Unraveling an Eight Year Error

By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host

I was skeptical of Donald Trump when he first emerged on the political scene during the 2016 Election Season.  My wife, an immigrant from Mexico who naturalized in 2007 was a fan of Mr. Trump right out the gate, the moment he said the word, "Wall."  She was brought to the United States when she was a baby.  Her parents spent many years saving up their money to make the move.  When asked about illegal aliens, my wife says, "It's a slap in my dad's face.  My dad didn't bring us here to be Mexicans.  He brought us here to be Americans.  My dad followed the law and the rules, and those rules are there because it weeds out those who really don't want to truly be Americans, and those who pose a danger to the United States."

She had been talking about a wall long before Trump did.  Hers, however, was a little more practical, and a little more fierce.  She wanted gun turrets, broken glass and inverted nails at the top, and a mote with alligators.  The mote, however, would also provide the dirt needed in New Orleans to shore up their levies, and the 'gators would come from Florida.  "Everyone's happy," she commented, when I asked her about it.

For me, of the original seventeen Republican candidates, Trump ranked number fifteen ... ahead of Chris Christie and Kasich, and one spot behind Jeb Bush.

I liked Scott Walker, early on.  Once the Wisconsin Governor stepped out of the race, I had no candidate.  I like Ted Cruz as a Senator, but I was not sure he was presidential material ... and besides, he's not eligible.  Natural Born Citizenship, from an original intent point of view, requires both parents to be citizens at the time of birth.  Cruz's father was still a citizen of Cuba, and while everyone says his mom was American, I believe she was Canadian at that time.

That said, I would have voted for Cruz had he won the nomination.  For the first time in my life I would have voted against the Constitution to save the Constitution.

Donald J. Trump rose to the top, and faced with the reality that despite my reservations about the man, he's not Hillary Clinton, I decided I would support him.

I lost friends and contact with family members over my decision.  When my co-host and co-writer on Political Pistachio, JASmius, kept writing what I considered to be hit pieces against Trump, I asked him to either lighten up or take his services elsewhere.  In truth, a lot of people thought it was me writing these pieces, and it was ultimately hurting the bottom line.  He departed, believing I was putting money over friendship and my values.  Interestingly enough, after a year of Trump in office, I think he has more than proven that he's not the Democrat the Never-Trump Conservatives believe him to be; but folks like my friend JASmius remain in the Never-Trump camp.

"He's not constitutional," JASmius has explained to me.  He believes he's a one-man ruling machine, is the attitude I get from folks like JASmius.

A friend of mine who is a pastor in San Diego County is in my camp, but his wife isn't.  She said to me last week, "We have a president who does not understand the Constitution."

I am not sure the accuser understands the Constitution, either.

I tell people that I firmly believe that Trump was not conservative, nor very Christian, going into this whole thing.  However, the madness of the liberal left as they ran around in circles with their hair on fire and blood squirting out of their eyes literally threw him into our arms.  Trump knew who his friends were, and I believe he was evolving as a human being in the sense that after a lifetime of being a businessman, not really caring about the politics of the people willing to put money in his pocket, he recognized a number of truths ... about economics, and about social issues like abortion, and transgenderism.  As a result, Trump embraced his new-found conservatism, and surrounded himself with conservatives, and Christians - a practice that has largely continued in his administration.

Trump is what the Tea Party had been fighting for.  Like Mr. Trump, politics was not a big deal to most Tea Party folk until Barack Obama won in 2008.  The threat against the Constitution, and our American System, was obvious when it came to the Democrat Party's great messiah.  I can't count how many Tea Party members who've told me they weren't into politics until the rise of Obama.

Trump was the same.  He tolerated Democrats, and even worked with them freely in business.  At points of his life he even agreed with leftists on a number of issues.  He had bought into some of their propaganda, such as the claim "it's not a baby, it's a fetus, and who are we to dictate to a woman what she can do with her body?"  America's genocide of millions upon millions upon millions of innocent and helpless persons is incomprehensible, yet the liberal left is full throttle forward in their support of the slaughter of babies.  During the campaign the Never-Trump conservatives screamed at me, "He's pro-abortion!" when laying out their accusations of the GOP nominee for President.

