Trump has done some good things – some really amazing things. But all of that stuff, as good as it is, is mostly small ball, relatively speaking. On many of the big things, the truly existential things, he has not done nearly so well. In fact, he might rate no better than a D on those crucial issues. Like what?
Like spending and the debt. Both still out of control. How many omnibus spending bills has he signed?
Like the border. Still not fixed, and illegals continue to pour in. Already, thousands, maybe a million or more, new potential Democrat voters await the next election.
Like election fraud. Many elections in 2016 and 2018 were stolen outright, yet those changelings still reign.
Like USMCA, the republic-destroying so-called “renegotiation” of NAFTA that is a globalist’s candy store.
And most importantly and significantly, like gun control.
This last, gun control, is galactically huge and has been, by far, the most difficult for me to understand. Why would the president go back on his promise to protect the Second Amendment? Here are the facts, as I see them:
- The last presidential election was very close.
- The next one may be as close, or even closer.
- There are enough hard core conservatives who, if Republican Trump gives us what Democrat/Socialist/Muslim Obama didn’t, will sit home on election day and thereby guarantee a loss for Trump.
Then why? Why is this happening? Why would Trump risk losing those precious votes? I just couldn’t understand it. Until now. I think I may now know why the president is going down this road to what I believe is sure destruction – politically for him and in every way for the republic.
This presidency has been terribly, unbelievably, difficult for Trump. He has seen his life and the lives of his family come under serious threat. He has been opposed, even, by a large part of his own party. A Republican Congress not only did not help him, but they seemed, instead, to do everything they could to keep him from implementing his MAGA agenda.
Trump has seen first hand something that could be learned no other way – just how powerful, widespread, and evil the Deep State is, not only in this country, but also in all of our closest allies. No normal person could have imagination so fertile, and so dark, as to be able to, in their wildest, craziest speculations, come anywhere close to imagining the true nature and breadth of the evil that would face this president, beginning on Inauguration Day.
Trump has endured withering fire from all of the print and broadcast media. Never before in history has such a coordinated barrage of hate been directed at one person. Trump has thick skin, certainly, but can any mortal have thick enough skin so as to endure that and not have it affect them in some very important ways?
Consider this: What if Trump had come to believe, right or wrong, that he couldn’t possibly win the fight that he had so nobly, but maybe naively, undertaken and that the effort could possibly cost him his own life and/or that of one or more loved ones? What would he do? Go down with the ship and take his family along for the ride? Or might he, instead, negotiate a private surrender that would guarantee protection for himself and his family from what was to come?
So we could understand it, and who could blame him, if Trump just decided that four years was more than enough and that he no longer wanted a second term. Of course, the problem then would be the exit strategy. He couldn’t just quit, obviously. Not after all of the promises that he had made. Plus, to Trump, quitting would be worse than almost anything else. He simply could not, simply would not, ever allow himself to be seen as a quitter. And that leads us to the second exit possibility … losing the election.
By now, we know Trump pretty well, don’t we? We know that, to him, failure is not something that he fears. Rather, it is a normal, maybe necessary, part of doing business. It’s just a momentary and minor bump in the road that must be gotten beyond so as to get on to bigger and better things, only an irritating little inconvenience that is the cost of trying. To Trump, adversity is nothing more or less than a springboard to the next level of prosperity. So losing the election would not only be an acceptable way out, it would be an honorable way out. I can hear him now explaining how he had tried so hard, at great personal and financial cost, to do the right thing and how others in his own party had let him down, most of which would be absolutely true.
Now, if we allow ourselves to assume that Trump wants out and that he has chosen losing in 2020 as his exit strategy, how could he bring that about while retaining dignity and respectability? The answer is that he would have to do something that he could sell as necessary and good, like protecting the children, that would still peel off enough of his votes so as to guarantee that an already close election would go against him. So what do you suppose that “something” might be? Maybe gun control?
So that would quite reasonably and tidily explain the seemingly unexplainable – just why Trump appears to be going against one of his major campaign promises, arguably his most important campaign promise, and working to give Democrats the gun control that they have coveted for decades, don’t you think?
But let us pray hard that we are wrong.
Jere Moore has been blogging about political matters since 2008. His posts include commentary about current news items, conservative opinion pieces, satirical articles, stories that illustrate conservative principles, and posts about history, rights, and economics.