagan’s messaging was more effective.
Third, the reaction to Trump is encouraging more people to support him and solidifying his position as front runner.
Rank and File Republicans Tell Party Elites: We’re Sticking With Donald Trump
From Michigan to Louisiana to California on Friday, rank-and-file Republicans expressed mystification, dismissal and contempt regarding the instructions that their party’s most high-profile leaders were urgently handing down to them: Reject and defeat Donald J. Trump.
Their angry reactions, in the 24 hours since Mitt Romney and John McCain urged millions of voters to cooperate in a grand strategy to undermine Mr. Trump’s candidacy, have captured the seemingly inexorable force of a movement that still puzzles the Republican elite and now threatens to unravel the party they hold dear.
In interviews, even lifelong Republicans who cast a ballot for Mr. Romney four years ago rebelled against his message and plan. “I personally am disgusted by it — I think it’s disgraceful,” said Lola Butler, 71, a retiree from Mandeville, La., who voted for Mr. Romney in 2012. “You’re telling me who to vote for and who not to vote for? Please.”
“There’s nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and my grandchildren — there is nothing and nobody that’s going to dissuade me from voting for Trump,” Ms. Butler said.
This article from the New York Times captures much of the zeal for Trump but their attempts at analysis fall short. However two paragraphs deserve a closer look.
The furious campaign now underway to stop Mr. Trump and the equally forceful rebellion against it captured the essence of the party’s breakdown over the past several weeks: Its most prominent guardians, misunderstanding their own voters, antagonize them as they try to reason with them, driving them even more energetically to Mr. Trump’s side.
I wish to take issue with the assertion that “the party’s breakdown” occurred “over the past several weeks”. The Party has been broken for many years.
Look at us here in California. Republican registration has fallen to 27 percent. The State Party Chairman said a few weeks ago, that Republicans are the third largest party in the State. Numerically they are second but he looks at it in terms of Democrats being first at 43 percent, all others are 30 percent and then the GOP.
The Republican reaction in California is not to go to voters and see what’s changed and try to reconnect with the masses that have changed registration to Decline to State. No they have become more insular, less responsive to voters, and have adopted a “bunker mentality”. They have firmly affixed blinders and are charging around in the dark.
I think the same thing has happened to the Party on a national level. Demographically, the country is changing—and not in a good way. Both Democrats and Republicans have turned a blind eye to following the Constitution. All three branches of government are perverted, un-moored, and outside of their Constitutional boundaries.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a long-running gathering of traditional conservatives, attendees feared that they were witnessing an event that has not occurred in more than a century: the breaking apart of a major American political party.
They spoke ruefully of “fidelity” lost and “values” forgone. They conceded a strange new feeling of powerlessness in the face of Mr. Trump’s ascendance. And they mourned for a 162-year-old party that is starting to seem unrecognizable to them.
The Republican Party has been broken for a long time, but the Establishment has not noticed because they were the only game in town if you wanted an alternative to the Democrats. Trump is an alternative to the status quo. Both Parties have been ready for a re-alignment but perhaps the Trump phenomenon will finally trigger its arrival.
This brings me to Immigration.
Our immigration system is broken and has been for decades. It’s getting worse instead of better.
I’m going to throw a new twist into the discussion of immigration. My assertion is that there are two components of immigration: the governmental system and the societal.
Dr. Michael Savage has made his thesis on this issue: Borders, Language, and Culture. My comments fall within this paradigm.
We need to secure our borders and set-up a guest worker program. I totally agree with Trump and Savage on this. However, this does not go far enough. There is a societal aspect to immigration that is also in need of reform. This reform is one that was once a core value of America, it was the dream of immigrants to be Americans.
People that come here now, no longer desire to be Americans. They don’t make the sacrifice of those before them to leave their old country and adopt America as their own.
I know when my wife’s ancestors came here from Germany, they were required to sign a document renouncing their German citizenship and any claim to property in their old country. This was required not by us but the German government. Once they got here they could not turn back. Once in America, they wanted to learn English and work to make a better life than the one they had left.
