Donald Trump – Page 2

Miscalculation

By Steve Woodward

Set this scene in your mind. Two high level Chinese government apparatchiks, chain smoking in a conference room. Their frustration levels are high.

What is it about this “American spirit”? These American farmers keep farming even when we punish their exporting potential with tariffs. Their manufacturers keep producing. Their consumers keep buying. Their citizens keep worshipping a god. And they elected Donald Trump, a man who mocks us, as their President.

We have flooded the United States with addictive fentanyl. We have flooded their pharmaceutical industry with tainted generic drugs. We have robbed their corporations of intellectual property. We have compromised them at the highest levels of their government. We own Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And Biden’s son.

What more can we do? Cigarettes at the ready, they contemplate more deeply.

One inhales a cloud of nicotine. “We have the lab in Wuhan.”

Seven months into the Great Wuhan Virus Lockdown in the United States and across the world, intelligent people have attempted to connect the dots between the origin of the virus and the objectives of its perpetrators. These attempts repeatedly are shot down by the Left in our country as conspiratorial, anti-science and, in all cases, irrelevant because the virus is here, and we’re all doomed. And, since it’s convenient let’s just blame President Trump.

Maybe Chinese researchers were not actually so evil to the core that they willfully unleashed a mysterious virus across the planet. Maybe it was accidental. But what is no accident is how quickly the Left and the corrupt American media turned on a dime to exploit the virus right on cue in an election year.

The Biden “campaign” is calculating that it can run out the clock, blame Trump for all of the collateral damage inflicted by the Wuhan Virus, then sit back and let the media pile on. It is so confident that this will play out that even the emergence of Hunter Biden’s scandalous business deals with China and Ukraine have been no cause for overt panic. (Hopefully, this week’s presidential debate will force Joe Biden to explain why he brokered these deals for his son and the Biden family).

Federal, state and local Democrat candidates, incumbents and challengers alike, are supremely confident as well. As long as they have a death toll and daily cases to magnify, they will assure themselves that Americans will oblige and vote for Democrats as a vote for life and a permanent presumption of absolute safety. They’re just as certain voters will ignore the Left’s endorsement of Black Lives Matter’s Marxist anarchists.

We watched last week, during a pro-freedom rally ahead of the Moore County Board of Education’s scheduled meeting as Democrat U.S. House candidate (NC-52) Lowell Simon shouted down a registered nurse for daring to inform the assembled of his recent experiences. The nurse said cases of patients being treated for Wuhan Virus minus accompanying health conditions at Moore Regional numbered no more than eight. “That’s a lie,” retorted Simon, his rage masked, literally.

The Left can swarm our communities with virtue signaling mask police all it wants, but it will never succeed at masking the carnage imposed on our country and its largely healthy people when it leveraged the Wuhan Virus so deceptively so many months ago.

There is something else spreading as a result: Outrage among people lining up even now at early voting sites. Citizens are outraged by a crippled economy that was robust seven months ago; outraged by the devastation of Governor Roy Cooper’s savage lockdowns, which are compromising public education, forcing parents to quit jobs to stay home with their kids; and outraged by a Democrat-infested Moore school board that says K-5 students will not return to school on a regular schedule until January 2021, at the earliest.

We are “science deniers,” scolds the Left, hiding behind science-driven theories proven wrong so often. But what they cannot hide has been their lust to impose tyranny on the American people, and they’ve miscalculated the fallout. You read it here.

Results trump rage

By Steve Woodward

By now we know beyond a doubt that the corrupt mainstream media, Democrats, feminists, and Never Trumpers among Republicans despise President Donald Trump on numerous levels and gleefully ignore substance (results of policies) to advance the narrative that he is unfit to hold the office.

Even Trump believers/supporters along with practical Americans who want a strong economy, a secure southern border and a mighty military struggle to defend Trump. They wish he would not tweet, that he would not punch back against every critic, or that he would not joke about pursuing a third term (unconstitutional).

A young Conservative media prodigy, Kassy Dillon, set off a Twitter-storm when she dared to be forthcoming about Trump. On September 13, the Pepperdine University graduate student and founder of the Lone Conservative media platform tweeted, “Here’s the thing: I’m voting for Trump but I wouldn’t be friends with Trump. I’m not voting for (Democrat Andy) Yang but I’d definitely be his friend.”

