Still Winning : Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (9781546085287)

by Hurt, Charles

  The month after that ad, President Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the normally whisker-tight bellwether state of Ohio by more than 8 points, the largest margin in that state since George H. W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis by 11 points for the White House thirty years ago.

  Once elected, President Trump rocked the political world by declaring in his inauguration speech that he intended to keep the promises that got him elected. He announced in December 2018 that he plans to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. Republican hawks immediately made their displeasure known. But this should have been no surprise, which Trump himself pointed out.

  “Getting out of Syria was no surprise,” Trump tweeted about the announcement. “I’ve been campaigning on it for years, and six months ago, when I very publicly wanted to do it, I agreed to stay longer. Russia, Iran, Syria & others are the local enemy of ISIS. We were doing there [sic] work. Time to come home & rebuild. #MAGA.” Later, Trump modified his position and has kept enough military advisors on the ground to prevent ISIS from regaining a stronghold in Syria.

  What was likely more surprising to those in the political universe was a candidate keeping his campaign promise.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  President Trump hugs an American flag at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2, 2019. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

  ROMNEY’S HOUSE OF RINO LOSERS

  If you really hate Donald Trump, you are probably not reading this book. You are not among the legions of loony lefties that have hijacked the Democrat Party and dragged it over the cliff of socialism. Nor are you among the small, smug, but incredibly powerful and self-satisfied fat cat Republicans in Washington known as “the Establishment.” Also known as “RINOs,” which stands for “Republicans In Name Only.” The RINOs are a stable of political geldings who call themselves “conservative” and “Republican” but do not actually represent the interests of “conservative” or “Republican” voters around the country.

  Instead, they are the passive eunuchs who serve diligently in the court of Democrats. They put up fights from time to time, but always dutifully lose and quietly go back to being loyal eunuchs in the court of Democrat Washington.

  Also, if you are reading this book, it is a near certainty that you are not among those afflicted by Donald Trump Derangement Syndrome.

  However, if, by some freak chance, you happen to be among those afflicted with this mentally debilitating disease, then I am here to help you.

  If you hate Donald Trump and are looking to place the blame for his election, look no further than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. She was arguably the worst possible person Democrats could have nominated in 2016, even if they had legitimately nominated her. We all now know, of course, that the Democrat Party officials actually stole the nomination and rigged the whole process to get Hillary Clinton nominated.

  And, in so doing, they did what establishment, power-drunk party elders often do when left to their own dishonest devices to circumvent the will of the people. In Hillary, they picked somebody who was so odious, so patently dishonest, so unlikable that even some dyed-in-the-wool Democrats could not vote for her—in some cases, not even when faced with the choice between her and Donald Trump. In addition to that blizzard of negativity, Hillary Clinton was a has-been retread who had already been roundly rejected by Democrat voters in 2008.

  Even if Democrat Party leaders had not rigged the nomination for her, Bernie Sanders would not have beaten Donald Trump. Despite the desires of an increasingly wacky Democrat Party, few Americans are interested in socialism. They know that socialism is an assault on everyday freedoms, that it quashes religion and ultimately kills people—around 100 million over the past one hundred years.

  Or, as President Trump said in his 2019 State of the Union address to Congress: “America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free.

  ”Tonight,” he concluded, “we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

  But the rise of socialist senator Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primary should have been a clear lesson for party leaders that 2016 was setting up to be a major rejection election. The status quo was in peril. Great unrest among voters in both parties meant that the only way to win was with something dramatically new and different.

  So, who did the geniuses leading the Democrat Party offer up as an agent of change in this era of clear upheaval?

  Hillary Rodham Clinton, who for the past twenty-five years has been trudging around on the national political stage. Her comments covering up her husband’s abuse of women—and her toleration and enabling of it—are the fodder of late-night comedians. In the public mind’s eye, there she is, hustling in and out of courthouses for depositions, offering faked, icy smiles, and always stuffed into baggy pantsuits, and usually lying about whatever she is talking about.

  So here is a woman who owes her entire career to marrying the right man. How on earth was Hillary Clinton ever going to be the face of progressive feminism in an era when so many women in every industry have achieved the highest levels—not because of who they married but because of their hard work, grit, and smarts?

  How could Hillary Clinton possibly prosecute the so-called Republican War on Women? How on God’s green earth was Hillary Clinton an agent of “change” after twenty-five years in the most powerful posts in national politics and eight years of dismal Democrat rule? Fact is, she had had a strong hand in creating nearly everything that was wrong with the country.

  Then, as she hilariously titled her latest book after losing, What Happened?

  Answer: You Lost!