Now immigrants can stay here for generations and not be assimilated into an American culture. They get to keep all their cultures, customs, and traditions. Even if they speak English they identify with their group not with their new country.
I remember that many children of Mexican immigrants that I went to school with never knew Spanish. They were here so they were expected to learn our language. Not by our government but by their parents. They spoke English at home so they would be good at it and have a better opportunity to get a good job when they grew up.
Now, public schools are legally required to provide translators and other tools so parents will never have to learn English. Heck when you want to vote in my county—Sacramento—the government is required to provide the ballot in English, Spanish, and some flavor of Chinese.
We passed a ballot measure in 1986 that declared that English is the official language of California but you sure wouldn’t know it by looking at our State.
Savage is right, without a unifying language and culture, what binds us together? Nothing. We are just in an uneasy ceasefire with the strangers living next door to us. Often their allegiance is not to our country but to their old country and old way of life.
For example, I have a friend at work that was born here, her parents are from China. She occasionally goes to Church and calls herself a Christian. She cares only for the welfare of the Chinese Community. Her first language is Chinese. She spends much of her spare time promoting a Chinese language newspaper that serves various enclaves of folks from China that live in the United States. It is run by an arm of the Communist Chinese government. She will only listen to politicians that pander to her ethnic group or have a Chinese heritage. She will always support Democrats. Only once has she flinched on the knee-jerk impulse to support the Dems and that was when the Dems were trying to pass a quota bill to increase Hispanic attendance at California Universities. Nobody cared that it might promote less qualified Hispanic children over Whites but when the Asia folks figured out that they would be the most screwed group in this racially based scheme, they went ballistic. They banded together and stopped the proposed legislation but none of the folks in the Chinese community were bothered by the fact that the people from “their community” had aligned with the Democrat leadership to screw them over. Leland Yee and others got a free pass.
This girl would be considered one of the better out comes from immigration. Most just stay in their ghetto where they happily take whatever scraps the government sees fit to give them. None desire above all else to be Americans.
Somehow people claim to love Dr. King but ignore the cornerstone of his belief that men should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
This Balkanization of the United States is a rather recent phenomenon. I bet that if you looked at the decline of immigrants desiring to be Americans as defined by learning English and enjoying freedom and this rise in immigrants clinging to their old ways and living off the government dole, there is a direct correlation with the increase in the popularity of soccer and decline of interest in baseball. Baseball was once the most popular thing exported by the United States. It was our goodwill ambassador to other nations. It was a welcome symbol of our country. Baseball, blue jeans and Bibles were once our biggest contributions to the world.
But back to Trump.
• Trump stands his ground, the Republican Establishment does not.
• Trump is a different type of political insurgent than anyone in recent memory. The Republican Establishment does not know what to do with him. To appropriate a phrase from Rush Limbaugh, they didn’t make him so they can’t unmake him either.
• Trump’s instinct on immigration is right. We only want people here that want to be like us, not those bringing their banana republic politics and ghetto mentality with them. The Republican Establishment has no plan but total capitulation on the issue.
How the Republican Establishment giving the Democrats a permanent majority for the next hundred years or more can be viewed as a victory on the issue is just baffling to rank-and-file Republican voters. Plans like Bush’s and Rubio’s are a suicide pact for the Republican Party. Furthermore, it’s a suicide pact for our nation.
Members of the military and those that have served in elected office take an oath to protect the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic. The domestic enemies of this country are the Democrat Party and the Republican Establishment. Neither group has any patriots left in them.
Supporters of Trump agree with him when he “calls out” both Democrats and Establishment Republicans. The ruling classes have no clothes. Trump is fearlessly confronting both.
Does he have the answers? Maybe not, but shining the light on the ruling classes and watching them scatter like cockroaches sure is entertaining. Hopefully it will wake-up enough folks to turn the country away from the destructive path it has been on.