It has been almost a year since Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, and none of the dire predictions made by the Democrats and the mainstream media have come to pass.
Remember back during the campaign when the mainstream media were predicting that Trump would have to step aside and Vice President Mike Pence would run in his place? Even after the election some were predicting that Trump would never be allowed to take the oath of office. Since then, the demise of the Trump administration has been predicted repeatedly by liberal pundits and conservative never-Trumpers.
New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman predicted a “worldwide recession with no end in sight” shortly after Trump was elected. But the opposite has happened. The stock market has hit 71 all time highs and the Dow has risen over 6,000 points since Trump was elected and may hit 25,000 before Trump’s first year in office is complete. Unemployment is down and some people are saying that the economy is at full employment, meaning those who want jobs have jobs.
The world is not at war as many predicted, but it appears the war in Iraq and Syria is over and ISIS has been crushed – not by former President Barack Obama, whose “lead from behind” policies allowed ISIS to conquer vast territories in Iraq and Syria including Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. Trump allowed the US military to do what it knows how to do and the result was the decimation of ISIS.
Trump, for instance, doesn’t require the US military to drop leaflets announcing where and when bombs would be dropped as Obama did. Trump also doesn’t announce what the military is going to do before it does it, as Obama did.
The year ended, not with a war with North Korea as many predicted, but with its leader Kim Jong Un making conciliatory statements. Trump let it be known that if it was war that Kim wanted, the US was willing. Kim may be crazy but he’s not stupid, and evidently he wants to live for a few more decades, something that would be unlikely if he started a war with the US.
Kim may, as he has said, have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. But as Trump pointed out in a tweet, the US has a lot more nuclear weapons and we know that ours work.
Trump still has a southern border wall high on his agenda, but with the Border Patrol actually enforcing the laws against illegal immigration it’s not as critical as it was when, under Obama, illegal immigrants were greeted with bus tickets to their chosen location in the US. It turns out that enforcing the law works.
The economists who are even slightly honest are predicting that the tax reform bill passed without a single Democratic vote will cause the economy to soar, as people and corporations are allowed to keep and spend more of their own money.
It’s hard to imagine how allowing an additional $1.5 trillion dollars to stay in the private sector isn’t going to boost the economy. Obama’s solution was for the federal government to spend more money; it didn’t work.
Trump spurred the economic recovery using the same methods that Obama had used to stifle it – through executive orders.
Trump has eliminated thousands of needless regulations that allowed companies to spend time producing products rather than filling out forms.
Trump has also quietly reduced the federal workforce by not filling positions that don’t need to be filled. He’s nowhere close to making all the appointments that he is entitled to make and it appears he has no intention of doing so.
Where he has made appointments is in the judiciary, where he has appointed judges who want to follow the law, not make the law fit their beliefs.
Trump continues to tweet to his heart’s content and the Earth has not stopped revolving around the sun.
The news media hates the fact that Trump communicates directly with the American people without the filter of the extremely liberal and biased mainstream media. But imagine that Obama had decided to tweet his concerns directly to the American people. If Obama had been confident and honest enough to tweet his thoughts and concerns, the mainstream media would have heralded it as Obama being open and transparent. The mainstream media would have talked about how groundbreaking it was for the president to communicate directly with his constituents and compared Obama to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his fireside chats.
But the mainstream media are so biased that they even attacked Trump for holding an impromptu press conference. When has the president ever been attacked for taking questions from the news media? The normal complaint is a lack of access to the president, but with Trump the mainstream media have the audacity to complain about too much access.
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It appears the Republicans can pass legislation in Washington. And considering that fact, it is absolutely astounding that the Republicans continue to fund the Public Broadcasting System.
Usually there isn’t even the pretense of having a conservative pundit on PBS broadcasts. Those with far left political views get together and talk about Republicans the way biologists talk about creatures in the animal kingdom. But instead of speculating on why raccoons wash their food, the government-funded news service speculates on why Republicans favor fewer government regulations.