A week ago President Donald J. Trump did something that no other President in history has ever done.  He addressed the March for Life marchers live from the White House.  If he was pro-abortion, I don't believe he is anymore.

Trump's journey has been pretty phenomenal since the day I believed him to be number fifteen on a list of seventeen candidates.  He's inspired an economic boom, he's embraced conservatism, and he has the liberal left Democrats frightened out of their minds that he may not only continue his streak of success, but that also they may be exposed for their criminal activities over the last few decades.

President Trump is not a part of the establishment.  He can't be bought, and he can't be twisted into a knot like most of the Republicans when they try to trifle with the Democrats.  Trump left a life of power and money to take a cut in pay and live in the White House (which must be like a Motel 6 to the guy) because he loves his country, and wants to make America great again ... after the Democrats tried to make America just another run-of-the-mill socialist country where everyone is equal ... in misery.

Common sense is something you don't see much of, anymore, but Trump seems to have tons of it.  He made his rise using his business sense, common sense, and ability to get what he wants, the way he wants it, because he wants it.  He has spent his life building things, and for myself, who spent twenty years in the construction industry (fourteen years digging foundations for residential homes, and six years delivering materials to job sites as a transfer truck driver) I can easily recognize someone who enjoys building things.  Here's the thing about those people ... they get things done, on time, under budget, and beautifully.

Trump was just the kind of guy we needed as President of the United States after the eight years of the Obama administration trying to tear down America.

The unraveling of what Obama had done is a slow and painful process, but Trump has the resolve, and the patience, to take apart the eight year error piece by piece, and moment by moment.

Is Trump perfect?  Of course not.  While Never-Trump conservatives can't argue against most of what Trump has done, they are always quick to leap all over what he says, in the hopes of proving that he's the wolf in sheep's clothing they firmly believe him to be.

First, he's not Hillary.

Could you imagine where we would be, right now, if Hillary Clinton would have won on November 8, 2016?  She's something much worse than Obama.  We wouldn't be seeing economic growth and real recovery, we would be experiencing a downward spiral that always accompanies the failed policies of Keynesian economic madness.

I once heard Thomas Sowell say something along the lines that if Democrats truly understood economics, they wouldn't be Democrats anymore.

The fury of the liberal left should be evidence enough for the Never-Trump conservatives to realize he's not the great Democrat Trojan Horse, after all.

I am thinking the Never-Trump conservatives are sort of like the Democrats in the sense that it's not really what Trump has done that has them so out of their minds.  It's what he represents.  He understands that being a politician is not supposed to be the warped thing we have.  Politicians are not supposed to be members of some kind of untouchable ruling elite.  They are public servants.  They are people who are supposed to work for us, not make We the People subjects under the iron fist of a ruling aristocracy.

Trump is anti-establishment, anti-cultural Marxism, and unapologetic about it.  He believes in the principles behind supply and demand, recognizes a connection between morality and liberty, rejects the posh attitudes and hoity-toity tastes of the inside-the-bubble elite, allows his stream of consciousness to escape his lips and fingers (Twitter) without any thought about putting a leash on it, and is an in-your-face, I'm not going to take your crap anymore, ostentatious American who exhibits every frustration most Americans are feeling, and have been feeling, for the last decade.  In other words, finally, one of us has made it to the White House.

He is a creation of the Tea Party.

Trump is the kind of guy that says, "If it's broke, not only fix it, but recreate it so that it works much better, with efficiency, and for less samolians."

While the art of the deal involves negotiations, for Trump it also includes a whole lot of pre-work.  Trump's political foreplay engages all senses, softens up the opposition, and rejects their inane offerings.  He places nuggets of shame against his opposition carefully and strategically, be it in his speeches, or with his Tweets.  He bypasses the talking heads of the lying biased media, and says that if the foreign powers want to make life hard on us, no problem, we'll accomplish the task in question ourselves.

