donsurber.blogspot.com Trumpism without Trump is like Reaganism without Reagan
A few lefties are getting ahead of their skis and imagining, as Comrade Ed Kilgore in New York magazine put it, Trumpism without Trump.
No thanks. I remember Reaganism without Reagan. It was headed by the first Bush whose administration was about what one would expect from a former CIA director.
He insulted Ronald and Nancy by promising at the RNC, a "kinder, gentler America," rebuking 8 years of an administration in which he served as vice president.
In a Playboy interview in 1990, Donald Trump said, "I like George Bush very much and support him and always will. But I disagree with him when he talks of a kinder, gentler America. I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist. I think if we had people from the business community — the Carl Icahns, the Ross Perots — negotiating some of our foreign policy, we’d have respect around the world."
Donald Trump was prescient. Other nations did better in his administration.
While Bush talked a good game about Tienanmen Square, the fact is he worked to normalize trade with Red China, a gift that has meant at least $5 trillion in trade surpluses from America alone -- money that is building its military arsenal and funding its infrastructure.
Meanwhile our nation's infrastructure deteriorates as the money we should have used to rebuild roads and airports is wasted on welfare for illegal aliens and whatnot. Imagine how those subsidies for wind and solar gadgets could have been used to rebuild the things the nation needs.
While the Soviet Union collapsed on his watch, Bush worried more about the communists than the people. He cut a deal with Gorbachev to create a New World Order, which he announced to Congress on 9/11 1991.
This came after the Gulf War in which Bush turned victory into defeat by not going to Baghdad. A dozen years later, his son went to Baghdad.
And of course, he started us down the road to perdition called NAFTA.
That's your Reaganism without Reagan.
But this is what lefties are pushing. Comrade Kristin Tate wrote in The Hill, "Imagine this: a Republican with the political positions of Trump, but without decades of tabloid fodder. A Republican who boldly challenges the biased media, without sparking the bandwagon effect of suburban voters eager to show their public disapproval of his latest action. If the GOP ran America First-style candidates who can message the platform with eloquence and effectiveness, the 2024 landscape will dramatically tilt in their favor. Cementing recent gains with nonwhite voters while winning back a share of college-educated whites, which shifted 6 percent away from Trump in 2020, would be well within reach."
Is there anything more racist than dividing voters up by their skin color?
Let us just be Republicans not race panderers.
Kilgore wrote of a "A Kinder, Gentler Trumpism."
He said, "it’s possible the GOP could return to the perspective of Sam’s Club Republicans such as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who before Trump’s rise called on their party to reshape its free-market fundamentalism into policies reflecting the economic as well as the cultural interests of their white working-class electoral base. For them, Trump was sort of a fun-house-mirror reflection of the new direction they favored. But with Trump himself gone, perhaps less racist and nativist voices might rise to scratch some of the itches he abrasively inflames.
"Possibilities include Florida senator and 2016 candidate Marco Rubio, who has followed the drift of his party into Trumpism without embracing some of its more dangerous authoritarian rhetoric; or possibly that supreme opportunist Nikki Haley, who has managed to stay on the tyrant’s good side while cultivating a reputation for independence and even decency."
Tyrant, eh?
Kilgore needs a dictionary.
As far as racist and nativist go, I am sorry but Kilgore and his ilk are going to call us that no matter what we say or do, so I am going to pass on backing a Rubio or Haley if their pitch is their ethnicity.
I want a candidate who will mainline Trumpism because it works.
Stephen Kruiser does too.
He wrote, "Republicans who love Trump’s transformation need to be very vigilant right now. The Never-Trumpers may not be well-liked by mainstream American members of the GOP, but they are still well connected to some old money. If we drop our guard amid all of the pandemic and election chaos, these back-stabbers could make a successful grab at some more power.
"The Democrats and the media will be giving these malcontents a lot of publicity and support too. Democrats really do not understand what has happened over on this side of the aisle in the last four years."
This is not Romney's party or McCain's or Bush's. We push back now. And if those who conspired with Democrats against The Donald think they are re-taking the party, they have another thing coming to them. We came too far against all odds to turn the party over to cowards and traitors because we remember Reaganism without Reagan. After 4 years of it, 62% of America voted against it in 1992.
Christopher Caldwell wrote, "Trump didn’t sell out his supporters. In fact, his presidency saw something extraordinary, even if it was all but invisible from the country’s globalized cities: the first egalitarian boom since well back into the twentieth century. In 2019, the last non-Covid year, he presided over an average 3.7% unemployment rate and 4.7% wage growth among the lowest quartile of earners. All income brackets increased their take. That had happened in the last three Obama years, too. The difference is that in the Obama part of the boom the income of the top decile rose by 20 percent, with tiny gains for other groups. In the Trump economy, the distribution was different. Net worth of the top 10% rose only marginally, while that of all other groups vaulted ahead. In 2019, the share of overall earnings going to the bottom 90% of earners rose for the first time in a decade."
That is what we want.
That is what we had.
That is what the Establishment stole in the name of covid 19.
Trumpism like Reaganism before that is capitalism. And capitalism without a capitalist is a lie. I am tired of liars.
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