The idea that NPR would have a conservative commentator on a show who doesn’t have to speculate, but can explain the political philosophy, is completely foreign to a network funded by the taxpayers.
I really don’t care what percent is publicly funded. It’s much higher than what NPR reports because so many local stations receive government funding, which is then paid to the network for their shows.
Not one penny of tax money should go to fund PBS. What is in some ways even more insulting than not having a conservative voice at all is when PBS chooses someone who may be more conservative than anyone who works for the network, but on any national scale would be far to the left of the middle, and promotes them as a conservative.
PBS has completely missed the point that Trump was elected president with 62 million votes, but more importantly that the people of this country went to the polls in their districts and elected a considerable Republican majority in the House and a majority in the Senate. Trump didn’t win a majority of the popular vote but he did win the race, and Republicans won across the country.
Yet the taxpayer-funded PBS ignores the opinion of at least half the nation and continues to present one side of the story – the liberal side. PBS is not only Democrat, it is far more liberal than the mainstream Democratic Party, which nominated Hillary Clinton not Sen. Bernie Sanders.
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It’s pretty incredible the lengths the mainstream media go to to criticize Trump. The Washington Post ran a piece Saturday that was highly critical of Trump for being too accessible while he was at Mar-a-Lago. Trump did a half hour interview with a New York Times reporter without alerting his aides and without having anyone from his staff present.
Now some of The Washington Post’s criticism is simply sour grapes. The Post sees The Times as its rival, although few people outside The Post’s offices see it that way. But the criticism wasn’t of The Times, but of Trump.
When, before Trump, have you ever seen the news media be critical of an elected official for being too open and transparent? Here was a dream interview – with no aides standing there to steer the president back in the right direction or offering to answer a question for him.
The Washington Post also criticizes Trump because when he is at Mar-a-Lago he talks to other members of the club without an appointment or anything. He talks to them just like he was a real human being who has friends, acquaintances and all of that.
According to The Post, this is a terrible thing for the president to do.
It boggles the mind. I actually can’t think of anything about Trump the mainstream media hasn’t attacked.
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Which brings up Trump’s tweets.
Imagine for a moment that it was not Trump sending out his own tweets on whatever he happened to be thinking at the moment, but Obama back when he was president.
If Obama had done that the press would have glorified him. The mainstream media would have touted Obama as the most transparent president ever. Every time he tweeted, network anchors at CNN and MSNBC would be beside themselves with joy and congratulations.
Obama, of course, did tweet, but he tweeted the same way he gave speeches. He had a team of writers working on his tweets. I don’t know exactly how many writers it took to write a 140 character tweet, but my guess would be four.
Remember when Obama had to use teleprompters to speak to a grammar school class? It wasn’t an accident. His handlers had learned that when he spoke off the cuff he got in huge trouble because he didn’t know much. How could he? Obama went from being a mediocre state senator in Illinois to president in almost no time at all.
And once he was elected to the US Senate he started running for president. He didn’t have time to learn much about national politics; first, he was too busy campaigning, and then he was too busy being president.
Trump not only tweets, he talks to the press all the time. During the Obama years, the press was not allowed to ask questions during photo ops. Any time Trump gets within earshot of the press they pummel him with questions and he often stops, not to answer one but to answer questions until his aides drag him away. Then he gets on Marine One and tweets up a storm.
Trump would be crazy to stop tweeting. His supporters love it and his detractors hate it.
Imagine the president who follows Trump. The White House press corps finally has access to the president, and if the next president takes it away, even if it is a Democrat, the White House press corps is going to complain.
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Even CNN agrees that Trump’s attack on the FBI is justified.
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According to the US Constitution, states are supposed to have sovereignty. The Constitution is supposed to outline the power of the federal government, and the 10th Amendment states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
But in the past 226 years, the federal government has grown stronger, mainly because it has an unlimited source of money, and the states have grown weaker because they do not.
