I am probably opening Pandora’s box with this story today! There are probably several thousand more will read this story than would have without that headline. That’s O.K. When you finish reading this, you’ll understand my reason for writing this: to make every reader and listener rethink their plan for choosing for whom to vote in November.
The thought that resulted in the title was “what if Obama was today running for re-election AND faced the same circumstances as does Donald Trump? Let’s look at those 2012 Obama re-election considerations as compared to today’s Trump’s challenges AND look at Obama’s 2012 considerations but with Trump running against Romney and not Obama:
- Imagine that Russia had annexed Crimea during the Trump years rather than while Obama was president. MSNBC and other left-wing media would have incessantly drummed claims that Trump conspired with Putin to let the Russian president smother Ukraine. Other news outlets would have probably chalked up the loss of Crimea to President Trump’s incompetence and his defiance of the foreign-policy establishment.
- What about Otto Warmbier: remember him? Otto was thrown in the slammer by Kim Jong Un in 2012. But what if that happened THIS year? The story would have been all about Trump being a foreign policy neophyte with no ability to negotiate with totalitarian regimes. But we know from the way it REALLY happened the fault was Obama’s foreign policy mistakes — you know, that foreign policy establishment that today’s media continually maintain dwarfed that of Donald Trump today.
Let’s try an “Opposite:”
- What if COVID-19 showed up in 2012? The media would have fawned over how calm, resolute, and prepared was Obama in handling such a monumental task so adeptly. The death toll wouldn’t have mattered to the media then. Remember: the COVID-19 pandemic would have occurred in his re-election year, and he had some sketchy history in handling a bad virus. In 2009, H1N1 showed up early in his first year as president. Sixty million Americans were infected by the virus, and Obama’s handling it was not stellar.
- Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans might deny this and demand that Obama’s response to COVID-19 could have made him more popular. After all, it would have allowed him to show his prowess in handling a healthcare disaster. With COVID-12 (as it would have been), it’s more likely it would have damaged Obama’s popularity and attacked his margin of victory over Mitt Romney. It might have even cost him a second term as president.
Remember this: one of the wildest realities of Trump’s first four years is how the demented American media, in their coverage of Donald Trump, made everything about HIM and not the events that happened on his watch: good and bad. They treated him like he really was a dictator-wannabe or a king instead of an elected president. Their end-goal was to re-establish “the way it used to be” — the establishment back in charge with the old “normal” political processes.
But they want us to all forget their record. They have one that was established not just under Obama but also under “Good Old George” W. Bush. Think back and compare how they treated George W. Bush in his eight years and compare that to how they have treated President Trump. In many ways, they are very similar: with total disdain. And the sandwich-filling eight years under Obama saw the media perpetually either fawning over Barack and Michelle for every imaginable non-event without ever saying one negative word or attacking anyone or any group that disagreed with anything from the Anointed One.
How did the media treat Trump overall in the past four years? (No need to comment) Contrast their treatment of Trump in light of his significant and sometimes glorious accomplishments until COVID-19. Neither Bush 43 NOR Obama had 3.5 years nearly as successful on so many fronts as has Trump.
Wait: Trump did NOTHING for the United States! Trump destroyed the amazing foreign policy reputation that Obama had miraculously plucked from the foreign policy garbage heap on which W. had thrown it.
What about Obama’s targeted sanctions on Russia? Those not only failed to get Putin out of Crimea but also failed to stop the Russian meddling in the 2016 election that we have heard about ever since. What about Erdogan’s consolidation of power in Turkey and China’s turn to a massive increase of power beyond (and within) its borders that also took place under Obama?
Obama was the oracle who came to usher the United States into a “new” world — a “new” and better position in leadership among all countries on Earth. Obama cleared the air with every country with which past U.S. presidents disagreed: every one of them! (It was called his “Apology Tour”) His shovel-ready jobs never materialized, and his billions in handouts to his green energy cronies disappeared. He made all that right, though. Remember: he giggled with some of his White House staff on camera, saying, “I guess all those shovel-ready jobs weren’t so shovel-ready after all.”
One question for all of you: If all the things Obama did in his eight years were so glorious, so successful, so great for America and the American people; if his policies ushered in this astounding transformation from a tired worn out country that was far behind the rest of the world; if he was the beginning of a new world, why did Trump win the 2016 election? Hillary was to be the successor to Obama to carry on with his grandiose changes.
Trump won because the American people held the elites in both parties responsible for horrible conditions at home and abroad. “Make America Great Again” won the election because Americans not only believed Trump could do it — they thought he WOULD do it. And Americans had swallowed all of the Obama pipe dreams for a “better America” that proved to be nothing more than dreams.
“Trump World”
The mainstream media’s coverage of the Trump administration has been an exercise in self-deception of the press themselves. “Trump World” has not been about Donald Trump, other than he made explicit what the elites have long disguised: that the American government (as comprised by those elites within it) that guided our country since the end of the Cold War has broken down and that the establishment leaders who wish to return us to “the way it was” lack legitimacy with the public. The public knows that change of some kind is needed, and it attempted to bring about change by electing Barack Obama and then Donald Trump.
The coronavirus and its consequences just might be enough to defeat President Trump in November. But the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not solve any of the problems that led to Trump’s election in the first place. Quite the contrary: the ruling class will be more alienated than ever, self-assured that the dismissal by voters of Trump is the same as the affirmation of elite rule as it existed before Trump. Under Biden and Harris, post-Trump America will be a country ready for another Trump — or someone even more terrifying to the elite.
That might be true even if Trump is reelected. A second-term president often focuses on foreign policy, with Congress half or entirely run by the opposition party. Trump has been making better, more “Trumpian” and more competent personnel appointments in recent months, so a coherent change in governing strategy may be possible in a second Trump term. He has also been willing to use executive power to reshape trade and immigration to the extent that his powers allow. But the changes the federal government needs to make to serve the country as a whole must be made by the legislature as well. Without these reforms and a concentration by ALL in government on the well-being of Main Street over Wall Street, the stagnation will continue.
The media, the Education system, and corporate America must also get serious about their failures. But four more years of “Trump World” may mean four more years of elitists screaming about the President’s sole responsibility for everything that goes wrong. The hope is that the shock of Trump’s reelection would be a slap-in-the-faces of those on the Left that consider themselves some sort of “ruling class” sufficient for them to face the realities of the new world in which we find ourselves. That is no safe bet, but it’s the only chance for real and longlasting change available.
After Trump, next year, or in five years, there will be a reckoning. And if the failed elites who made Trump necessary in the first place have not changed their ways, they will find themselves lost at sea by whoever wins control of the government in five years. And whoever that is will purposely put them on that boat, shove them away from a dock somewhere. They’ll probably have put a small hole in the bottom of the boat, too!