Dillon’s pragmatic approach to political ideology is not new. She focuses on issues, policy and substance. She could care less if she’d rather not have a Diet Coke with the President. In fact, prolific Twitter user Trump even replied to her tweet. “I’m OK with that!”

A recent survey by the Heritage Foundation’s Heritage Action for America arm sheds light on a dire necessity: Republican and independent voters in 2020 must embrace the issues and debate anti-Trumpers on substance. There is a temptation to waste time condemning false “reporting” about Trump’s tax returns, “whistle blower” allegations, Justice Kavanaugh’s past or the White-House-in-crisis narrative. We’ve been doing this since November 2016 to no avail.

By engaging voters in three comprehensive surveys, Heritage Action sought “to find out what issues currently motivate the coalition that elected Donald Trump and Republican congressional majorities in 2016, so that we can keep that coalition together and expand it while simultaneously advancing the conservative ideas we hold dear.

“We found that the GOP isn’t connecting the dots between its own innate conservative principles and voters’ preferences—which, our polling reveals, are more similar than many realize.” Let that sink in.

Some of the most notable revelations include:

Voters in five key swing states overwhelmingly reject single-payer healthcare, with 65% of respondents opposing it.
Common ground between Democrats, Republicans and independents is found in multiple categories. Increased funding for job training (95% Dems/81% GOP/86% IND). Support for mandatory medical care for infants surviving attempted abortion (71% Dems/85% GOP/76% IND). Across all voter categories, 75% are certain or hopeful that their family’s financial situation will improve going forward (56% Dems/88% GOP/74% IND).
Even on the subject of taxes, there is strong evidence that Trump administration economic policy will sway independents and attract begrudging approval from Democrats. 58% of respondents say taxes on middle class Americans are “too high” (63% Dems/53% GOP/60% IND). And, there is strong agreement that taxes paid by small businesses are too high (52% Dems/64% GOP/60% IND).
A clear majority, 57%, of general election voters say national Democrats are “becoming increasingly extremist”, while 65% oppose Socialism.

It is not extremism alone that likely will plague the Democrat nominee for President in 2020, as well as other Democrat Congressional candidates nationwide. It is their rampant corruption and disregard for voters, willfully concealed by a compliant media. Democrats recently unveiled their newest “reason” to impeach Trump — his conversation, as reported by an unidentified whistleblower, with Ukraine’s newly elected president.

Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who pretends to be challenging Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination, said Trump committed treason if he asked Ukraine’s leader to investigate Joe Biden’s (very shady) interaction with Ukraine when he was vice president under Barack Obama. “The penalty for treason,” Weld said on MSNBC, “is death.”

The death knell is chiming for any pretense of substantive political debate and any evidence that the rule of law applies to both parties. Beneath the din, the will and wishes of American voters slip further away, quaint relics of the past.

Hurricane Deception

By Steve Woodward

The tweet was snarky, as is to be expected. It speculated that President Donald Trump cancelled a scheduled trip to Poland, not because of the looming threat of Hurricane Dorian, but because he is lazy and needed an excuse to spend the holiday weekend playing golf, as usual.

Imagine the false outrage had Trump made the trip to Poland? The twitter-sphere would have condemned him for abandoning the homeland amid yet another climate change-generated natural disaster. Dorian is Trump’s Katrina!

Over on Facebook, we’ve encountered a chorus of whiners reacting to Trump’s forthcoming appearance in Fayetteville, NC (Sept. 9), on the eve of a special election for a U.S. congressional seat in NC-9. The outrage centers on a narrative that Trump’s 2020 campaign is saddling municipalities with unprecedented costs, closing in on $1 million, for additional security and other logistical needs when he rolls into to town for his signature rallies.

Naturally, no one mentions how the campaigns of sitting presidents seeking re-election handled these costs in the past. George W. Bush and Barack Obama were called out for similar fiscal “abuses”. Obama used Air Force One to travel with then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for a 2016 joint campaign appearance, but a Bush era ethics lawyer had no issues with the arrangement.

It’s an unavoidable problem, Richard Painter said in an interview with ABC News, for presidents who are simultaneously commanders-in-chiefs and the leaders of their respective political parties.

“I don’t think this is controversial,” Painter said. “A president that won’t campaign for his own party isn’t the leader of his own party. If someone claimed that President Bush was abusing taxpayer money to campaign, we would have laughed at that.”