States should be different from each other because it gives people more freedom. For instance, if you want to live in a state where marijuana is legal, you can move to Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Nevada and now California. If you don’t want to live in a state where people are high as kites, you can live in one of the other 45 states. That’s actually what our founding fathers intended – that different states would have different laws.
Here’s one that has not received the media attention of marijuana, but is a great example of how states are different:
Oregon in 2018 made self-service gas stations legal and people in Oregon are outraged. People in Oregon have said that having individuals pump their own gas is dangerous and just plain wrong. In the vast majority of states self-service gas stations have become a way of life, and in North Carolina finding a full service station is a challenge, but in Oregon it’s the other way around.
Trump is reducing the size of the federal government by not filling many of the open positions, even at the top levels. It hasn’t received a lot of attention but under former President Obama the number of federal employees had grown to over 2 million. Since it is nearly impossible to fire a federal employee, the best way to reduce the number of employees is through attrition. It’s not as neat as simply getting rid of employees who don’t do anything useful, or whole departments that are not helpful, but over time it works.
People in jobs that do nothing can be transferred to jobs that make a difference. It will be hard adjustment for them, but if they take a careful look at the private sector they will realize that even if they are now required to work, they aren’t going to receive the compensation or benefits of a federal job anywhere in the private sector.
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Speaking of federal departments that need to be purged, Trump should start with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It has gone rogue. Perhaps the best thing Trump could do would be to abolish the FBI and start over.
The FBI wasn’t established until 1908. So the country survived for over 100 years without an FBI. Maybe it’s time to rethink the federal law enforcement agency and develop an agency that is less political and more in line with enforcing federal law instead of an agency that tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election.
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Tuesday Trump tweeted, “Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid, Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailors pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dept must finally act? Also on Comey & others.”
It’s a great tweet for a candidate calling on the Justice Department to do its job and investigate Human Abedin, who as Hillary Clinton’s top aide operated above the law during the Obama administration.
The problem is that Trump is not a candidate, he is president of the United States.
If he wants Abedin, Comey and, hopefully, Hillary Clinton investigated by the Justice Department, he needs to call Attorney General Jeff Sessions into his office and tell him to do it.
So far Sessions has made some questionable moves as attorney general.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should have been fired, not given the right to hire a special prosecutor. Sessions never should have allowed someone as involved in the case as Bob Mueller to be appointed special prosecutor. Why is Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe just now announcing that he is retiring? What in the world does someone have to do to get fired from the Justice Department or the FBI? Evidently planning some kind of overthrow of the president – as Peter Strzok, McCabe and Strzok’s mistress Lisa Page did – is not enough, because despite the release of the text, they are all still working for the FBI.
Sessions came into a Justice Department that had been run by Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, both ardent leftists.
Lynch had the audacity to meet privately with former President Bill Clinton when Hillary Clinton was being investigated by her department. It was unethical, but Lynch knew that the results of the investigation, which was not complete, would be that no laws had been broken. Lynch knew this because FBI Director James Comey had already written his statement. Why wait for the results of an investigation if you already know what the results are going to be?
Lynch and Comey are gone from the Justice Department but the people who worked for them, the ones who actually did the work while Lynch and Comey made the news, are still there. People who were willing to lie and suppress evidence to protect Hillary Clinton and her aides shouldn’t be working in the Justice Department at all, but they certainly shouldn’t be working in the Trump Justice Department.
It’s the New Year. Sessions brought more pain and controversy to the Trump administration in 2017 than it seems possible for one man. Sessions needs to spend more time with his family. For the good of the Trump administration he should walk into the Oval Office with his letter of resignation in hand.
Or he should walk into the Oval Office and find his letter of resignation already written out for him waiting for his signature.
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It looks like Mitt Romney is going to get to be a senator.
A lot of pundits point to the presidential election debate between Mitt Romney and Obama when Romney finally brought up the attack on the US compound in Benghazi and was corrected by Candy Crowley from CNN who was supposed to be the moderator.
Romney backed down and, according to many, that was the turning point in the race, even though Romney was right and Obama and Crowley were wrong.