Trump holds up Americans, uses the word "we" rather than "I" and "me", and reminds us that we are all in this together, as Americans.

Trump is the anti-Obama, anti-Hillary, and the kind of force the GOP has been searching for.  Yet, in a ridiculous tradition of their Stockholm-Syndrome ways, the Republican Party elites are (or at least "were") sickened by Trump.

"That's not how we've always done it," I can hear them screaming.

Meanwhile, the people of the republic are screaming out, "Exactly!"

For the first time since Ronald Reagan, the maladministration of the federal government is being exposed, pulled back, and rolled back.  Unconstitutional dabblings by the federal government are being addressed.  Trump is working on pulling us away from the idiotic man-made climate change hoax (angering the liberal left worldwide), federal welfare costs are being reduced and people are weening themselves off of food stamps and other programs, he's been using various maneuvers to place the activist judges who legislate from the bench in their place, immigration laws are being enforced (and States and cities with unconstitutional sanctuary status laws which are contrary to constitutional federal immigration laws are being challenged for their violation of the Supremacy Clause in Article VI. of the U.S. Constitution), unreasonable and redundant government spending is facing reductions, and Trump is telling the globalists that frankly he's not interested in their games, anymore - America is roaring back as an independent, sovereign country.

While knuckleheads like John McCain has blurred the lines between the two parties, Donald Trump has reclaimed the Republican Party for conservatism, liberty, and a virtuous society.  Despite the hesitancy of the Republican Congress, President Trump has encouraged the use and extraction of domestic resources by slashing the government obstacles standing in the way of domestic energy development, reformed of our tax system including tax cuts for most Americans and for businesses which will fuel economic growth and bolster domestic entrepreneurship, and he has the leftist media on the run.  While I will never say that Trump is Reagan reincarnated, he is very Reaganesque.  He's politically incorrect, blunt, honest, cunning, verbally strategic, full of conservative energy, and cynical of the opposition.  Meanwhile, black support for him has doubled, actions are being taken to protect religious liberties, Common Core is on its deathbed, the economy is growing and ready for a boom (once folks realize there's more in their paycheck thanks to the tax reform law), and despite all of the attacks and fake news, Trump is hanging in there and getting the job done.

Trump is bullying America back into prominence, and he's doing it as the attacks by the left increase to levels that no other Republican would have been able to withstand.  

The real unraveling of the Obama era, however, is happening in the legal trenches.  Obama weaponized federal agencies, and a deep state was nurtured to the point that it was becoming a greater leviathan than ever before.  Yet, thanks to the Trump Team's resolve, and strategic peeling back of the leftist onion of crime and corruption, a number of Democrat crooks are under the federal radar.  Trump is undoing the secret societies and exposing the sins of Obama's secret network, the Clintons, and all of their accomplices one by one, and point by point. 

We have reclaimed our necessary friendship with Israel, as the Democrats scheme with dictators who wish to bring down the United States.  The Trump administration is addressing true domestic terrorism, as the liberal left does what it can to fuel the chaos by groups like Antifa.  Big business is returning to American Shores as the Democrats continue to swear up and down it is somehow an afterglow of Obama's policies.  Jobless claims are at the lowest point since 1973, after reaching record highs during the Obama presidency (despite the Obama administration cooking the books).  ISIS is on the run, and Trump's work to try to correct Obama's long list or mistakes with Russia is coming together nicely.  

Peace through strength.

The Rule of Law has not only returned to America, but it is being applied to foreign policy, and the bad actors are not sure what to do next.  

In one short year President Trump has turned the great ship America into a u-turn, despite opposition, despite 90% of all media coverage going against him, and despite the hesitancy of the Republicans in Congress.

In short, I'm not worried about 2018, or 2020.  People will vote with their overflowing wallets, and in response to the good news that even the fake news networks will be unable to continue to deny.  In fact, I am expecting an incredible landslide victory for Trump in 2020 ... if idiots like Soros doesn't do something really unimaginable in the meantime.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary