Send This to a Trump Supporter

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But It’s Not His Fault!!!

In the eight years since Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator and introduced himself as a candidate for President of the United States, our country has changed. It has not changed for the better.

An abridged list of what we have dealt with since then:

• Illegal immigration has skyrocketed to unsustainable levels and is causing major problems around the country.

• Crime has soared in major cities, and some of our most beautiful cities like San Francisco have become virtually unlivable in all but the most expensive areas.

• The size of our government has exploded and the unsustainable spending levels of a post 9/11 world seem like a quaint memory compared to now.

• Inflation is out of control and nobody knows how to stop it, all the while the dollar is losing its place as the world reserve currency.

• The law enforcement and the intelligence apparatus of our Federal government seems to have changed its focus from protecting American citizens from criminals and foreign bad actors, to investigating and harassing citizens with certain “unacceptable” views.

• Relations between racial groups in America are worse than any other time in my life (I was born in 1979).

• Activist groups have hijacked the gay rights movement and are pushing a strange social contagion that encourages adults to have children undergo sex change treatments / surgeries.

• Radical left wing theories about race, power, gender, and other Freshman Sociology 101 nonsense have infected large corporations. What would have been considered laughably stupid when Trump came down his escalator are now canon in board rooms.

• The press has been completely coopted by the intelligence community, defense contractors, big pharma, and a few others. They no longer report the truth.

• Covid, a respiratory disease that killed virtually nobody who wasn’t already very sick, sent the entire western world into an authoritarian frenzy and literally made people go insane.

• With regard to the Grand Old Party, the Republicans are in a truly sorry state. They can’t nominate electable candidates. They are controlled by a small minority of extremists, many of whom are convinced that Trump won the 2020 election.

• Americans are more siloed now than ever before. They only interact with people they agree with, either online or in person. This creates dangerous feedback loops which serve only to radicalize people into inane positions.

• Donald Trump has been federally indicted on serious felonies. Felonies of which he is almost certainly guilty. Yet his polls go up. They go up because a significant portion of the country no longer has faith in our institutions… and they have good reason for it. Trump is certainly not alone in his crimes, and he is the only person being charged.

I know. I can hear the chants now. “None of that is Trump’s fault!”

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It’s not all Trump’s fault, but it happened because of him

This isn’t the easiest concept to wrap your head around. Donald Trump obviously didn’t want the size of our government and budget to explode under his watch. He didn’t want our important institutions like the FBI and the media to lose all their credibility with huge swaths of the American people. He certainly isn’t in favor of radical leftists performing medical experiments on children. Finally, he didn’t want our country to be so terribly divided. That wasn’t his goal.

But it happened all the same. And it happened because of him.

First, let’s state the obvious. Donald Trump is an amoral man. We all knew this when we supported him in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. It was an easy choice for most of us to make… Hillary is also an amoral person and Trump was going to nominate conservative judges, do a tax cut, and send the lefties into fits.

At first it was grand fun. One of my favorite nights of all time was watching the results land in November of 2016 and watching that little dial on the New York Times slowly tick down from 97% likelihood of a Clinton win to eventually having to call the race for Donald Trump. Between us, I still sometimes rewatch a YouTube video of those idiots at the Javits Center crying when it became obvious that she would lose.

Unfortunately that would be the high water mark. It was all down hill from there.

The First Two Years

Predictably and almost immediately, elements of the deep state began an operation to discredit Trump. One accusation after another was leaked to the press, who in their horror for their own complicity in getting Trump elected, repeated the claims breathlessly and credulously night after night.

President Trump, instead of either addressing the controversy over Russia calmly and succinctly, or simply ignoring the rumblings of a hostile press, decided to go on the attack and address the issue via Twitter and in his unhinged speeches with inflammatory comments and several inaccuracies. This served only to keep the accusation in the news and give the conspiracy theory that Trump was guilty of collusion air.

His Attorney General, Jeff Sessions (former Senator from Alabama) was a staunch conservative and was a vocal Trump supporter. With the sheer, unrelenting attacks coming from the FBI through the media, and Trump’s insane insistence on keeping the scandal at the top of the news everyday by continuing to give it air, Sessions was left with no choice. He had to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate the matter or it would simply never be put to bed.