But in the era of Trump this type of reasoned analysis is no longer possible. The narratives build one upon the other in the media’s endless quest to diminish him and marginalize his administration and supporters. His campaign doesn’t reimburse? Of course not, as a businessman he was famous, or so it goes, for refusing to pay contractors what they were owed. Everybody knows that (because it has been repeated for three years running). He’s lazy because he plays rounds of golf despite working more hours than any president since perhaps Abe Lincoln (never mentioned), and granting more media access than any president ever (not even close).

Authors Gary Marcus and Annie Duke explain how unrelenting fake news perpetuates Trump delusion syndrome in a piece they co-authored for The Wall Street Journal, which lays out how the Left and its compliant media hold the truth hostage so effectively. It is a simple matter of exploiting behavior.

In a world of information overload and distraction wrought by technology and daily life as we know it “we tend to assume that whatever we hear is true.” Admittedly, this is an objectionable generalization but it is not aimed at readers of this blog. It is aimed at the growing sector of society identified by Rush Limbaugh as the “low information voter.”

The authors site numerous studies that have demonstrated how vulnerable human beings are to being snookered. A 2017 study by faculty at New York University examined around 500,000 social media messages. Subtle words such as “hate”, “destroy” or “blame” accelerate the spread of these messages by 20% per emotional word.

“Fake news tends to avoid nuance or neutral language and frequently adds layers of emotion and moralizing — all of which makes false items spread much faster than the real thing,” Marcus and Duke wrote. They conclude a war can be waged on fake news by teaching “information literacy” across all age groups.

In WSJ August 31 – September 1 editions, the newspaper profiles prolific novelist Salmon Rushdie. His 14th just-published novel is a contemporary version of a 17th-century classic, “Don Quixote”. His motivation for writing it partially draws on the fake news and reality TV phenomena from which almost no one readily escapes.

“We live in a moment in which truth is stranger than fiction,” Rushdie says, “and so the fiction has to decide how strange it needs to be in order to get close to the truth.”

This week’s fictional thread, which inevitably will work its way back to the Trump White House, is that Hurricane Dorian is another in a series of monster storms delivering “unprecedented” fury.

“The truth is that the storms that are hitting the Caribbean with this intense magnitude are historic, unprecedented, and these storms are manmade storms,” contends Emory University Prof. Tiphanie Yanique in a televised interview with the independent news hour Democracy Now.

The guest and her interviewer, both clearly in lockstep with the climate change narrative, failed to address a well documented chronology of Category 5 hurricanes. The first Cat 5 hurricane in the Atlantic Basin was recorded in 1924, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), followed by 34 more through this year. Only four have hit the United States as a Cat 5 across 95 years.

Now, test your information literacy as you read this concluding sentence: The most intense Cat 5 hurricane to make U.S. landfall hit the Florida Keys on Labor Day 1935. President Roosevelt was blamed, along with climate change.

Is our flag next?

By Steve Woodward

As do many, I have a friend who tries persistently to view everything around him through an apolitical lens. I suppose it’s his alternative plan for managing blood pressure.

When I mentioned my outraged reaction to Nike’s willful compliance with the left’s poster child for oppressed millionaires, Colin Kaepernick, in connection with withdrawing Betsy Ross flag emblazoned Nike footwear, my friend did not concur. He does not agree that Nike caved to one of its highest profile, most radical endorsers, and therefore should be called out. Quite to the contrary, my friend sees Nike’s decision as a stone cold business decision intended to inspire an important target audience of consumers — the growing number of Americans who no longer are sure they really want to be (Americans).

Nike-air-max-1 If absorbing the very good possibility that his assessment is correct does not turn your outrage into sadness, we’ll assume you are standing in line as we speak at a Nike store. In fact it is more than a possibility. Forbes.com reports a 2% increase in Nike’s stock price after the Ross decision, adding $3 billion to the company’s market value virtually overnight.

Observing the socialist-leaning, anti-American left routinely hijacking formerly enjoyable holidays, such as Independence Day, or global sports events, such as the just concluded soccer Women’s World Cup, only deepens my profound sadness. At the same time, I do not equate sadness with defeat. The remaining 45% of citizens who are extremely proud to be American are also extremely likely to continue defending our nation’s core values, to denounce Nike and other consumer brands which applaud the decline of patriotism and leverage it as a sales strategy, and to feel ashamed of American athletes such as Team USA soccer star Megan Rapinoe for using a world stage to f-bomb the nation’s majestic White House, trample an American flag in plain sight and infer that her talents stem from her identifying as a lesbian.