  The other Democrat who deserves a huge helping of credit for the rise of Donald Trump is, of course, President Barack Obama. In 2008 he ran a positive and uplifting and unifying campaign. Those promising qualities quickly faded once he settled into the White House.

  A LITTLE RETROSPECTIVE

  Barack Obama burst onto the national political scene back during the 2004 Democrat convention, where Democrats were doing everything they could to get excited about the thoroughly unexciting John Kerry, who is famously unlikable. He tends to drone on and on and on and—worst of all—he takes himself so seriously when most others don’t.

  For example, during one campaign stop that year, Kerry thought it would be a really powerful and moving experience for his entourage to visit the hospital in Colorado where he was born. Of course, nobody wanted to see the hospital room where he was born. After all, we’re not talking about a manger in Bethlehem. But he dragged an entourage of reporters into the place and tried reenacting the historic moment when he took his first breath and began wailing.

  He said something along the lines of “Isn’t that hard to imagine.” Actually, given all the constant whining reporters had been hearing from him for the better part of a year, it really wasn’t hard to imagine.

  Needless to say, when the opportunity arose to hear anyone other than John Kerry give a speech, people perked up. And that year, it was Senator Barack Obama. Going back and reading that speech today is enlightening. You get a real sense of why he was such an appealing candidate—even if you did not agree with his brand of politics. He was positive and unifying. You got a real sense that he loved America and cherished the hope and opportunity our country holds.

  But it is also illuminating because it reminds you of just how miserably he failed once he tried to govern. You realize what a complete pig-in-the-poke the American people had been sold. He presented himself as an appealing candidate with noble instincts—but then governed as someone entirely different.

  In that convention speech, Obama quoted the Founders and celebrated “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He sounded like a red-blooded American patriot. He expressed gratitude that in America “we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution and that our votes will be counted, at least most of the time.”

  Th
is is the same man whose administration went on to weaponize the Internal Revenue Service to punish conservatives for their political beliefs. The same administration whose Department of Justice dismissed concerns about members of the New Black Panther Party intimidating voters outside a Philadelphia polling place during the 2008 election.

  This is the same administration that fought tooth and nail against efforts to secure voting everywhere to make sure fraudulent voters were not casting votes that would disenfranchise legitimate voters.

  And, most chilling of all, this is the same guy whose administration would launch a full-scale spying operation using the government’s most powerful domestic espionage apparatus against political opponents at the height of a presidential campaign. And as if that were not terrifying and disgusting enough, officials at the highest levels of the Obama administration collected information on political opponents and leaked that classified information to their toadies in the media in order to punish those enemies.

  While we might have been able to “participate in the political process without fear of retribution” before Obama became president, his administration changed that. In that 2004 convention speech, Obama also celebrated individual success. He met people all the time, he said, who “don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead—and they want to.”

  (Until, of course, he got elected four years later. Then, with unparalleled audacity, his message to entrepreneurs became “You didn’t build that.”)

  In the same speech, he warned fellow Democrats that the government was not always the answer: “Go into any inner-city neighborhood and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn—they know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.”

  This sounds so promising and heightens the dismay so many felt when he wasted his first two years in office—with control of the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate—to ram down Americans’ throats an orchestrated takeover by the federal government of the country’s health-care industry.

  Perhaps the most dishonest part of that famous 2004 speech was where Barack Obama talked about how far Americans had come in terms of racial reconciliation after a long, hard past. “Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes,” he said.

  “Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there is the United States of America.”

  It was a truly thrilling line. Too bad the evidence shows he didn’t mean a word of it.

  Needless to say, Obama’s legislating days in Washington ended pretty quickly after Democrats jammed through Obamacare. It would be their only significant victory—a victory that set the stage for the calamitous times ahead for the Democrat Party.

  Two years later, Democrats would lose the House to the largest Republican majority in history. Obama would also lose six seats in the Senate. Of course, even in the minority, Democrats continued to pursue an unpopular agenda. For Obama’s part, he turned to making all sorts of constitutionally questionable administrative changes to jam through the rest of his unpopular agenda.

  By the time Obama left office, he and his party had managed to lose more than one thousand seats across the country—along with the majorities in the House and the Senate. But Obama got himself reelected and that was all that mattered to him.

  NOW COMES MITT ROMNEY

  No matter how looney, stupid, or tone-deaf Democrats in Washington behave, they are forever lucky for the one magical ace they always have up their sleeve: Republicans.

  In all fairness, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton bear the overwhelming burden of responsibility for paving the way for President Trump’s ascension into the White House. But a good deal of that responsibility also belongs to Republicans who for years have fielded terrible, spineless candidates, ignored the wishes of their own voters, and made monstrous tactical errors that ultimately brought on their own destruction.

  Nobody in the Republican firmament better embodies those suicidal Republican instincts than Mitt Romney, the Great White RINO from Michigan. I mean Boston. Um, no. Actually Utah. Oh, whatever: Willard Mitt Romney is from wherever is most politically expedient at any given moment.

  Currently that is Utah, where he now represents the Beehive State in the United States Senate. Because that is the only state where the guy could get elected for a free ride back to Washington.

  Now, Romney has been praised as a genius turnaround artist with failing companies. That may be true, but he is also one of the biggest morons at politics to ever run for elected office. It is doubtful the guy could get elected dog catcher from just about any county in the country.

  Did someone mention dogs? One of Romney’s favorite little homey stories to endear voters to him is about the time he and his family drove a thousand miles in their station wagon. That’s nice until you get to the part where they strapped the family dog to the roof and ended up in a car wash because the poor dog had diarrhea.

  Yikes. Poor Seamus. Who but a real dope would tell people about something so idiotic? This is a good example of just how tone-deaf Romney is as a candidate.

  Good lesson for all future Republican candidates: Americans love their dogs. In fact, they love them far more than they like even the most popular politicians. You are not scoring any points chortling about the time you strapped your family dog to the roof of your car for a vacation a thousand miles away.

  But back to Mitt Romney, the politician. Before Mitt Romney was from Utah, he was from Michigan. That is where his father was an auto company executive. George Romney later became governor of Michigan. That is the state from which the elder Romney ran for president, ultimately crashing out of the 1968 campaign after admitting to being “brainwashed” about the war in Vietnam.

  After Mitt Romney was from Michigan and before he was from Utah, he was from Boston. It was there—in the liberal land of Ted Kennedy and Elizabeth Warren—that Mitt Romney found his political fortunes.

  It is true that when he ran for governor, he ran as a Republican. But he was hardly a Republican in any traditional sense of the word. He was in favor of abortion, against Ronald Reagan, and just fine with illegal immigration—so long as he could get a good deal on yard work. Oh, and so long as it meant cheap labor for all his buddies who owned companies.

  And Mitt Romney—speaking I suppose as a man of the people—once memorably remarked during his presidential campaign that he is a huge fan of NASCAR racing. I mean, who isn’t, right? Who doesn’t like Talladega Nights and who hasn’t snaked for miles and miles with three coolers of beer to get into Martinsville Speedway to get your eardrums blown out watching cars thunder around the track and plastering you with melted black rubber?

  Or, as Romney himself said, tweaking his blue-collar credentials: “I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners.”

  Somebody get this guy a stage. He should run for office. Real man of the people!

  It was as if there was no setting where Mitt Romney could find himself comfortable among normal people. At a Martin Luther King Day parade in Jacksonville, Florida, for example, he spied a group of people preparing to march. They ranged in age from adults to young children and Romney got excited. He wanted to mingle with them.

  So, he jumped out to greet them and said, “Who let the dogs out?”

  The group of people, of course, were good sports about it, but they must have wondered what was this white guy talking about. And just when you thought the whole scene could not get more cringe-worthy, Romney announced: “Oh, I see you’ve got some bling-bling here.”

  By no means did this s
uggest in any way that Mitt Romney is racist or even particularly racially insensitive. He was trying his best to connect with people in the warmest, most genuine way he knew possible. But it simply reveals that he doesn’t possess the innate skills to do so. Romney still goes to enormous lengths to pander to people and pretend he speaks their language, understands their issues, and wants to represent them.

  “Who let the dogs out?”

  “Oh, you’ve got some bling-bling here!”

  Lord, please help us.

  When it came to actual issues most important to conservatives or Republican voters, Mitt Romney was even more of a clueless caricature of everything voters hate about politicians. On abortion, for example, Romney so terribly contorted himself over the years that by the time he became the Republican nominee for president in 2012, nobody had the earthliest clue where the man actually stood.

  A devout Mormon, Romney maintains that he has always been at least personally opposed to abortion. Fine. Good for you. That is not why the question matters to serious people trying to figure out who they are going to vote for. What matters is a politician’s view of the law and when life begins and when the constitutionally guaranteed rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as granted by God kick in for a baby growing in the womb.

  When Mitt Romney first ran for the U.S. Senate—during his Massachusetts phase—he adamantly favored abortion: “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country,” he said during a debate with Senator Ted Kennedy, in which Romney clearly wanted to be for abortion even more than Kennedy. “I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years it should be sustained and supported,” he said. “And I sustain and support that law and support the right of a woman to make that choice.”