President Trump knew he was innocent. He knew he didn’t “collude with Russia” to beat Hillary. In hindsight, even the accusation is ridiculous on its face. It was never explained just how this collusion happened and what the Russians supposedly did for Trump, beyond some innuendo about Facebook adds, which is idiotic because Trump memes and Russian bots are not what kept Hillary out of the rust belt. Her own hubris did that.

Either way, Trump, who has barely a middle schooler’s command of the English language, was simply incapable of defending himself in the court of public opinion. He would Tweet insane misspelled rantings like a schizophrenic, and lie about easily verifiable, unimportant nonsense and killed his own credibility.

He was innocent. Why not just grant a couple of interviews with hostile press, let them ask whatever Russia questions they want, point out that the accusation doesn’t make any sense, throw a little humor in on top of it, and watch the investigation fizzle?

He didn’t do that because he was incapable of doing that.

Did you ever used to watch that old show “COPS”? Did you ever notice how many people ended up getting hauled off to jail because they didn’t have the ability to simply and calmly explain themselves, and instead ended up yelling at the cop and throwing their Big Gulp filled with Vodka at him?

Well, that’s Trump.

Standing in a gutter with shit on his shoe, one boob hanging out of a tank top, and calling the cop a “pig”.

What in the hell did he think was going to happen?

The “Perfect” Phone Call

By the skin of his teeth and only because he didn’t actually collude with Russia to steal the 2016 election, the Mueller Report showed two things. First, Robert Mueller has dementia and didn’t run the investigation. Second, while Trump did things that could have been considered obstruction of justice, you can’t really charge that if there’s no proven underlying crime… which in this case there was not.

Trump celebrated this win by jumping on the phone with the newly elected President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Also on the phone was every high level intelligence analyst and member of the deep state in Washington. That wasn’t a secret… Trump knew who was on the phone.

Because he is an idiot, Donald Trump then proceeded to confuse his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani with his Attorney General, Bill Barr and suggest that Zelenskyy aid one (or both) of them in the search for a Biden / Ukraine corruption connection.

First of all Bill Barr, as he clearly spells out in his memoir One Damn Thing After Another, had nothing whatever to do with Trump and Giuliani’s investigation of the Burisma stuff. The Department of Justice simply wasn’t involved in getting opposition research for a politician… which is exactly what that request was, at that time. Newer developments have called for a real investigation into Biden and his family, but at that time it was just Trump trying to hamstring his 2020 opponent before his campaign got off the ground. It’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but not using DOJ assets. Barr saved Trump from himself on that.

At any rate, Trump then went on to imply that a delivery of Javelin antitank missiles would be aided by Zelinskyy’s cooperation in the Biden / Burisma matter.

Look, Presidents are political animals. They do things as President all the time that are purely for political reasons. “Tax this group!”. “Give a tax break to that group!”. It’s all just a game. We know that…

But for the love of everything holy, Don… You literally just got finished with a Special Counsel investigation! Maybe don’t try to shake down a world leader for opposition research on the damn phone with everyone who hates you and is trying to take you down. DUH!

To make matters worse, because there was no Hillary Clinton in 2018 to act as a foil, Trump managed to lose the House and the Senate, guaranteeing he would be impeached. Which he was.

The point of this article is to talk about the results of Trump, not his intentions. So even if you think his phone call was “perfect”… the result was a first term President dealing with impeachment in the run up to a reelection campaign.

I suggest that is an imperfect result.

Covid

I have written enough on Trump’s Covid failures to fill a book. I am not going to repeat it all here, but I encourage you to go back over old Line of Fire articles if you’d like to read about it.

I will say this though. Imagine, for just a moment, if in February of 2020 we had calm leadership who kept the bureaucracy on a tight leash and made recommendations and policy announcements calmly from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Imagine that leader was calm, reassuring, and giving updates about how the best medical minds in the world were working on the problem. Imagine him or her telling us that this problem is something the US Government is prepared for and that everything was going to be okay.

