The dead-end street of righteous indignation about Trump

The dead-end street of righteous indignation about Trump

This post is addressed to conservatives and other Republicans who are made angry and uncomfortable by the media’s unending onslaught of “bad news” about Donald Trump.

There is no point in addressing progressive leftists and other Democrats.  For them, there is no dead-end proposition.  Undermining the sitting president, to such an extent that nothing can be done about the chokehold of progressive special interests on Washington, D.C., is actually their goal.  They don’t share any objectives in common with the voters who elected Trump in 2016 – which is the reason there is no compromising with them.  Trump voters want less government.  Progressives aren’t satisfied with even the extraordinary size of government we have now.  They want more.

Trump stands in their way.  He is the only effective figure now standing in their way.  That’s why they are so determined to take a few pieces of innuendo about Trump, and flog them repeatedly until everyone who isn’t just ignoring them is dazed and speechless.  The demented frenzy of their quest is evident in a number of ways, from their expletive-filled verbal incontinence to their chronic lying and incessant misrepresentations.  They are lending themselves without compunction to repeated violations of federal law and breaches of national security in the form of intelligence leaks.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

The anti-Trump media are slitting their own throats with their behavior; they will never recover their reputation with a broad spectrum of the people, at least not under their current brands.  The nihilism of their enterprise is startling.  Over the past eight years, something similar can be said of the Democrats, who have doubled down over and over on all the things that have lost them governorships, statehouses, Congress, and voters.

He who troubles his own house, says Proverbs 11:29, shall inherit the wind.  The institutions of the left seem hell-bent on troubling everyone’s house, including their own.  From what they demand, as they burn bridges, break windows and attack the police and the middle class, we can only conclude that what they want is the power to hold a lot of other people perpetually at risk, so they can impose an endless string of miseries and petty triumphs on their fellow men.

So much for what the anti-Trump left wants.  What is it the anti-Trump right wants?  I ask this as someone who didn’t even vote for Trump.  He wasn’t my choice, for a handful of reasons that are important to my voting decisions.  But now that he is the president, I continue to be saddened, if no longer dumbfounded, by the sight of “NeverTrumpers” allowing themselves to be spun up by the media narrative against Trump.

Several valid arguments can be made about why the anti-Trump narrative still amounts to nothing.  But that’s not my purpose here.  My purpose is to say something else that really needs to be said, and it’s this.  There is no future in riding an anti-Trump train to nowhere.  So you’ve reached the end of your rope, and you can no longer defend Trump, because they’ve beaten you down with one too many spinnable allegations from anonymous or heavily Democrat-linked sources.  You feel that they have indeed made it look bad.  You feel that it does look bad.  You have to speak out.

That’s fine, and you have to do what you have to do.  But you’re speaking out on a dead-end street, with no way to back yourself out of it.  There is nowhere to go with joining the anti-Trump charge.  The important point is not even this: that among the virulent anti-Trumpers, your voice is meaningless.  The important point is that there is literally no next step for America or your own future that you can exercise any discretion over.

Now, if I believed that Donald Trump was a toxic infestation of America, and that the insanely overhyped innuendo against him had merit, I would perhaps take my own stand where the NeverTrumpers are increasingly taking it.  I might say, “This is my hill, and here I die.”  But I don’t believe it.  The “Russian interference” narrative, just by itself, is too ridiculous and full of holes.

Of course the Russians tried to influence the U.S. election.  They always do.  But they didn’t succeed in any demonstrable way.  There’s no there there.  Trying to connect Trump to the Russian-interference narrative is like trying to connect Trump to a plot to exterminate all the unicorns.

That colors my choices, and it may be an unbridgeable gap with the NeverTrumpers.  But that said, I find the certainty about Trump’s unrighteousness, and the apparent determination to simply accept political death in a dead-end, to be misplaced here.  As a matter of fact, I don’t think it would be more righteous to die under the boot of collectivist cultural Marxism than to see Trump, flawed as he is, triumph over his media enemies – who have proven over and over that they are also the enemies of the ordinary people, of America, and of the truth.

All Trump has to do to triumph is survive, and retain an ability to act effectively in the office he holds.  There is no reason to think he wants anything more than that.

If he doesn’t survive in office, far more will be strangled off than the Republican brand.  The hope of America as she has been will be gone.  Millions of Americans will have nothing left in the tormented shell of their nation to be loyal to.

Those Americans know they are fighting for their lives right now, and that the media war against Trump is a war against them.  It is not evidence of a faulty conscience, to want to get out from under Obamacare, to have regulations rolled back and jobs plentiful again, and to see our borders secured, more than one wants to declare one’s disgust at Trump for being uncouth and mouthy.  It’s actually evidence of a healthy attitude toward the promise of life – not to mention the proper relation of government to the individual conscience, and a proper understanding of how God wants to relate to His people (hint: not through the temporal state).

Trump’s core of loyal voters aren’t going to be swayed by ineffective indignation from NeverTrumpers.  They will point out, correctly, that the NeverTrumpers haven’t been effective in all their years of indignation about progressive Democrats, and that nothing has changed.

The tightening noose of collectivism cannot be lived with; its cost is too high, and it’s the Trump voters who have been bearing all of it.  They want out.  They can’t sell their futures out for the sake of a media narrative against Trump that doesn’t amount to anything – no matter how embarrassed or disgusted it makes NeverTrumpers feel.  Neither can I.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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