The Case For Trump?

Forty-eight per cent of American voters can't be wrong... can they?

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

If you don’t yet subscribe to Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, you’re missing out. In a media landscape almost entirely poisoned by shameless apologists for one political viewpoint or another, it’s a shining beacon of balance, contrasting takes, open debate, and, blessedly, rich humour and biting sarcasm. It’s all so utterly refreshing. Sign up — you won’t regret it.

America is in the final throes of trying to decide between two deeply flawed options for President, and The Free Press has done a masterful job of cutting through the baloney around both candidates (and their running mates).

Take these duelling viewpoints published on October 16^th:

First, ex-CIA analyst and Cuban-born Free Press columnist Matt Gurri posted a piece titled: “I Refused to Vote in the Last Two Elections. Now, I’m Voting for Trump.” He opens with this delightful line:

“Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5.”

Gurri has decided to climb off the fence this cycle and cast a vote for the Donald. Not because he’s particularly enthused by the sneaker-peddling Bible-hawking blowhard:

“The man spouts industrial amounts of nonsense. But in politics, everything is relative. The entire public character of the Biden administration rested on a colossal lie, in which Kamala Harris was complicit: that the president was a wise, energetic senior, fully engaged in the nation’s business. That massive deception, promulgated for years by an irresponsible media in defiance of the evidence of our own eyes, amounted to state propaganda, many orders of magnitude more destructive of trust than the worst of Trump’s outrages.”

Gurri’s from Cuba, remember. Hence he’s utterly dismayed by what he perceives as illiberal liberals’ iron grasp on America’s institutions:

“The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporation, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture.”

“There are only two vital forces in American politics today,” he writes. “Those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. Reluctantly, I choose the latter.”

Fellow Free Press columnist Joe Nocera is having none of it. He’s got Trump Derangement Syndrome, he says; and he’s proud of it:

“The MAGA crowd thinks it’s an insult to say you have TDS. I think it’s a badge of honor.”

“Once you start in on one of [Trump’s] many character flaws,” according to Nocera, “it’s just so hard to stop… why in the world would we ever want this man to be our president?”

He concludes his piece with this:

“You’re damn right I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I wish all Americans had it. We would be far better off.”

There you have it. Both entertaining reads, but opposite viewpoints, accurately reflecting the current bitter divide in American politics.

Most Canadians would prefer to see Harris win, of course, by a three to one margin. (We Canucks don’t seem to have learned much from our scalding experience with Justin Trudeau; by all appearances, Harris is Trudeau in a skirt — a pantsuit, rather.)

As far as our economic interests go, it’s hard to know what to wish for. In his first term, Trump took an axe to NAFTA, reshaping it into USMCA to better suit his interests; now he threatens to tear that up as well.

Harris, on the other hand, is a dyed-in-the-wool climate-catastrophe loon, which wouldn’t bode well for Canada’s resource sector, already staggering from years of battering by Trudeau and his henchman Stephen Guilbeault.

I’m no fan of Trump; I’ve never been able to get past the Hollywood Access tapes and his disgusting “grab ‘em by the pu**y” comments; how so-called Christians were able to coalesce behind this man without calling out his behaviour continues to mystify me.

But on the other hand, the Biden/Harris position on transgender issues—a position which allows men to compete in women’s sports and to invade women’s spaces, and which enthusiastically champions the medical and surgical mutilation of children, and which threatens to remove such children from their parents if they don’t acquiesce to that butchery—doesn’t just mystify me: it leaves me sputtering with rage and indignation.

So much so, that if I were an American, I might find myself on the side of Matt Gurri: reluctantly choosing the Trumpster.

Ach, well… maybe four years from now there’ll better choices on offer. Perhaps that’s the American dream.