What We Can Learn from the Trump Win

The Mad Monarchist muses on the American political scene in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election.

From The Mad Monarchist (12 November 2016)

Billionaire real-estate mogul Donald Trump is the new President-Elect of the United States and most of the world is still in shock about it. No one thought it would happen. Many thought it couldn’t happen. But it did. Like the referendum on Britain leaving the European Union, all the polls were wrong, all the predictions were wrong and all the pundits were wrong. Now, everyone is trying to analyze how they got it wrong and why. Personally, I don’t think that is too difficult to figure out. I also do not think this is going to bring about any major change in behavior on the part of the political class. A simple look at the Democrats in America proves that point. They are now saying that the defeat of Hillary proves that they need to move further to the left. This is exactly what they said after Obama was elected twice, that his victory proved the country wanted to go in a more socialist direction. So, win or lose, they are going to be moving left and will use victory or defeat to justify it no matter which one occurs. The Republicans, likewise, are saying that now is the time to move on matters that they have given a priority to rather than the issues Trump championed. Neither side wants to change.

However, regardless of why it happened or how it happened, the victory of Donald Trump provides everyone with a great deal of learning material concerning government and how the world works, because things in the United States are not all that dissimilar to many other parts of the world. I was remarking on this long before this intolerably long campaign season was even half over. Even if he had lost, Donald Trump would have still done the American people a great service by revealing facts about the federal ruling elite that most did not know or wanted to deny. Some of these points, Trump revealed personally but others were revealed simply in the course of his unprecedented and unorthodox campaign by others who either wanted him to win, wanted Hillary to lose or who simply wanted to reveal how corrupt and hypocritical the most powerful people on the planet really are. What was revealed will probably be taken by most readers here with a yawn. Many people have been saying it for a long time but now there is proof, and proof that was revealed in full public view for all the world to see, at least if they want to.

The election of Donald Trump revealed that neither of the major parties of the United States really believe in what they have each long claimed to champion. They are liars, hypocrites and corrupt to the core and that is no longer an opinion but a verifiable fact. We should start with the Grand Old Party itself, the Republicans. Trump showed that the Republican establishment are a bunch of liars, plain and simple. Their opposition to Trump, originally at least, was that he was not a “real” conservative. They had plenty of facts to support them too. Trump used to be a Democrat, he used to be in favor of abortion and he used to support government-run healthcare. Trump supporters said, that did not matter because he had changed all those positions and he was someone who could win. The establishment, however, showed their hand with this exchange. In the last election, after all, it was they who said everyone had to support Mitt Romney because he was the candidate who could win (though he didn’t of course) even though he too had previously been pro-abortion and previously supported government-run healthcare too. Likewise, none of them made an issue out of the fact that another candidate, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, had previously been a Democrat. Even President Ronald Reagan had previously been a Democrat.

They also said that, in defense of their case, that Trump had proposed more government programs and more government spending, which a “true” conservative would not do. This, however, rings hollow in the wake of the George W. Bush administration which created entire new government departments, new government programs like the failed “no child left behind” program and which had spent more money than all American presidents of the past combined until Obama came along and took that title away. So, given the fact that these same people often supported Jeb Bush and would never say anything negative about George W. Bush or anything he had done, it was revealed that they did not mean a single word of it. Their opposition to Trump was not principled at all as they had shown by their own actions that these principles were not so important so long as someone other than Trump was the candidate.

Another thing that many neocons in particular claimed to base their opposition to Trump on was his stated opposition to military interventions overseas and his opposition to the Iraq War. This too rings hollow when one remembers, as I do, that when George W. Bush was running for president, he promised the same thing. He said that America should not be the ‘policeman of the world’ and that nation-building was not something that the U.S. military should be tasked with. Maybe, since Bush was ‘one of the club’, they knew he was lying to the American people when he said that, but no one at the time made an issue out of it. Either way, they were either lying about their opposition to Trump or they were complicit in the lie of George W. Bush. They have tried to have it both ways and some of us have not failed to notice.

There were also those in the establishment who based their opposition to Trump on moral, religious grounds. Trump is widely known for his playboy past, his affairs and his multiple marriages. All of this, as well as him never being known as someone who attended church regularly, was used as justification for not supporting him and urging Christian evangelicals not to support him either. However, just since the Bush administration, these same people had supported Senator John McCain, a man who had numerous affairs, cheating on the wife who had stood by him during his time as a prisoner of war, his long medical recovery and who had herself been nearly killed in a car accident that left her crippled. McCain had a number of affairs and finally divorced his first wife to marry his latest mistress in 1980. The next GOP candidate who, again, the establishment clearly favored and supported, was Mitt Romney, a member of an American religious sect which most traditional Christians do not consider to be truly Christian and which does or did believe in such bizarre things as the Garden of Eden being in Missouri, Native Americans being Jews, that Black people don’t have souls and, more famously, believing in polygamy and magic underwear. Obviously, none of these people really cared about their candidate being a strictly traditional Christian.

