Fact-free media bigots attack Trump after Annapolis tragedy            

Obama associate Rahm Emanuel notoriously counseled partisans to "never let a crisis go to waste." In that reptilian spirit, media voices sped to their Twitter accounts to exploit the Annapolis tragedy. 

Investigation of the Annapolis shooter eventually turned up evidence of his longstanding animus toward the Capital Gazette newspaper, one that included social media harassment and courtroom confrontations but was wholly unrelated to President Trump and his legitimate media fault finding.

But before any facts were known about the shooter, the president's critics charged his legitimate press criticism had engendered the assault. 

Tweets implicating President Trump's rhetoric were rushed online by James LaPorta (Newsweek), Jessica Valenti (GuardianUS), Mark Harris (Vulture), Danielle Campoamor (Bustle), and Aaron Rupar (ThinkProgress).

Reuters' Rob Cox initially tweeted to Trump: "you have blood on your hands." (Cox did later post an apologetic admission of error, unlike his inky, biased fellows.)

Big Media voices were joined in Trump-smearing by a galaxy of lesser lights

Now, those of us championing Trump's America First cause had long seen firsthand the smug disingenuousness of the mainstream political media.

When candidate Trump assailed unrelenting and falsity-freighted press crusades against him, we roared approval.

Our wariness endured after Trump's victory. An October 18, 2017 Detroit Free Press report was headlined "Donald Trump's 'fake news' claims are real, say 46% of voters in [Morning Consult / Politico] poll,"

And the Knight Foundation Trust, Media, and Democracy initiative published on January15, 2018 a poll Knight had conducted in conjunction with Gallup. A release on that poll, which had included some 19,000 respondents, summarized its findings: 

[M]ost Americans believe it is now harder to be well-informed and to determine which news is accurate. They increasingly perceive the media as biased and struggle to identify objective news sources. They believe the media continue to have a critical role in our democracy, but are not very positive about how the media are fulfilling that role.

Several of President Trump's post-Annapolis, Twitter slurrers recycled a garbage argument popular during his campaign. Despite Trump's carefully specifying "fake news," many persisted in misrepresenting his targeted brickbats as referencing the entire journalistic enterprise.

Of course, that only underscored his point. By refusing to acknowledge the pivotal distinction, journalists essentially threw arms about Fake News's shoulders, claimed it as a legitimate component of a free press, and declared that to call out the improper former was to necessarily threaten the proper latter.

There is a fundamental flaw in arguments that by castigating shoddy journalism, Trump evinces hostility to the public interest, Who is the true enemy of the people: a press that dissembles, or the man who points that out?

It was only correct of the president to tweet on February 17, 2017 that "The FAKE NEWS media (failing New York Times @NBCNews @ABC @CBS @CNN is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people!" 

Truer words were never typed, as scurrillious media tweets in the wake of the Annapolis shooting handily illustrated.

(Sections of this chapter appeared previously in the author's 2017 That a Man Can Again Stand Up, and 2018 Ideas Afoot, both issued by Bromley Press)

An excerpt from one of my 2017 books:

chapter one

Exceptional ignition


A populist wave broke across 2015 America. The nation crackled with optimistic lightning. Average citizens reclaimed civil government, in 2016 putting Donald Trump into the White House in defiance of elitists' howling angers. It was an historic moment, a decisive reassertion of the noble ideal that regular people can uphold traditional values and determine the country's future.

In his 1/16/2015 Trump Tower announcement of entrance into the race, the billionaire world-class businessman-turned-populist firebrand enumerated themes that resounded with voters who'd long waited for a candidate unashamedly patriotic, unafraid of the nation's enemies, and who spoke in loud language they loved.

"I am officially running for President of the United States, and we are going to make our country great, again!. It can happen. Our country has great potential! We have tremendous people!"

America roared its approval.

The rebellious presidential aspirant spoke that day of issues that would in future months be hallmarks of his effort: Defending American interests by building up the military. Rewriting or rejecting completely trade pacts like NAFTA that had drained so many jobs from America, sending them to foreign lands. Preventing Iran and other hostile actors from developing nuclear weapons technology. 

And there were more: Saving without cuts the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs upon which so many citizens depended. They had throughout their decades of work paid into those programs. Trump promised that the bargain would be honored.