Are we to accept that celebrating American independence on the Fourth of July, celebrating historic women like Betsy Ross and celebrating dominant American athletes wearing the red, white and blue are tied to a bygone era?

The corrupt U.S. media are more than determined to extract the joy out of everything to damage Donald Trump and diminish long standing traditions. The “Salute to America” parade, military flyovers and fireworks in Washington were derided as an obscenely expensive production and a platform for a Trump campaign event. It instead attracted a sea of patriotic humanity on the Mall in inclement weather, but the washout thunderstorms the media predicted never happened. America happened.

And now we are scolded by agenda-driven sports “journalists” for daring to be uncomfortable about behavior by U.S. team members during the World Cup in France. A good many Americans looking on recall a time not so long ago when our athletes competing in international events were required to “represent our country” with dignity and class. (In the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow, members of the U.S. women’s basketball team were derided for draping themselves in American flags after a victory).

With Nike rooting them on, the American women’s World Cup team spent much of the tournament drawing attention to themselves. Rapinoe kneels during the National Anthem. President Trump kindly invites the team to the White House before knowing if it would win a fourth Cup, and Rapinoe responds, “I’m not going to the f—ing White House”. They spend inordinate time talking, not about soccer strategy, but about how unfair it is they are not paid as much as U.S. men when they qualify for the national team, ignoring basic economics.

But instead of suggesting these unhappy campers tone it down, publications such anti-USA Today continued to applaud their self-absorption.

“(It was) a group that confronted the issues that have roiled our society – gender equity, sexism, what we stand for as a country – head on, making sure these much-needed conversations keep going,” wrote cheerleading Nancy Armour.

“Eventually, (Rapinoe) will endorse someone in the Democratic presidential race,” Christine Brennan wrote, nearly short-circuiting her keyboard with torrents of saliva. “Rapinoe is going to become as a big a person in our culture as she wants to be.”

More than likely, she will become a footnote by next week. Always happens. But should she venture into the political arena, how will Rapinoe explain post-victory video capturing her shoving away an American flag, leaving it on the pitch and partially trampling it as she and two teammates performed an obnoxious routine that might have been choreographed by street thugs?

It’s a good guess she’ll never be asked for an explanation. And it’s an even better guess that the revulsion Nike customers feel toward the Ross flag some day will be directed toward our modern day stars and bars. We’ve already seen Kaepernick’s kneeling replaced by violence in our streets by America hating, Trump loathing marchers and rioters. “Our media and popular culture institutions portray love of country as inherently racist and xenophobic,” writes Jarrett Stepman for The Daily Signal.

If the American flag, and by extension a secure and prosperous America, are the next targets in the left’s war on all things sacred, let us pray that the sadness filling our hearts quickly will engender in us the courage of our founders to draw battle lines and defend our freedom. We are, as Ronald Reagan warned, but one generation removed from losing it.

A sensible Washington

Editor’s note: In this era of Trump Derangement Syndrome in which no anti-American policy idea is too radical, and during which there is a relentless movement to erase symbols of our history, the fundamental principles behind America’s founding remain entrenched. But we are left to wonder for how much longer.

By Norman Zanetti

A treasure trove of exemplary governance is found in President George Washington’s farewell address to Americans. In his letter to the American people in The American Daily Advertiser in 1796, he wrote that he hoped citizens would support a strong federal government, though Americans at the time were local in their thinking and allegiances.

He cautioned that extreme partisanship among political parties would be “divisive and disruptive”, urging voters casting future ballots to do so for candidates favoring the common good instead of supporting strict party affiliation.

Washington forewarned extreme partisanship would result in “a spirit of revenge” to maintain one’s grip on power. His greatest concern, and rightly so, was intervention of external invasion, advocating a policy favoring neutrality and friendly commerce with other nations.

For years, this farewell address was read in congress on July 4th. For some reason the practice ended years ago. I recently recommended to our U.S. Congressman Richard Hudson (NC-8) that he champion a revival of this tradition in the House of Representatives, especially as newly elected representatives begin their tenure. We need a groundswell of bipartisan cooperation to assuage the polarization that has afflicted both chambers and hindered addressing our country’s vital needs.

Washington’s words, a foundry for exemplary governing, should be on the minds of all of those who represent us, as well as among media members who cover them. His message should resonate when legislation is proposed and voted on.