Timothy Birdnow

Monica Showalter is wrong.

What has happened is a dog has returned to it's vomit. Showalter is blaming Trump for the election and it really has nothing to do with Trump, and everything to do with phantom fears ginned up by the media that led Americans to seek "change" as they did with Obama. They forgot the lesson so painfully learned.

This is common. I've long argued that one of the cardinal sins of politics is boredom. Clinton was popular because he wasn't boring; it was a soap-opera in real life. Biden was boring which is why Trump won, and so was Hillary. Now the public is bored again, because Trump has not shaken things up enough for their tastes in the last two years. This is a Trump who is not plagued by endless attacks as in the first term and I suspect this "dissatisfaction" with Trump is that he isn't giving the show they want, so many people quietly support these radical Democrats just to shake things up. It's like a long-running show that has to introduce new characters.

So they put a bunch of crazies in power to entertain them.

I doubt anyone is aware of this but it is a real part of the decision making of many Americans, I fear.

Showalter is usually pretty good but I would argue she laid an egg here. Blaming this on Trump is like blaming your doctor for cutting the cancer out of you because it hurt.

Do Americans believe the Democrats will improve their quality of life? Get prices down? Make gas cheaper? Food cheaper? They cannot possibly think that. They may BELIEVE that because they want it to happen; magical thinking. But in the end there is no way they can THINK that. This was only a way to repudiate the Republicans (and I would say the GOP Congress more than Trump himself, who is working to do the will of the People). No doubt they voted this way out of sheer frustration and boredom.

But even if Showalter is correct, the answer is not to just give Americans everything they want any time they want just because they want it. That would be pure democracy, something loathed and feared by the Founding Fathers. Why do we have a Senate? It was to act as a restriction on the House of Representatives, which at the time was the ONLY elected office in the Federal government. There are times when the people with more information need to do things that may be politically unpopular. The war in Iran was one such, a clear and present danger that the Left refuses to accept. But it had to be done and in the old days "politics ended at the water's edge" but now politics makes common cause with our sworn enemies just to screw over the Republicans.

When you are doing what is right you have to do it no matter how popular opinion feels. In politics that means explaining what you are doing. Sadly the news media and the internet news sources people, especially young people get are biased and will not allow the President to get his word out.

I will admit he did not do a good job of communicating his strategy and why we needed the things he's been doing. But he needed to keep doing them.

America wanted all the illegals out and when Trump started rounding them up and repatriating them a bunch of people complained, saying he was being mean. Well, how else do you kick people out if you don't round them up and repatriate them? Trump needed to make that clear. And he needed to move faster on the evictions.

When a nation like Iran, which chants "death to America" tells us they have enough enriched uranium for 11 nuclear bombs there is no choice. Trump should have been a broken record on that. He assumed the public would understand you can't allow that but he assumed wrong.

And of course that meant gas has been temporarily high and he needed to explain better WHY it is high. In fact he had a perfect opportunity to blame the Democrats in blue states, pointing out their high taxes and ridiculous regulations. But he assumed everyone would already know that. It was a mistake.

Showalter blames the President for this but doesn't offer any constructive advice. She simply complains about things that were hard to control.

She says Trump alienated Latino voters. Well duh! That was going to happen when you start deporting Latinos. What does she propose Trump do? Essentially she is calling for amnesty with this complaint.

She complains too about corruption in the Administration. It is no worse than any prior Administration and Trump has dealt with many of these people as soon as it became an issue. It is only more obvious because the media hunts for corruption wherever they can find it (I know; my older brother is a labor Democrat and he's always talking about Trump corruption). But nobody ever said they voted Democrat based on corruption - that is a fantasy from the RINO wing of the party.

And of course she tries to blame tariffs, calling them a "terrible idea". The fact remains that the Progressives hated tariffs because they wanted a heavy, progressive income tax, just like Marx wanted.