He would declare himself to be the "law and order" candidate. Across America, voters had witnessed criminality growing. Urban and country environs, alike, were falling to lawlessness. Turning America away from crime and back onto an orderly course respectful of citizens' constitutional rights and liberties sounded exactly right.

Trump pledged more that listeners found compelling. He articulated the pressing need to rebuild America's roadways, bridges, and general infrastructure. They had fallen into woeful dilapidation as the result of decades of inattention. Another strong point was supporting and protecting the Second Amendment's promise that citizens need not fear siege, and can defend themselves, their families, and their homes against threatening predators. Gun ownership rights groups like the National Rifle Association would become some of Trump's most enthusiastic endorsers.

Appointing to the Supreme Court jurists who held the Constitution as sacred was another of Donald Trump's promises that attracted voters. For too long, and with deleterious impact, that body had strayed from reason. The swaggering outsider candidate vowed to appoint only nominees who advocated the strict-constructionist philosophy.

Ending the illegal immigration that strained national financial and medical resources, and robbed needful American citizens of available work, was a popular theme. As was the deportation of persons who'd violated applicable immigration codes.

And, of course, Trump went on to vow that he would build a wall. The causes of preventing further illegal immigration, shutting off the flow of injurious narcotics, and establishing American geographic character would be served by its construction.

The inspirational siren Trump that day issued fired the hearts of tens of millions who were drawn to its patriotic, America First spirit.

To paraphrase legendary screenwriter/director Frank Capra, common men do the living and dying in America. Was it too much to ask that they do that living and dying in a secure, truly free country? After all, no one had more right to guide government.

The common citizens heal the ill, mop the floors, fix the televisions, conceive of new technologies, build the homes, and drive the buses.

They are police, teachers, firemen, store clerks, farm hands, miners, mechanics, pilots, waiters, and a million other everyday types.

Hard-working, tax-paying citizens applauded Trump's message of traditional national pride, as well as his inspirational, adamant pledge to reassert a unifying American identity that included all. They saw the glass as half full, not half empty. To their minds, the United States should never be defined by its few and uncharacteristic missteps, which every nation has on its historical account, but instead by its abundant potential and massive successes.

The America evoked by Donald Trump was the one they believed in. The one their parents, grandparents, and more distant ancestors had built. A marvelous experiment in which men of all backgrounds, assured equality of opportunity, can not only dream of security and upward mobility but achieve it handsomely through educational initiative and plain old elbow grease.

The country whose proud character they rallied to support by endorsing Trump had saved the world from oppressive ideologies. Genuinely free men cannot abide spiritually suffocating dogmas, regardless of how clever such might seem on antiseptic collegiate-textbook pages.

And there were contemporary perils to be dealt with. Of these, Trump was realistic, both in recognition and intention. To cheering, overflow arena crowds across America, he vowed to crush "radical Islamic terrorism," a horrendous foreign crusade whose homicidal adherents, crazed with Dark Age-zealotry, were perpetrating vicious attacks on innocent men, women, and children all over the world, including in the United States.

Candidate Trump assured Americans that, as president, he would without hesitation launch effective military endeavors to destroy murderous madmen plotting international atrocities in shadowy lairs.

Not without reason, voters worried that future terrorist assaults might well be made possible by continuing to allow unchecked ingress to unidentifiable hordes possibly hostile to American laws and culture. They knew that had already proved the terrible product of liberal policies in France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere in Europe, as well as in American cities like Orlando and San Bernardino.

Anti-U.S. leaders in other lands had boasted that terrorists intended to infiltrate the refugee rank streaming into America. Their sinister vows inspired Trump's admonition that the refugee crisis could be a Trojan Horse for elements plotting terrorist acts.

Given those cautionary examples, his proposed "extreme vetting" of outsiders prior to their entry into the U.S. appealed as a sensible safeguard. And he had received endorsements from the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council (ICE), National Border Patrol Council, Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, New England Police Benevolent Association, and the nationwide Fraternal Order of Police.

The candidate declared an intent to remove the handcuffs that had prevented law officers from properly dispatching deadly street gangs and destructive rioters. In many voting quarters, that was hailed as further recommendation.

News broadcasts had carried footage of Black Lives Matter marchers in the streets chanting their desire for police deaths: "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want 'em? Now!" And, "Pigs in a blanket! Fry 'em like bacon!" 

