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.
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.
----------
posted by DC Larson at
June 23, 2018
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