Imagine how different things would have been. Alas, we didn’t get that. We got Trump calling some CNN reporter nasty names while repeating crap he read on Twitter. *sigh*

The 2020 election and January 6th

Donald Trump lost the election. I can prove that to you, because he is not currently the President and Joe Biden is. You can call the election “rigged” or “stolen” or whatever you want. He still lost.

By the way, I agree that changing all the rules because of the pandemic was a purely political move by Democrats. They were masterful in their manipulation of the vote. I also blame Donald Trump for playing right into their hands… again.

Trump told people not to vote early. He told people not to vote by mail. He had zero apparatus to keep an eye on illegal ballot harvesting in big cities. He had virtually no ground game beyond his rallies.

Joe Biden didn’t even campaign. He was, and remains, in the throws of dementia. During the debates, instead of highlighting Biden’s weaknesses by letting him ramble, Donald Trump yelled at him for an hour and a half making many people in the country actually feel sorry for the old man.

It was the sorriest, most disorganized, ridiculous campaign in modern American Presidential politics. It’s a testament to how many Americans simply can’t tolerate the Democrats that he got as many votes as he did… but in the end, it wasn't enough. Trump lost narrowly in several states he needed to win, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Then he really went off the rails.

Prior to November of 2020, Donald Trump was eccentric. He was a bit of a bull in a china shop… but that bull was surprisingly good at some things. We all loved how he triggered the left. We thought he was entertaining and funny. He did get the tax cuts done and was pretty effective on domestic manufacturing, energy, trade, and foreign policy. But that all came to an end when he lost that election.

In the several months that followed, Donald Trump lost his mind. He started calling states still counting votes and demanded they find more Trump votes. He threatened Republican politicians that they must also claim that the election was invalid.

After the Electoral College certified the election in December 2020, there were no avenues left, so Trump decided to try and convince his Vice President to not accept the electoral votes and send the matter back to the states. On January 6th, 2021, he held a huge rally and people from all over the country made their way to DC.

Through whatever agents provocateur, federal encouragement, Capitol Police incompetence… whatever… the protest devolved into a riot that led to unhinged Trump supporters roaming the Capitol attempting to stop the certification of the vote.

America was shocked by this. In a year of civil unrest, riots, death, and property damage all over the country, all was forgotten because of the riot at the Capitol. In that instant, the GOP ceded the moral high ground. Prior to January 6th, Democrats were running for political cover because of their support of BLM and their permissive attitude toward racial lawlessness in major American cities. After it, the GOP didn’t have a leg to stand on.

Understand this… January 6th hurt nobody in this country more than it hurt conservatives. Was it Trump’s fault? I don’t know. I don’t think he wanted a riot. But it happened because of him.

Then, as if that weren’t enough… he intentionally tanked two special elections in Georgia because he was mad at Gov. Brian Kemp for not “finding more Trump votes”. He intentionally gave away the GOP Senate to the Democrats because he was having a hissy fit. There is simply no other way to look at it.

This paved the way for Biden to have both houses of Congress as he rolled into his Presidency, and just look at the results for our country.

The F*ING 2022 Midterms

I wrote an article on it called The Morning After Pill. Read it. The GOP performance in the midterms can be laid directly at Trump’s feet. I know there are those who don’t believe that, but it is 100% true.

The Legal Stuff

Let’s ignore the New York State charges. Yes, Donald Trump did pay a hooker hush money with campaign cash so that his wife wouldn’t find out that he was shagging someone named ‘Stormy’ while she was pregnant. Let’s just pretend that as conservatives, we have no problem with that kind of behavior at all.

We can also ignore the pending Georgia charges. Sure, Trump is on tape calling the Secretary of State of Georgia and demanding that he fabricate votes to deliver Georgia for him. Sure he is pretty explicit in his ambivalence as to whether or not those votes are legitimate. But hey… innocent until proven guilty, right? I mean, the Democrats changed the voting rules, so that gives Trump the right to bully state level amateur politicians into violating their oaths and the law, right?

So let’s set both of those aside. The fact is, that even though I don’t love the facts surrounding those cases, they are political in nature and therefore probably inappropriate.