To their shame, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats courted the Black Lives Matter endorsement. Donald Trump vocally opposed that group, as well as the abhorrent police assassinations then taking place around the country.  

The verminous conceit asserting moral legitimacy for law-breaking perpetrated in the cause of unseemly philosophies had also infested the federal government. It required Trump's shoe.

Throughout the nation's history, countless soldiers had gone into bloody battle. Thanks to their sacrifice, America's wonderful light of liberty continued to shine undimmed. Trump acknowledged their sacrifices and our debt to them. The torch would blaze on.

The common man who surged to the cause of the unorthodox candidate understood the gravity of the 2016 election. Far more than merely an electoral process, it was a struggle for dominance between an establishment Goliath plotting borderless globalism and a common-people David fighting a patriotic mission to preserve time-honored liberty and national sovereignty.

Once traditional rights and liberties are allowed to ebb away, they are unlikely to resurge, no matter how dearly citizens might one day yearn otherwise.

At stake was nothing less than America, itself.

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Confronting a closed Iowa mind

A 1970s high school friend reached out to me recently, unsure how best to deal with another shared acquaintance from that era. The acquaintance in question has in his twilight years gotten rigidly dogmatic to the point of unreasonableness. 

He is now given to strongly implying that all who disagree with his trumpeted ideological pronouncements are bigots beyond redemption and of horrible historical aspect. An inflexible opponent of President Trump and all he stands for, this shared acquaintance has even taken to ringing the hysterical 'Nazis' alarm bell currently popular with what Pat Buchanan used to term the 'beads and sandals crowd.' 

Of course, by throwing such references around for momentary political advantage, Left alarmists are cheapening the monumental horror they pretend to be cautioning against, as well as reprehensibly doing dirt to the memories of millions who were killed in the actual Holocaust.

But do not waste time searching for rationality or moral consistency in their ill-considered bleatings.

Now, it may well be that this shared acquaintance's 'I'm always right, no other view merits consideration' attitude may stem, at least partly, from his longtime residence in the hard-Left bubble of college town Iowa City, Iowa. He's perhaps surrounded by career university student/grey-beard Wavy Gravy types droning endlessly about dialectical materialism, Kierkegaard, and the supposed virtues of open borders and the Obama Administration.

And he is, apparently, proud of having adhered to identical prejudices since his long-passed days of callow youth. In some reckonings, recalibration and even outright epiphany are thought weaknesses to be disdained, not the sometimes logical products of intellectual openness and maturation.

Changing one's opinions can speak of reasonableness and strength. I've reconsidered old assumptions and found not all were valid. And I've looked to see whether particular opinions I espoused were in line with deeper values. Sometimes, I've adjusted my views toward that end.

A story: In the late-1980s, I went through a regrettable period in which I was ultra PC, challenging everyone on their conversational word choices, Once, when I had done that (needlessly), someone quietly told me I was being as socially unpleasant as the actual bigots I believed myself to be combating.

The irony? The guy who pointed that out to me was the shared acquaintance, himself; he is today doing the very same thing, seemingly unmindful of his own intolerance and unpleasantness.

His recent blasts in that regrettable tenor remind me of an old Lou Reed lyric: "You're still doin' things I gave up years ago."

Scheming partisans catch wave

(This is an abbreviated reprise of earlier essays.)

In August 2017, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell told an interviewer that he wished for a president who, unlike Donald Trump: “would not give his daughter to a Jew.” Cantwell then sneered: “I don’t think you can feel about race like I do, and watch that Kushner bastard walk around with that beautiful girl. Okay?”

I shared those detestable words with a purpose. That is what genuine bigotry sounds like.

Calls to maintain national borders and enforce citizenship laws are hardly of a piece with that horrific prefatory citation. In fact, they are not within philosophical miles of it.

Splentic anti-Trump expositors diminish the horrors of Nazism and race hate by falsely linking them to legitimate defense of national sovereignty.

But their attempts are crippled by logical flaws.

In historic instances, national citizens were denied rights due them by virtue of existent citizenship. The Rev. Dr. King, for example, argued persuasively that the US government needed to live up to promises our Constitution makes to citizens. He didn’t advocate that non-Americans be elevated.

And there is another pivotal distinction. Each Jew and every black was included because of group membership. But legal immigrants are not the people at issue, here, nor are they the objects of immigration enforcement. Illegal immigration is an action, a behavior, and not a religion or immutable characteristic. 