If you look through the history of tariffs (and they were the primary funding mechanism for the United States until the income tax in 1913) they do not coincide with any sort of economic downturn nor inflation. Showalter shows she does not understand this. Tariffs were raised TWICE during the depression of f'21 and the nation not only got out of that depression but we went into the roaring '20's. People were paying less tax out of pocket. That was Harding and Coolidge who promoted those tariff increases.

Tariffs has not led to an "affordability" crisis and Monica should know better.

Every tariff hater goes back to Smoot-Hawley, the tariff increase at the beginning of the Great Depression. It did not cause the Depression (the Feds, who had pumped up the money supply during the twenties, contracted it sharply, triggering the Depression) nor did it exacerbate it. What it did was take money out of the pockets of Europeans, who got mad about it. But that was an outlier.

And the public in this election did not vote on tariffs, but "affordability" because they foolishly believed we would have deflation, without understanding the Fed is the only source that can trigger that, by contracting the money supply (which also would cause a recession at minimum). Deflation is destructive and we fought against it for decades during the late nineteenth century. It was a case of unrealistic expectations. And fuel prices are largely driving higher consumer prices.

Still, as our editor Dana Mathewson says, how is the economy so terrible? I myself have noticed restaurants are full, and I don't mean McDonalds; fine dining places. Starbucks are full; people are buying expensive coffee. If times were so bad they'd be making Folgers at home. The electronics stores are busy. Walmart is busy; I have to park far from the door and hoof it in when I go for my insulin. Bars and breweries are hopping. The economy is not bad if one looks at consumer spending. So how is this such a crisis? It isn't; the media just told everybody it was.

Monica is just plain wrong in this essay.

She complains Trump just sprang the Iran war on the public. Hmm. What do you do when someone has a bunch of nuclear material lying around? Spend a year talking about how you are going to bomb Iran? You MUST do it suddenly so they can't move the stuff. That was the mistake Bush made in Iraq; he jawbones about it for a year before doing it. Saddam had plenty of time to hide or move all his stuff.

She also complains about things like Greenland and Trump's trolling of Canada as if the man can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

She says she was told by a voter "this isn't what I voted for" and no doubt she did not ask exactly what that voter DID vote for. Closing the border? Done. Evicting illegal aliens? In progress. Cutting the size of government? Done. Make America Great Again means exactly that, and things like Greenland are and were a part of it. Monica didn't seem to try to defend any of MAGA with said friend. We need Greenland to defend against the Chicoms, who are moving into the Arctic (from which they could strike us with atomic weapons).

Showalter is usually pretty good but she laid an egg here. She may even be right about the voter's motives and she certainly is right Trump did not do a good job of explaining. But Trump made all the right decisions. What he is trying to do is incredibly difficult; he's trying to reform the country. Grover Cleveland did likewise; he campaigned as a reformer who would ferret out corruption and he did it, but he was wildly unpopular for it at the time and lost his re-election bid (only, like Trump, to come back and be re-elected after the public saw the alternative). Trump was guaranteed to piss a lot of people off. He was disrupting the status quo, and people are lazy and weak and prefer the devil they know.

At the end she actually praises NeverTrumper Peggy Noonan for wishing for a blue blowout to force the GOP back into RINO control, which she refers to as "first principles". Yeah; like we ever won anything with the RINO wing in charge! And Showalter actually agrees. That is political suicide. It would mean we go back to the days where we put principles ahead of everything, and do nothing. It means we go back to "comity" and being the party to better manage America's decline. It means we go bac to open borders, a big welfare state, not challenging vote fraud, high taxes and high prices and no jobs. No thank you Monica. 

We are in a state of terminal decay and Showalter wants to play pattycake with the Left. And she says we need to "give the voters what they want". They have said they want socialism and open borders with this election; should we give them that, or teach them why they shouldn't want these things? Her way is simply surrender. 

Now is not the time to blame Trump. Now is the time to support him more than ever. Shame on Monica Showalter!

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