Now imagine that same situation with Trump standing in place of Romney and you can see why Trump was a great candidate and Romney was a terrible candidate. Trump would have howled and yelled about fake news and the dishonest media; he would have hounded Crowley off the stage with verbal attacks.
And Trump would have insisted he was right. He would have catalogued all the lies that the Obama administration had used to cover up what was a dangerous situation brought about by the policies of Obama and Hillary Clinton. Trump would have no doubt added a few exaggerations, but his outrage would have been real.
In the same situation, Trump would have turned that debate completely around and Obama would have whimpered off the stage like Romney did in the actual event.
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Trump is threatening to cut off foreign aid to the Palestinians, Pakistan and other countries that have not been cooperating with US policy.
The Palestinians are refusing to come to the negotiating table with Israel. No peace can come to the Middle East if the Palestinians don’t reach an agreement with Israel and no agreement is possible if the two sides aren’t talking.
Pakistan has been allowing those fighting against the US in Afghanistan to cross the border into Pakistan, establish camps and regroup before going back to Afghanistan to fight. And Pakistan helped hide Osama bin Laden from the US for years.
Why should the US pay countries and organizations that use American money to attempt to thwart American policy? It doesn’t make much sense to the average American, but we have been told for decades it is good for diplomatic relations.
Paying out billions of dollars doesn’t appear to be helping diplomatic relations. Israel and the Palestinians don’t appear to be any closer to an agreement than they were 10 or 20 years ago.
What Trump is saying makes sense. If the threat of losing that money is right out there on the table, it seems likely that we would get more, not less, cooperation. If it doesn’t work, what has the US lost? We can always give them money and try to buy their friendship again. But buying friends doesn’t work in life and it doesn’t work for countries.
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Democrats are claiming that the Hillary Clinton email scandal has been investigated and is over. They seem to have forgotten how long these political investigations take.
The Watergate break in was June 17, 1972; former President Richard Nixon was forced to resign on August 9, 1974, over two years later.
Following that timeline, Hillary Clinton and her top aides should be indicted in the summer or fall of 2018.
Congressional committees reportedly uncovered quite a bit of information at closed door briefings in December. Including more evidence that, not only did then FBI Director Comey start drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton of any wrong doing before 17 witnesses, including Hillary Clinton herself, had been interviewed, but he also ignored the reports from field officers that federal laws had been violated.
The computer technician who deleted the 33,000 Hillary Clinton emails after they had been subpoenaed lied about that act when he was first interviewed by the FBI, but he wasn’t charged with lying to the FBI like retired Lieutenant General and former National Security Advisor for Trump Michael Flynn or volunteer Trump campaign worker George Papadopoulos.
It certainly appears that the FBI is operating with a double standard. Trump aides get the book thrown at them and the aides of Hillary Clinton are allowed to keep changing their stories until they get one that works.
It appears that not only did Hillary Clinton and the people working for her commit crimes, but that Comey did also.
The mess that Sessions has on his hands is growing, and so far he hasn’t done much about it.
The inspector general is reportedly investigating the investigation of the Hillary Clinton private email server, but so far the Justice Department and the FBI have done nothing to instill confidence that the Justice Department is interested in justice.
With McCabe still the number two man at the FBI and Rosenstein the number two man at the Justice Department, does anyone believe that a fair investigation of the crimes committed by the Department of Justice and the FBI is possible?
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The recent cold snap has made me consider becoming a global warming true believer. Life is so easy to explain for true believers because everything is caused by global warming. The fact that record cold temperatures are being recorded across the US is caused by global warming. The fires in California are caused by global warming. The hurricanes last summer were definitely caused by global warming as were the 10 years previously without hurricanes.
Droughts are caused by global warming, but so are floods.
It is a truly incredible all purpose explanation for everything. Trouble in your marriage? It was caused by global warming. Your car breaks down? Your dog dies and you lose your job? All caused by global warming.
Late for work? It was caused by global warming.
How did people explain the world before Al Gore invented global warming, I can’t imagine.
