There were three articles this past week by two of my favorite reads and that struck me as a tad bit obsessive, so I decided I would be a little obsessive myself and write about Trump again and all too soon. The first item I wish to present are the recent polls showing Hillary Clinton defeating The Donald 50% to 39% with 7% going to the Libertarian Party candidate and the rest to the Green Party. The fact that these two were included in the poll and the Constitution Party was not was indicative of seeking every presumably mainstream viable candidates despite us all knowing that Donald Duck had as good if not better chance than the Libertarian and Green Party candidates of winning the elections, especially this year where more will be pressed to write in a Disney or Peanuts character. Still, it seems somewhat difficult to believe that Hillary Clinton gained nearly 8% points while Donald Trump lost around 3% in a single week, but then again this is an election like few others. The last time anything remotely similar came down the pike the United States elected James K. Polk as their President and that may have had more to do with the opponent’s campaign theme stating, “Who the hell is James K. Polk.” Perhaps there is something to be said for getting your name out before the public even if it is your opponent ridiculing your obscurity. Perhaps if Henry Clay had ran advertisements with his name instead of his opponent’s he would have won the election and nobody would ever have heard of James K. Polk, but he didn’t and so we now know that Polk was the eleventh President of the United States. But enough about then, this is now and we have a completely different problem as both the candidates are well known, maybe a little too well known.
James K, Polk and Henry Clay
Just a quick aside to those who feel I write too often about Trump and appear to be ignoring Ms. Clinton. Hillary Clinton’s shortfalls and misdeeds are more than well-known and her record stands as it is for better or for worse. Thus far she has not been indicted, but not for lack of trying. Some would claim that much of the effort has been spent finding reasons and ways not to charge her with crimes; many might say far too much effort. The one item which might be of interest is that there are no laws which preclude being President and giving all your State of the Union addresses from the Prison library. Imprisonment does not disqualify one from being elected President and would only prevent them from serving past a few weeks if the Congress brought charges of impeachment and a guilty finding removing her from office. Without an impeachment conviction from Congress there is no reason a President could not serve two terms as President while serving a long term in even Federal Prison, though such would be unlikely.
The most echoed complaint about Donald Trump has been his sophomoric attitudes and overindulgence of self-adoration. Then there is the further claim that he tends to go off on tangents and wild exclamations in response to what should be serious answers to serious questions. He takes criticism as if it was an attack on his being and returns as he perceives he has received. All of these are packaged in different orders of severity and then summarily referred to as disqualifying him to hold the office of President. Character faults, ignorance, self-adoration and aloofness are also not disqualifications to the office of President. Actually, there are very few actual qualifications to be President and none of them have much to do with intelligence, education, good character or even literacy. So, no matter how disqualified many of us believe one or the other, if not both, candidates put up by the two major parties may appear to be, let us assure you that both are technically as qualified as one need be to be elected President. So the next time you read a column claiming either candidate is unqualified to be President be assured that you are reading an editorial opinion and not a fact.
One of the other favorite reasons which make Trump a poor choice to be President, we have read, is that he will have his finger on the button, or more accurately direct access to a list of launch codes for different scenarios, which in and of themselves would likely take a week of briefings for any normal human being to master, and that would pose too dangerous a position to allow such a shallow and unserious person who seems more drawn to the adulation of the office than the actual performance of the duties to be permitted to access. Luckily, Donald Trump is likely not the buffoon he has been playing thus far on the campaign trail and likely is aware, as are many pundits though they are want to admit, the real campaign as far as some 80% of the voting public are concerned does not begin until the second or third week of April and everything before that is grist for the political mill, and Donald is giving the mill all it can handle. He will not even start spending in earnest as those paying attention now have already decided and picked their preferred poison. This is definitely going to be an election decided in the final two weeks and everything before is trimming hanging in the hall. If Trump is going to become serious as promised, do not expect this new Donald until the end of September as he will give the media a week or two of introductions before refining it for the final push when the election truly will be decided. Trump is not the fool he appears to be playing as you do not even hold on to a fortune as a fool and if half his claims are valid he has done rather well in his investments despite the media concentrating on those that went bust. Ask any true investor and one of their likely favorite quotes comes from Edison who claimed his success came from not allowing failures to deter him but only to show him another thing which would not work.