All in all, the more excuses the Republican elites came up with to justify not supporting Trump, even after he proved to be the most popular of the candidates on offer, fails to hold up given who these same elites had supported in the past. There was also the issue of the pledge, at the beginning of the nomination campaign to support the eventual nominee no matter who it was. All the candidates but Trump eagerly promised to support the winner and castigated Trump for not doing so. A short time later, he finally did but once Trump did become the nominee, many of these same people broke their pledge and refused to support him. This revealed to everyone how dishonest these individuals are.

The most prominent was certainly Senator Ted Cruz, the favorite of the ‘constitutional conservatives’. Cruz refused to honor his pledge to support the nominee, Trump, but still claimed to be principled in doing so, saying that it was because Trump had “attacked” his family, referring to a rude internet meme about his wife Trump had re-tweeted and questions raised by Trump about Cruz’ father and the assassination of President Kennedy. However, this showed Cruz (or “Lyin’ Ted” as Trump called him) to be rather disingenuous given how, early on, he had been Trump’s best friend in the campaign and had refused to attack him or condemn him when Trump said even worse things about other GOP candidates. Cruz only seemed to care about Trump’s junkyard dog tactics when he was not the one being targeted. Trump, on the other hand, was so bluntly honest about the situation that most found it humorous, openly stating that he only started attacking Cruz when Cruz started to become a threat to his ‘front-runner’ status.

The biggest revelation, overall, though was just what both the Republican and Democrat elites think of their own voters and the democratic process. At the Republican National Convention, all former Republican presidents and all but one former Republican presidential candidates refused to attend because of their opposition to Trump. This was especially noticeable on the part of the Bush family. George W. Bush, a man who had no hesitation about going to war to “spread democracy” and even defended the democratic change he brought to Iraq when it resulted in a pro-Iranian government, refused to accept the democratic will of the Republican voters when their choice proved to be Donald Trump. Not only did they refuse to endorse him, they refused to show him any support whatsoever and refused to vote for him. They had not treated John McCain the same way, even though McCain and Bush had been bitter enemies. Respect for the will of the voters but only when the voters choose the way their betters want seems to be the rule.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have long been openly hypocritical in this regard but still managed to surprise at least a few people when evidence emerged about how un-democratic the Democratic Party really is. Everyone already knew about how the Democrat nominating process makes use of so-called “Super Delegates” to ensure that the Party elite can override the will of the Democrat voters, so long as the popular support for a certain candidate is not too overwhelming. However, it was clear in this election that, from start to finish, Hillary Clinton was going to be the nominee no matter what actual Democrat voters really thought of her. Opposed by a few relatively unknown and completely forgettable nonentities plus one eccentric, elderly socialist from Vermont, it was clear that Hillary was never supposed to have any real competition in winning the nomination of her party to run for president. However, thanks to the “Wikileaks” revelations, we have since found out that the Democrat elites were lying when they claimed to be neutral and were actively working to help Clinton and sabotage her socialist rival Bernie Sanders who proved to be her only half-way effective competition.

We also found out that most of the talking points and slogans spouted by the Democrat Party to be purely self-serving lies. The Democrats have been the most vocal of all in denouncing the “fat cat” bankers, the Wall Street financiers, the super rich and so on, claiming to be the party of the struggling, working man or woman. However, this election showed that Wall Street overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton. Most billionaires in this country supported Hillary Clinton and she received a huge amount of monetary support from the biggest and wealthiest banks (most famously Goldman Sachs). Trump, on the other hand, received practically no support from any of these sectors. As Bernie Sanders (before showing himself to also be a complete hypocrite and endorsing Hillary) asked during the campaign, if Hillary really meant what she said about cracking down on Wall Street, the big banks and drastically raising taxes on the rich, why were all of these people giving such overwhelming support to her campaign? Either they are being completely suicidal or she is being totally dishonest. Well, again thanks to leaked information about speeches she gave to a group of Brazilian bankers, Hillary herself answered that question by telling the audience that she had to have a “public position” that was very different from her “private position” on issues for the sake of political expediency. Hypocrites and liars the lot of them!

Of course, we also have a whole ball of hypocrisy concerning the Democrats criticism of Trump. The same people who said that Bill Clinton getting oral sex from an intern in the Oval Office was a private matter that had nothing to do with how he did his job, and who voted against removing him from office for lying under oath about it, suddenly went into hysterics because of a secretly taped Trump boasting about what celebrity groupies will let famous men to do them. The same people who said that all the women who came forward in the past accusing Bill Clinton of everything from sexual harassment to outright rape were lying attention-seekers, suddenly produced their own assortment of women claiming Trump did the same to them and should have all their stories taken at face value. You had Hillary Clinton saying that someone like Trump was not to be trusted with nuclear codes based on things he said in his speeches whereas she should be trusted with them, even though she voted to invade Iraq, pushed for military intervention in Syria and Libya and threatened to launch military attacks on Russia for allegedly hacking her email. Of course, Hillary also thought it outrageous that Trump should say he would be okay with American allies like South Korea and Japan having nuclear weapons while having nothing to say about the growing number of American enemies having atomic arsenals.

No, if armed conflict is something you wish to avoid, Hillary Clinton certainly did not seem to be the “safe” candidate. She probably only thought she could get away with it because of the lying hypocrites of the anti-war movement who only seemed to oppose the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan while Bush was in office but had nothing to say about these and other armed interventions undertaken by Obama. The same people who made jokes about Mitt Romney (admittedly easy) for claiming Russia to be a threat to the United States, suddenly saw Russians hiding behind every corner, warned that Russia was about to launch World War Three and who seemed to blame Russia if the weather was bad or their soup was cold. Hillary made a big spectacle out of her effort to “reset” Russo-American relations, yet said that our relations are now extremely bad and Russia is the biggest threat to us while absurdly claiming that Hillary was the best person to deal with them!

Treatment of minorities was also a major plank of the Hillary Clinton campaign. She certainly seemed less than honest when she called Trump and his supporters homophobic considering that, for the first time ever, a gay man spoke at the Republican National Convention and Trump spoke in favor of and in defense of the gay community at the RNC and was met with thunderous applause. Hillary, on the other hand, had the father of a gunman who massacred gay nightclub patrons at one of her rallies. However, none of that can hold a candle to the Democrat hypocrisy on full display concerning the Black community. These same people who coddled “Black Lives Matter” activists, who said that Blacks are being hunted and murdered (by government employees), that they face “systematic” and “institutional” racism on a daily basis, suddenly did the fastest ‘about face’ in history and claimed that everything in the Black community was fine and dandy when Trump said that, yes, Black people have it bad in this country and that is why they should stop voting for Democrats as that has obviously not helped them.

This also played into a much larger ball of lies and hypocrisy for Hillary Clinton though. Her speeches on unity, tolerance and slogan that we are “better together” rang false when she was dismissing half of the American electorate as “deplorable”. She castigated Trump for saying that many of the illegal aliens from Mexico were rapists but thought nothing of labeling huge numbers of her own countrymen as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic and so on. The Democrats said it was racist and bigoted to oppose bringing in Syrian refugees yet Hillary accepted large donations from countries like Saudi Arabia which are in the neighborhood of Syria and yet which have refused to take in any refugees. That also made her seem rather hypocritical to call Trump, who I do not recall ever saying anything negative about homosexuals, a homophobe while accepting donations from countries like Saudi Arabia where homosexuals are put to death. Perhaps laws against homosexuals are only bad when Russia enacts them? No, it has been made abundantly clear in this campaign that the Democrats could not possibly care less about any of the minority groups they claim to champion. These people are important for them only so long as they generate votes to keep Democrats in power. Look at it this way; when South Africa practiced racial segregation, that was considered a heinous enough crime for the United States to put sanctions on the country. Yet, countries which do far worse to women or homosexuals are not treated the same, even by the leftists who claim to be the champions of female and homosexual rights. Liars and hypocrites.

And that is the bottom line. What we have learned through this whole process, either because of Donald Trump himself or because of the reaction to Trump, we can see clearly that the political class in this country, left and right, does not believe a word of what they have been spouting for years. They are corrupt, lying hypocrites, kept in power by a corrupt and dishonest media, who will do or say anything to stay in power and pursue their own agenda. Many of us have long suspected it but this campaign has put it out in the open for all to see. We continue to see it even now as the champions of tolerance who voted for the candidate that promoted “togetherness” take to the streets to smash cars, set fires and beat up people because their candidate lost. I pointed it out before and warned that I would point it out again, that these people are proving the late Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini correct when he said that liberals (which would include both Republicans and Democrats by his definition) were phonies who believed in liberty for themselves but not for you. “The liberal state is a mask behind which there is no face, a scaffolding behind which there is no building” he said. It is all a scam, a scam the Republican and Democrat rulers of this country have been running on the people as a whole for many years. No matter if Trump proves to be a stunning success or a horrendous failure as president, he has at least, even if inadvertently, done us a service by throwing this fraud into the light of day.