Then we come to “the boxes”.

Can anyone, anywhere please explain to me Trump’s obsession with these boxes and their contents? I get it, there are mementos in there and probably some private stuff. They are his and he likes them. Fine. I don’t have a problem with that.

BUT

The National Archives reached out to his team and said they believe there are some items in the boxes that are still owned by the government. They also believed there was classified material in the boxes.

Trump’s team was contacted about the items and apparently Trump’s lawyers recommended that they go through the boxes and turn over anything that the government deemed he wasn’t authorized to keep. That would have solved the problem. Trump didn’t personally pack the boxes. The end of any administration is chaotic. If some stuff erroneously got thrown into some boxes and shipped down to Mar-a-Lago, that is perfectly explainable and wouldn’t be a problem.

Well, Trump didn’t like that idea. He wanted to personally go through the boxes, something he put off doing. He then had the boxes moved to a more secure area, at the behest of the FBI… who were now looking into the matter.

Finally, after not getting any cooperation out of the Trump team over the materials, the FBI opened a criminal investigation of President Trump (again) and executed a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the materials.

Even at this moment, there was every opportunity to avoid charges. Merrick Garland understands the significance of charging Trump in this case. This isn’t some county DA doing DNC work. This is the full force of the Federal Government being used against a former President and the current front runner of the opposition party’s race for President. It’s a very big deal.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump again took the stance that his actions have been completely “perfect”. He defiantly attacked the DOJ and Garland as political actors. Instead of saying something to the effect of;

“I am shocked that the FBI raided my home at Mar-a-Lago looking for certain documents that I didn’t know I had. It was my understanding that my attorneys had been working closely with the National Archives to return anything that needed to be returned. I am sorry that we have apparently not had good communication.

I am now directing my attorneys to meet with the DOJ as soon as possible. I am instructing them to turn over any materials that they would like to review. I will keep the American public informed on what happens, but I want it known that I am cooperating fully with requests from the National Archives and the DOJ in this matter. I have nothing to hide and don’t believe I’ve done anything wrong.”

If he had said that, and actually cooperated, he wouldn’t be facing charges right now. Garland wouldn’t have appointed the Special Counsel and the documents issue would be just another bunch of New York Times hit pieces about how Trump doesn’t follow the rules.

But did he do that? Of course not. Hell, he’s probably still holding on to some classified files somewhere. He’s been charged with 37 felonies and is likely legally guilty of all of them. He’s been arraigned in Federal court. He’s looking at something like 400 years in prison.

Over what? Some documents he wanted to show to Kid Rock? How is this not a self inflicted wound?

I know they didn’t go after Hillary. I know she hit her phones with a hammer and bleach bit her server before sending it to the far corners of the earth. I know, I know, I know… But for the love of Pete, man. You have the play the game you’re in… and when you know the government is out to get you, you don’t obstruct justice and hide classified documents and show them to Kid Rock ON TAPE WHILE EXPLAINING IN LURID DETAIL HOW THEY ARE STILL F*ING CLASSIFIED AND THAT YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO SHOW THEM TO ANYBODY!!!

Ugh. What a fricken moron.

It’s time to move on:

If only there was a popular conservative Governor named Ron we could choose instead…

Look, I get it. I know Trump supporters. I was one. I know he has been treated unfairly and I know they were out to get him. I don’t disagree with any of that.

But here’s the rub: Donald Trump is bad for our country. I don’t believe the left would have gone so crazy if he wasn't there. I don’t think there would have been George Floyd riots without him. I don’t think the FBI would have become so political if it weren’t for Trump. I think the press would still be trying to tell the truth, at least some of the time.

Donald Trump brings out the worst in all of us. He causes us to become stubborn and paranoid. He makes us hate our neighbors, and he makes our neighbors hate us.

He might not have meant it. Hell, it might not even be his fault at all… but in the end, the man is a cancer, and as much as I still love watching silly liberals whinge, I love my country more. I love our society. I love my neighbors. That’s why I’ve moved on from Donald Trump, and it’s why you should too.

There are better options.

God bless and happy Friday all!

—Virgil