Donald Trump having the access codes for nuclear weapons is not giving a baby dynamite and matches and leaving them in the quarry to play. He is no more prone to starting a nuclear exchange on his Presidential whim than most of us, though there are some who might have doubts about that. Further, after two or three days in office Donald Trump will be disabused of any thoughts that he was just elected to the cushiest job on the planet. Those days will be spent receiving the most serious reality check conceivable as he is briefed by the CIA, Military Intelligence, FBI, NSA and a number of agencies neither he nor we have ever heard of and what he will learn would turn the hair on a peach white. I am fairly sure such reports and truths about the realities in the deepest recesses within our world, which most of us are not privileged to know, unequivocally and in the starkest terms would serve to alter even Donald Trump shaking all he believed he knew about the world in which we reside. Even things deduced by the fiercest news addict would take the wind from Trumps antics and bring him crashing back to be grounded in what is real and presented before him. Add to this the fact that he will have appointed people who are well known for expertise in the workings and situations around the world, people whose worlds most of us would never care to share if we were informed as many of these experts reside in day in and day out. The only two Presidents in since even before World War I who were likely not even the slightest surprised when they received their initial briefings would have been President Dwight David Eisenhower, as he had just finished commanding the allied efforts in Europe and pretty much knew many of the troublesome areas as he was living them, and President George H. W. Bush (the elder), as he had been head of the CIA formerly and Vice-President and probably trusted and included in many of the Presidential briefings thus knew most of what any briefing upon taking office was going to contain. There are very good reasons why the Presidency tends to age the men holding the office so visibly, and these are reasons which most of us would just as well not be made privileged to as it would remove any doubt about the shape of the world and threats held within.
There is also the truth that Donald Trump has presented defining core beliefs which are placed on his campaign website though for detractors it is far easier to challenge the Trump buffoonery he has shown the media, especially those in the media seeking to discredit him. Baiting the mainstream media has been one of the games that Donald Trump has played largely for his own amusement as he is just as aware as are we that there would be no pleasing the leftist media pundits and if he were to treat their questions seriously they would likely ask him when he planned to stop beating his wife and if he answered it the headline would read, ‘Trump Beats his Wife,’ or ‘Trump Refuses to Stop Beating Wife.’ That would be the reality of much of the reporting as we have already witnessed; so with these tricksters and gamers out there laying traps for him to fall into, and he has fallen for more than his supporters wish he had forcing them to defend the undefendable, why even treat their ‘interrogatories with any degree of respect and seriousness when all they exist for are for Trump to take them on seriously and then they report the choicest morsels strung together out of context and in an order often expressing the opposite or things never uttered by Donald Trump. We will not even deign to give any examples as doing so would also serve to send our readers into the darker corners of the liberal, leftist media and all its machinations. Suffice it to say, Donald Trump is giving a show for the pure entertainment factor as he realizes the media is trying to game him, so why not play along and game the gamers. Trump has his positions defined, as we linked to above, but that is not what the media wishes to cover or expose to the light of day. Informing the American public that Trump has serious positions, which anybody can go and read for themselves, is not what their coverage is about, theirs is to destroy all veracity and support behind Donald Trump such that their darling, Hillary Clinton, wins the election by hook or by crook come November. This is also why we will witness more and more polls showing Hillary Clinton pulling away eventually predicting a landslide win for Hillary Clinton all in an effort to suppress Trump voters from even going to the polls on election day.
Presidential Rivals Not So Different
on Far Too Many Positions
It should not surprise anybody with an ounce of integrity who has experienced even the slightest glimpse into how the media operates and the extents the state with all of its power even to include court challenges which even if fought and won would take those proceedings past election day thus accomplishing the goal of hiding true democratic choices openly to the public. The reality is the fix is in that there are but two parties and that the United States has a two party system. Check your Constitution and you will not find anywhere a limit to the number of parties permitted in American political theater. There have been elections thrown to Congress to sort things out as none of the candidates, sometimes more than even just three, reached the required number of electoral votes to become President and the delegates remained locked. Four candidates, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William H. Crawford and Henry Clay, had originally campaigned for the presidency in 1823-24 and each man had the unyielding support base generally reflected the geographic region from which each came. Further confusing the election of 1823-4 was the fact that all four candidates claimed to represent the same party, the Democratic-Republican Party. Who said there had to be more than one party for controversy and more than a single candidate for the office of the President? Numerous Presidential elections have included more than two parties and others have had one party nominate and run two candidates in order to win differing states with neither candidate strong enough overall. This seldom made any difference as fielding two candidates proved to almost always throw the election to the other party. This in and of itself as well as the destructive antics of people such a Teddy Roosevelt running with his own Bull Moose Party simply because he did not win his party’s nomination which simply weakened his former party’s position splitting their vote and throwing the election to their mutual opposition. Often such splits worked to divide but not conquer as that divide was most apparent on the side of the third party candidate taking votes from their former and natural party leaving their mutual opponent the electoral victory.
The finality is this claim that the only fact which supports a Trump receiving anybody’s vote is due to their distaste for Hillary Clinton. This is an insult to the true supporters of Donald Trump though these pundits would also claim that the average Trump supporter is too ignorant or lacking in intelligence to understand that they had been insulted; simply piling on now, aren’t we. What makes the claims against Donald Trump appear to be greater than their support base is directly due to elitist and Republican hierarchy who detest Donald Trump and are ashamed of his candidacy representing their party, a party they believe deserves better than Donald Trump. If these people are pushed, the reality surfaces and we find that these are the very elitists and establishment Republicans who gave the electorate John McCain and Mitt Romney, both wonderful men with lots of talent and capable of being an outstanding President except they are centrist candidates more popular with the party leadership than its people. This is where Trump can claim his right to the nomination as he defeated all the centrist elites’ candidates and the other conservative darlings even once it became evident that the race was finally between two men, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, neither very popular with the Republican upper crust leadership who were left wondering where they went wrong. That has an easy answer, they were fully behind repeating every mistake of the last two elections and the people decided otherwise. One needs look no further than the campaign funding of the candidates. Initially all money was bet on Jeb Bush. He crashed and burned early. Then the money went to Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Ben Carson and others except for Trump. Donald Trump was the red haired, freckled step child nobody wanted left to grow up in a political orphanage but Trump took to the mean streets, like the ones in New York where he was raised. He then proceeded to battle the entire power structure of the Republican Party, the party he was attempting to garner the support for his candidacy for President. Somehow this proved the best path to tread as this was the year of the outsider. Yep, the year of the outsider and the primaries gave us the two main candidates having over 50% negatives for both in polling and two as connected monetarily deeply in the establishment of either party. That was the one truth evident in the 1823-4 elections, when carefully examined there is still only one party which could be called the Democratic-Republican Party even today. The main difference is that the Clintons have always been in the midst of the political mainstream and elites on the left while Donald Trump can actually be viewed as an outsider despite his campaign contributions, which he made often equally to each party, which were pay to play contributions so Donald could always claim he had supported either candidate dependent on his access to whatever approvals his next project will be required. That is the reality of how business need operate in order to not become subservient to either party and especially to their politics.
So, what can we say about Donald Trump and the fears he exudes to so many pundits and other commentary of these elections? Much of the fear is simply the media attempting to play on other people’s fears which can be largely traced back to early losses by favorite candidates such a Jeb Bush, likely the candidate with the moneyed support and who was considered, according to the media, to be the established leader which should have read the establishment’s candidate whose sole fear is that they have nothing truly behind them but the moneyed leadership whose sum total is greater in dollars compared to numbers of supporters. Such proved too deep a hole to get oneself extricated no matter what the monetary reserves contained. This was proven time after time where some even threw their hat in the ring supporting others who remained to fight a better fight but each failed until Trump and not-Trump remained the two standing candidates. Candidates other than Donald Trump were no longer gaining supporters as much as they were gaining people desperate to prevent Trump from winning the Republican nomination making him their candidate for President. Even now after the convention and every last ditch efforts having failed are seeking to find some way of placing a favorite son in every state to deny Trump winning in every state where this may become an accomplished reality. What these panicked elitists of the party are missing in their calculations is that if they prevent Trump winning some state all they have accomplished is electing Hillary Clinton as she will win such states handily. So, those opposed to having Hillary Clinton for their President had best find some reason they can latch upon in order to place Donald Trump into the White House. The one advantage this year had brought is both of the party candidates will desire looking truly knowledgeable in most areas desperately seeking any bump they can garner. It still remains to be seen exactly where the youths’ votes will fall at the end of the day. Another crucial area which bears watching, as it will be a vital and necessary component if Donald Trump hopes to be competitive, is the trending of the voting for married women, a demographic to both be voting on Election Day and supporting Trump in sufficient percentages. This one vital demographic is and has been the biggest question mark in the Trump equation, married women, especially those with a college education, and whether they will vote in sufficiently high percentages as well as vote Trump overwhelmingly. Without this demographic a Trump victory appears shaky and in jeopardy. Of course that is if polling is to be believed. Possibly the most manufactured and profoundly wrong segment of the entire election might turn out to be how little polling can be an accurate gauge of public opinions in this new digital world. One poll may prove to be the most accurate of them all are those based on social media, Twitter in particular. We will have to wait and see while keeping in the back of our minds that the pundits have sold Donald Trump nearly every step of the way. They have raised questions on his origins, intelligence, seriousness, knowledgeability, competence, skill set and any other quality which could be used to berate, belittle and otherwise oppose his candidacy and Trump has proven them wrong at every turn. The question now is whether he can do this one more time in November.
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 