Advocates of granting legal citizenship to illegals sometimes argue that such has become their rightful due, as illegals may have lived for years in the United States.

Consider the principle of legal status in another context:

Five years ago, Roy stole a blue car, in Philadelphia. Today, he is still driving it. Because five years have passed, is the car now legitimately Roy’s, or does it remain stolen property?

Voices demanding that citizenship be extended to scofflaw non-citizens point to possible past economic contributions. They further insist that illegals brought into this country when they were children are without culpability, and know no other life, no other country.

Consider, then, another hypothetical:

After having stolen the blue, Philadelphia car, Roy gives it to Pete. Though initially unaware that Roy had stolen it, Pete later realizes that. It is the only car Pete has ever had. And over the course of several years of driving it and enjoying its benefits, Pete spent considerable cash on gas, oil, and general mechanical upkeep.

Do those factors make the car no longer the bounty of criminality, and somehow Pete’s rightful property? Should the original owner of the blue Philadelphia car simply absorb the loss, and exempt Roy and Pete from applicable laws against theft?

No, and no.

Anti-Trump activists would twist our common political and social cultures to drastic unreason, until no innocent citizen dare utter any words but condemnatory ones about national, heraldic, historic, and politically conservative subjects.

Passion for combating divisive racial and religious hates is admirable. And when sincerely acted upon, it can be an effective realization of America’s finest moral quality.

But when opportunistically leveraged with intended political ambition, it allows animation to true hatred of the type enunciated by the cretinous Cantwell.

Trump assailants exploit border enforcement to spew hatred at the President of the United States and his patriotic supporters. The genuineness of their claimed anti-bigotry interest is dubious.

As they do not accurately characterize the plague, they cannot be productive agents in its eradication.

They are reprehensibly surfboarding to political agency atop the suffering of others.

Iowan DC Larson is an author, freelance writer, and blogger. His latest book is Ideas Afoot (Bromley Street Press). His essays have run in Daily Caller, American Thinker, USA Today, and numerous others.

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that Trump swing  

With his remarks at Sunday night's Tony Awards event, actor Robert DeNiro could have stuck to show business. Or, if he was simply unable to pass up the opportunity granted him by public-platform visibility, he could have articulated in intellectual phrasings ideals and principles he felt deserving of wide and sober contemplation.

Instead, reminding of a tuxedoed caveman in need of a razor, he merely grunted "I'm gonna say one thing: Fuck Trump. It's no longer just 'Down with Trump.' It's 'Fuck Trump.'" 

The audience of expensively tailored, Tinsel Town imbeciles rose en masse, cheering as if DeNiro had imparted some great wisdom. They may honestly have believed that he had.

DeNiro's choice to hurl profanity rather than raise complex argument isn't the end of the world. Probably, many people are given to 'colorful' language. (I am.) And perhaps common political discussion should reflect that.

Keeping it real, as goes the saying.

DeNiro's exclamation was illustrative of a plunge in conversation. Partisans who previously claimed rectitude threw off the cloak of high character to stand horribly revealed as principle-free operators comfortable in the beneath-ground gutter's brackishness.

But, Trump himself is no dignified orator. He isn't given to broaching high-minded ideas and waxing poetic. 

Why do I exempt him from criticism? 

Because with him, it's a matter of dashing entertainment style, dispatched with enviable I-don't-care swagger. He's thunderously, unapologetically on the side of real America, and the people know it.

DeNiro and modern-day Hollywood just are not. 

Old school movies icon Humphrey Bogart told an interviewer the only reason to have lots of money is so you can tell every son of a bitch in the world to go to hell. Trump can do that, and a lot of common Americans aspire to his latitude.

And when Trump bursts out of social formation, he is exceptional. He is the headliner on whose declarations hang friend and foe, alike. That rarity is distinctive and compelling. 

Crass imitators are just regrettable. When they try to horn in on Trump's successful act, their unfitness is only underscored.

Detractors like DeNiro are like brats at the kids' table, eager to bawl out expletives with pathetic, attention-whore ambition.

Trump shatters discourse orthodoxy by brazenly violating unwritten rules of propriety, and making audiences love it. Hollywood attack mutts gnash their capped teeth in sour-charactered distemper, flipping off America with diamond-ringed fingers. 

