Don't Grade Trump on a Curve
it never works out the way you plan
A lot of people are confusing partisanship with patriotism and frankly it’s gross.
Let me explain something, Trump hasn’t done anything to warrant praise yet. He won an election, that’s it.
The Republican Party hasn’t cut one red cent out of spending. Not a single agency is legitimately on the chopping block and half of his picks for his cabinet are establishmentarian.
Many people are super excited that RFK is being appointed to Health and Human Services and there’s some rhetoric around bringing back “the gold standard of science” but that means nothing from a President who has never distanced himself from Operation Warp Speed - which quite literally bypassed the scientific method.
Most people had no clue what RFK believed in until he starting taking shots at Fauci and wrote a book about it and yet people seem to think that a Trump administration is somehow going to really shake things up when Trump gave Fauci a medal for pushing through the vaccines and only stopped talking about them because they weren’t popular.
Trump STILL supports the vax and Operation Warp Speed which means he still supports Fauci’s work on it. That’s not a stance from somebody looking to substantially change things at the FDA.
I HOPE I’m wrong here but if you make excuses and applaud empty rhetoric that’s all you’re ever going to get.
Trump, for the second time, ran on a strong immigration stance that he, again, moderated, and now he’s picked Marco Rubio - Mr. Gang of 8 himself - for Secretary of State which overseas visas at our embassies.
Instead of mass deportations and a truly secure border we’re hearing more and more about giving green cards to foreign students who get a degree.
This is quite possibly the stupidest idea if you actually understand how immigration and colleges work.
The dude working three jobs and picking fruit has more in common with the average American than some bougie foreigner whose parents could afford to send them overseas to go to school.
Colleges profit by charges foreign nationals more than American citizens and they import students for those profit margins, it’s quite literally an American Last admissions system in most schools when they can get away with it.
Then on top of that we have to talk about how the schools, by and large, are left-wing indoctrination centers which is why every Con Inc person has a show where they spend all day arguing with leftist students about the most basic bitch of conservative talking points.
So left-wing, anti-American institutions are importing foreign nationals and then when they graduate from those indoctrination centers Trump wants to reward them with a path to citizenship.
How does that make America Great?
Having values that align with America should be the first qualifier for citizenship in this great nation - not simply having a piece a paper from an institution that hates everything we hold dear.
Taking that into consideration, let’s talk about the culture a bit, specifically about all of the anti-woke stuff being said by a few cabinet picks.
Honestly I barely care about the rhetoric because the issues being discussed are mostly marginal.
Yes, Hegseth wants transgenders out of the military and women out of combat. Cool, I guess if that’s your big issue.
How about we stop playing world police and make sure fewer Americans are dying for Lockhead’s profit margins instead of quibbling that only straight men should be cannon fodder in our forever wars.
I know it’s all the rage to pretend that being anti-woke means anything but all I hear is that Hegseth wants to make sure it’s my sons who die to protect somebody else’s country as though that’s supposed to make me feel better as an American.
I want a strong country with a defensive posture, not a bully that does all the fighting all the time because despite the warhawk rhetoric you can’t force our morals or values onto reticent nations.
Speaking of people who don't share out values, I don’t want Kristi Noem in a position of power precisely because she thinks killing animals is a show of strength which is sociopathic behavior.
I know the GOP Stans like to pretend they know what it means to work on farms but my grandfather was a ranch hand and he wouldn’t disrespect the mangiest cur the way Noem treated her expensive purebred hound to say nothing of the way she treated her goat.
Even if you believe that she wasn’t culpable for poorly training her own dog, and you believe she wasn’t responsible for not securing her own animal when it killed a neighbor’s chickens, and you believe that Cricket - and the goat - both needed to die - you’re fooling yourself if you sanction the way she went about it and how she presents it.
Killing something isn’t supposed to be a flex. You do things out of necessity and you show reverence and disappointment in the situations you find yourself in when tough decisions have to be made. But Noem didn’t position her rampage - and it read like a rampage considering her lack of preparedness or thought when it came to shooting the goat - as an unfortunate situation that she needed to find the strength to handle. No, she played it up in her book and on social media like it was something to be proud of and to hang her hat upon.
Somebody who rushes into situations, half-cocked, and can’t realize the error of her ways in securing her own home isn’t the best pick for securing our homeland.
The rest of Trump’s picks also leave a lot to be desired and perhaps I’ll go through all of them later.
However, Tulsi Gabbard is the one people usually ask me about because of her anti-war stances but she’s not truly anti-war, just anti-some wars which makes a sort of sense.
My concerns with her are twofold;
The first issue is she seems too cozy with China especially since she’s on record complaining that Japan shouldn’t re-militarize despite all of China’s aggression in the region. If Japan can’t protect itself this puts America into the precarious position of protecting or abandoning Japan and making them reliant upon us. This is bad policy all around when talking about allies.
The second problem I have with Tulsi is a problem I have with RFK, Elon, and so many others and that's this idea that they didn’t leave the Democratic Party but rather that the Democratic Party left them.
