Politics are the ultimate grudge match and Capitol Hill Democrats are in a fight for their lives. Is Trump winning? Or are the Democrats just losing?
State of the Union 2018 (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)
Death Before Dishonor
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie described the situation on Capitol Hill perfectly this week. For any fans of the seminal hit HBO series based on the bestselling books by George R.R. Martin, calling the Trump Administration a “Game of Thrones,” just about sums it up.
But this game of thrones doesn’t stop at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: Christie should have included all of Capitol Hill in his assessment.
In a game of thrones, you win or you die. If you take a shot at the king, better not miss.
The game of American politics is no less perilous. Over half of those tuning in to tonight’s SOTU address who would rather see the entire country crash and burn, and Venezuela too, than see the Trump Administration succeed.
If cutting off your nose to spite your face were an Olympic sport, Democrats would be the only ones currently going for the gold. Though, in fairness, plenty of conservatives felt that way during the Obama years.
The Democrats Are Not Winning It
Is Trump winning or are the Democrats beating themselves?
Trump: Evil Mastermind. Nazi. Traitor. Racist. Slacker?
Today’s leftist Trump outrage du jour is that Trump is derelict in his duties.
First, he was a Nazi dictator with an evil masterplan to bring every aspect of American life under a new fascist regime controlled by the Kremlin. Now, he’s a slacker who spends most of his time playing on the internet.
No wonder the country is in such terrible shape?
Considering Trump’s growing track record of accomplishments as President (if you don’t know about them you need to diversify your news sources) this criticism seems pretty weak. Especially since the Democratic strategy heretofore of comparing Trump to Hitler falls spectacularly apart under mounting claims of Trump’s endless hours of unstructured ‘executive time’ spent talking on the phone and playing celebrity fued on twitter.
What Trump has done in just over four years of Presidency, he has also done, according to a leaked presidential schedule, in a shorter workweek than his predecessors.
And?
Liberal detractors complaining about Mar-a-Lago and calculating the costs of Trump Presidential vacations are grasping at the same feeble straws conservatives grasped unsuccessfully during the Obama administration with outrages over Obama Hawaiian vacations and expensive golf habits.
No one cares.
In worse news for Democrats, even Trump’s most ardent critics in the press are begrudgingly beginning to give his admittedly maverick foreign policy proper credit for beginning to actually do the things other politicians have been barking about for decades.
If the NYT starts admitting that putting America first actually helps America, Democrats will really be in trouble.
And for Democrats anyway, the bad news just keeps coming; the U.S. economy is strong and jobs won’t stop coming back in droves. The FIRST STEP Act passed. Hospitals are now required to post master price lists for goods and services online for all to see.
Trump Is Getting It Right on Veterans Care
Even those long neglected military Veterans are starting to see some light at the end of a long, dark VA hospital tunnel as Trump’s new rules allow those living too far from a VA hospital to use their benefits on care closer to home, just for starters.
If President Obama had managed anything close to the above, we’d all know: Liberal Democrats would still be crowing about it today.
Impeachment Trap
The Democrat’s only cohesive political strategy, digging up dirt to get Trump thrown out of office, is also failing miserably.
The impeachment clamor is fading to a persistent whining drone as questionable investigations drag on and on and each revelatory smoking-gun goes up in smoke.
Democrats are forgetting, it would seem, how hard Republicans worked to impeach President Bill Clinton. And how well it worked out for them, both in terms of acheiving their goal and at the polls in the election cycle that followed.
Democrats are forgetting, too, that impeachment means bringing charges against a President. Impeachment alone does not expel a President from office.
During this country’s last Presidential impeachment, even when Republicans caught Clinton in a radical, very public, lie about his deeply problematic exploitative sexual relationship with an intern barely out of her teens, it did absolutely nothing to remove Clinton from office.
“I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” — President Bill Clinton
On the contrary, Clinton’s popularity recovered from the scandal faster than you can say “abusive power dynamic.”
Russia, it turns out, did not manage to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, though the DNC’s unfortunate meddling in the primary process in favor of Hillary Clinton unquestionably did.
He Who Digs the Pit Falls Into It
Some top Democrats are even landing on the same swords they’ve used to skewer others.
Embattled Governor of Virginia Ralph Northam is facing demands for his resignation over decades-old yearbook photos that appear to show him wearing blackface (or in a KKK outfit).
The defense that the photos in question are decades old doesn’t hold water anymore; Democrats themselves have made any racist, sexist or homophobic thing ever said or done fair game now.
If Northam does cave to pressure to resign, his successor, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, is facing far worse problems of his own. A woman who accused Fairfax of raping her in 2004 has retained the same firm which represented Christine Blasey-Ford of Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing fame.
Though Fairfax stridently denies the allegations and insists the encounter was “100 percent consensual,” the denial defense doesn’t work anymore:
We believe women, now.
Presumed innocence until proven guilty, due process of law, a fair and impartial trial by a jury of your peers; those things are for people not accused of crimes against women or minorities.
Preventing a Wall or Jumping Off a Cliff?
Yes, Democrats have managed to deny Trump a victory on “the Wall,” he so strenuously supported. But they have done so at a terrible cost.
By refusing to allow even one dollar for border security they have exposed themselves as the party of open borders and illegal immigration; the party that intends to abolish ICE and put nothing in its place.
That no industrialized nation on Earth has this type of radical immigration policy seems to have escaped their notice. Along with the fact that most American voters do not support such extreme measures.
“But he put kids in cages!”
First of all, he didn’t really. The facilities in question are indeed inadequate for children, just as they were under Obama, but they weren’t cages. And naturally, there are going to be plenty of issues when a BORDER SECURITY office is bombarded with IMMIGRATION OFFICE problems on a massive level.
Second, what exactly have Democrats done about it? In the aftermath of what Obama called a humanitarian crisis way back in 2014, congressional Democrats wouldn’t approve even one dollar to improve the situation in 2019.
Great job?
(contributing writer, Brooke Bell)