They know that whereas Trump can pull it off as casual cool, they seem but awkward and juvenile apers. He is in sync with the people. Celebrities aren't, wrinkling their surgically-sculpted noses in disdain at the average man.

President Trump is like a smirking, fists-up street brawler who loves the fight and is confident of victory. 

The bejeweled California DeNiro brigade reminds of the old Fat Albert joke: They are like school in the summertime: No class.

Montana 'Tricksters for Tester' 

Today, Infowars reported that Montana Democrats have filed suit, challenging ballot access-petition signatures presented by the state's Green Party. The signatures were presented by the Greens to ensure their ballot placement against Senator Jon Tester, who is seeking re-election.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/06/theyre-running-scared-montana-democrats-sue-to-remove-green-party-candidate-from-senate-race/

In 2004, I was Iowa coordinator for Ralph Nader's independent presidential campaign. In the 12th hour, Democrats here also mounted a tactical, frivolous lawsuit challenging Nader's ballot access-petitions' signatures.

They were ultimately unsuccessful.

After that election, it came out that numerous such state efforts were coordinated at the Democrats' national level. The calculated ambition was to 'kneecap' the Nader campaign by draining it of time and resources, making the path easier for Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry.

A Chicago Tribune piece of years ago noted that when he was running for that state's senate, Barack Obama's supporters scoured the ballot access-petitions of third party and independent competitors seeking excuses to disqualify them from the race.

As Infowars founder Jim Hoft noted sarcastically: "Democracy is only valid when Democrats win."

Agenda corrupts arithmetic

On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of individual religious liberty in Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

The decision may portend a new Supreme Court majority, one that recognizes the guaranteed rights of the individual over the pressures of cultural-interest groups and governmental clampdown dictates.

But the New York Times, NBCNews.com, Reuters, Politico, and USA Today all minimized the significance of the hefty majority decision by deceptively characterizing it as "narrow."

Huh? 5-4 is narrow. 6-3 is only marginally better. But 7-2 is within hailing distance of the Rock of Gibraltar.

Roe v Wade also was a 7-2 Supreme Court decision. Ever hear mainstream media dismiss it as a "narrow" ruling, the implication being that it was of dubious worth?

Viewers beware: Ben Rhodes in the media house

This past week, former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes was in the news for three reasons. 

A clip from HBO documentary The Final Year made the rounds. It depicted Rhodes on election night, sitting in silent despondency after Trump's landslide victory over Hillary was officially announced. (Any possibility that a Rhodes-enabled 'Obama Legacy' would endure was in the same moment crushed.)

He had published a recollection of his Obama Administration time: The World As It Is.

And NBC and MSNBC announced they had hired the devastated politico and would-be author as a contributor. (This portrays the unhealthy nexus between electoral and journalistic worlds. So does the fact that CBS News is run by David Rhodes, brother of the one-time Obama Minister of Propaganda.)

The clip was funny, at least for the tens of millions of us who'd put our shoulders to the Trump campaign. Our victory was America's victory.

And indeed, as yesterday's bad-for-America pacts and international fumblings are hurled into the shredder, it is increasingly as if the wretched Obama presidency had never been perpetrated on us. 

So, it was satisfying to see Rhodes, who had done so much to disserve America, inches from weeping as the bell tolled.

But his employ by NBC and MSNBC is serious.

To understand Ben Rhodes' eagerness to manipulate information citizens get from officials, that an ideological agenda might be advanced, and his willingness to exploit reporters as an "echo chamber" for his artfully contrived bannering, consider the praise of one of his allies.

"The aspiring novelist who became Obama's foreign policy guru," was a May 5, 2016 New York Times Magazine article written by David Samuels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?_r=0

"Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer's tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal," wrote Samuels. "He is adept at creating overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations, and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials."

That's a fine description of someone who intends rigid narrative command. It does not capture a commentator open to healthy intellectual exchanges and willing to consider alternative perspectives, that truths might be established and solutions discovered.

"He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives...His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility -- like military or diplomatic service, or even a master's degree in international relations rather than creative writing -- is still startling."

That NBC and MSNBC would inflict a yarn-spinning professional policy huckster as commentator illustrates that those channels view their enterprises as pushing partisan ambitions, not promoting honest dialogue.