That makes a little bit of sense coming from RFK considering his family literally ran the party back in the 60s but it’s not really a good talking point coming from Tulsi because she’s not old enough to remember a Democratic Party that believed in even the pretense of freedom and liberty.
Tulsi is a year younger than me which means she grew up with Democrats such as Clinton in power. She’s also from Hawaii which makes California look Conservative by many metrics. For her to say that the DNC left her behind means that she still believes in some pretty terrible things.
The DNC hasn't been an anti-war party, pretty much ever. They’ve never believed in fiscal responsibility and they’ve been the party of race and gender grifters for generations.
Sure the goalposts have shifted from forcing affirmative action to transgender inclusivity but the underlying structure of cultural marxism is what needed to be rejected, not just how it was weaponized.
In 2020 Tulsi voted Yes on House Resolution 1154 - condemning Q Anon which is quite worrying considering the role that Trump is placing her into.
Here;s that resolution;
Expresses that the House of Representatives:
Condemns QAnon and rejects the conspiracy theories it promotes;
Condemns all other groups and ideologies, from the far left and far right, that contribute to the spread of unfounded conspiracy theories and that encourage Americans to destroy public and private property and attack law enforcement officers;
Encourages the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as all federal law enforcement and homeland security agencies, to strengthen their focus on preventing violence, threats, harassment, and other criminal activity by extremists motivated by fringe political conspiracy theories;
Encourages the intelligence community to uncover any foreign support, assistance, or online amplification QAnon receives, as well as any QAnon affiliations, coordination, and contacts, with foreign extremist organizations or groups espousing violence; and
Urges all Americans, regardless of our beliefs or partisan affiliation, to seek information from authoritative sources and engage in political debate from a common factual foundation.
She voted to encourage the FBI, as well as all federal law enforcement and homeland security agencies, to strengthen their focus on preventing, amongst others things, “harassment” - which isn’t clearly defined - as well as any other criminal activity “motivated” by what the government considers “fringe political conspiracy theories”.
Keep in mind that this is from October 2020 when the government was busy censoring wrongthink on X and just in time for the propaganda machine to paint the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation”.
The worst part of this vote was the call for all Americans to “seek information from authoritative sources” at a time when the government was lying to us about everything and yet somehow Tulsi voted to encourage Americans to listen to them and to encourage the government to target people saying things that the State didn’t like if they could tie it to “conspiracy theories”.
This is not the vote of somebody you want in charge of watch lists.
So I have to ask, when, precisely, did the left leave her because when we needed voices of reason the most she was busy voting to uphold the worst values of the Deep State.
All of this to say that I’m going to be critical of everybody that Trump picks. I’m going to be critical of everything that he does.
The same way I didn’t give a pass to anything Biden did or said because it’s my job as an American to demand the most from my government.
The President will have a White House Press Secretary to lie to us, gaslight us, and make excuses for his actions or lack thereof.
There will be plenty of blame games and hand-wringing and finger pointing from the people in power for why they’re going to break most of their promises, why they’re going to shift every goalpost, and why they won’t be assed to tell the truth - it’s our job as Americans to call them out on it.
The minute you start grading politicians on a curve all you end up doing is protecting corruption for the sake of partisanship.
I hope I’m wrong about all of my criticisms of Trump but I wasn’t wrong in 2016 and I don’t think I’ll be wrong this time around either.
You can point to the feckless and likely powerless D.O.G.E. announcement and pretend like Elon and Vivek are actually going to do something. I’m going to point out that it’s a non-governmental agency not empowered by Congress and it effectively neuters Vivek so instead of having a man with strong libertarian rhetoric in a position of power - he’s relegated to the position of an advisor who can be ignored.
Then when the midterms roll around and Trump is still signing Mike Johnson’s Trillion dollar budgets we’ll get to hear all about how the RINOs and (D)s are subverting the will of the people who elected Trump as if that wasn’t the plan from the jump. This is, after all, what happened last time around.
Trump is and always has been a salesman and that hasn’t changed. He’s going to tone down some rhetoric when it doesn’t play well - like his love of Operation Warp Speed - and he’s going to play up other rhetoric like the promises to streamline government when he knows full well that most cuts to government would have to go through a Congress that can’t even balance a budget.
When actions start to materialize, again, I hope I’m wrong but don’t expect me to cheerlead for a politician, not now, not ever.
My favorite people in office, if I can even parse it that way, are Thomas Massie and Rand Paul and I talk shit on the votes they get wrong. I went after Massie several times when he said we’d get individual budget bills and then, as expected, that never happened.
So in summary I’m not a partisan. I hate most people on both teams and I’m not in the business of extolling the virtues of snake oil salesmen in double breasted suits.
It’s the job of thinking Americans to hold their government to their words and their responsibility, not to make excuses and play the role of ball washer because the balls currently tea-bagging the system happen to not be blue.
Cheers.