When a televised opinion panel consists of three aggressive liberals and one tepid conservative -- and with the host often joining the battle from the liberals' quarter -- balance is but a fiction and viewers are shunted down a partisan path.

Of course, most television news commentators hail from ideologically distinct zip codes. And when they are granted equal liberty in open combat, viewers are well served. The truth can emerge.

But NBC and MSNBC are not in the habit of fairness. That they are not alone among news channels in rigging debate does not minimize their culpability.

Rhodes is not the only Obama Administration alumnus to turn up on television news. CBS has John Brennan. James Clapper speaks on CNN. Susan Rice is a Netflix board member. And Barack and Michelle themselves recently signed with Netflix as producers.

The Newly Press observed "it's clear" that former officials of the dumped team desire to control news and entertainment information upon which the average American bases his understanding of the world, opinions of events and figures, and voting inclinations.

Consider yourselves warned. When Rhodes appears on screen, reach for a big grain of salt.




----------

They know but one bad song
Washington Post's Dana Milbank covers Hillary's slur tune

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'Basket of Deplorables, right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it. 
- Hillary Clinton, during Sept. 2016 fundraiser

Nearly two years have passed since Hillary gave the back of her hand to a substantial swath of America. Still, opponents of President Trump persist in similarly slurring the 63+ million hardworking, tax-paying, law-abiding citizens who rallied to the Make America Great Again cause.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank's enthusiastic and deceitful damning of average Americans may enjoy favor on MSNBC's lunatic Hardball With Chris Matthews, as well as in the pages of Jeff Bezos' vanity newsletter, but elsewhere it stands evident as bilge.

Ten or 20 years from now, wrote Milbank, America will be much closer to the majority-minority nation it is forecast to become in 2045. A racist backlash to a black president wouldn't matter as much. 

But what was naively proclaimed in 2008 as a post-racial America was instead kindling for white insecurity, and Trump cunningly exploited and stoked racial grievance with his subtle and overt nods to white nationalism. He is now leading the backlash to the Obama years and is seeking to extend white dominion as long as possible, with attempts to stem immigration, to suppress minority voting and to deter minority census participation.

("Obama was right: He came too early" Milbank / Washington Post 6/1/2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-brings-on-the-death-throes-of-white-hegemony/2018/06/01/0cf2d636-65c7-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.30985ac73746)

Upholding national sovereignty against criminal invaders is legitimate. So are ensuring electoral and citizenship integrity.
Having noted that, let's now ignore Milbank's doggedly partisan waving of untruths.

Instead, focus on Milbank's foul smearing of his good-hearted fellow citizens. I wrote of them in my 2017 book That a Man Can Again Stand Up (Bromley Press):

To paraphrase legendary screenwriter / director Frank Capra, common men do the living and dying in America. Was it too much to ask that they do that living and dying in a truly secure, free country? After all, no one had more right to guide government.

The common citizens heal the ill, mop the floors, fix the televisions, conceive of new technologies, build the homes, and drive the buses.

They are police, firemen, teachers, store clerks, farm hands, miners, mechanics, pilots, waiters, and a million other everyday types.

Hard-working, tax-paying American citizens applauded Trump's message of traditional national pride, as well as his inspirational, adamant pledge to reassert a unifying American identity that included all. They saw the glass as half full, not half empty. To their minds, the United States should never be defined solely by its missteps, which every nation has on its historical account, but instead by its abundant potential and massive successes.

The America evoked by Donald Trump was the one they believed in. The one that their parents, grandparents, and more distant ancestors had built. A marvelous experiment in which men of all backgrounds, assured equality of opportunity, can not only dream of security and upward mobility but achieve it handsomely through educational initiative and plain old elbow grease.

The country whose proud character they rallied to support by endorsing Trump had saved the world from oppressive ideologies. Genuinely free men cannot abide spiritually suffocating dogmas, regardless of how clever such might seem on antiseptic collegiate textbook pages.

The common man who surged to the cause of the unorthodox candidate understood the gravity of the 2016 election. Far more than merely an electoral process, it was a struggle for dominance between an establishment Goliath plotting borderless globalism and a common-people David fighting a patriotic mission to preserve time-honored liberty and national sovereignty.

At stake was America, itself.

In 2916, Hillary didn't understand what actually compelled us. Dana Milbank still doesn't. 



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