Those who are not fans of the federal government can rest assured that there are going to be at least two years of gridlock in Washington.
If anything gets done it will have to be through deals, where neither side trusts the other.
It won’t be terribly different from the current situation except the two sides will be in different political parties.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump never got along. In fact, in some ways Trump may prefer to deal with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who says she is going to be speaker. Trump knows exactly where Pelosi is coming from and he doesn’t have to worry about Pelosi stabbing him in the back because she is going to slap him in the face.
Trump enjoys a battle and he may figure that with some key concessions he can get more of his agenda through the House with the Democrats in charge than he could with the Republicans.
The House really can’t do much of anything without Senate approval, so Trump doesn’t have to worry about the House raising taxes or trying to bring Obamacare back from life support. If the Republicans in the House had done what they promised to do for years and killed Obamacare, they might not have lost the majority, but in the end there wasn’t the will to do it.
Trump is a dealmaker and it will be a real challenge for Trump to find a way to make deals with the House. But if you look at what Trump has done as far as trade goes, he has been able to make deals that experts said were impossible.
Trump, for instance, seems to be really enjoying negotiating with China, which isn’t giving in easily. So far China has been willing to destroy its own economy rather than make a deal with Trump, but, as Trump knows, that can only go on so long. China is going to have to make some concessions. Trump knows it and the Chinese leadership knows it.
Then again, negotiating with China may turn out to be a whole lot easier than negotiating with Pelosi or whoever the Democrats elect as speaker.
One thing Trump can count on is that the Democrats have enormous party discipline. If Trump does reach a deal with the Democratic speaker, he doesn’t have to worry about making deals with a bunch of Democratic splinter groups that don’t agree with the speaker.
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But this election did have something for everyone. The Democrats could celebrate winning the majority in the House and the Republicans could rejoice in gaining some seats in the Senate.
Not everyone Trump campaigned for won, but the vast majority did – proving once again that he is the most powerful politician in the country.
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The fact that nobody really won in this election, or perhaps nobody didn’t lose, proves just how divided this country is. The Democrats made big gains in the House, enough to win the majority, but the Republicans increased their majority in the Senate.
There was no blue wave as the mainstream media had been predicting for months. It was in many ways a typical midterm election where the party that is not in the White House makes big gains. It has happened that way in all but two midterm elections for over a hundred years.
What is pretty amazing is that Trump, by using his popularity with his base, managed to get out and save the Senate. Trump is portrayed by the mainstream media as a dolt when it comes to politics, but he is certainly the best politician in the White House since Bill Clinton. And if he wins in 2020, he will have a good claim at being better than Bill Clinton. If he not only wins but manages to win the House back in 2020, that would just about cement that claim.
Trump saw what was happening, held huge rallies in key states where the Republican Senate candidates were in trouble and got his base out to vote.
If there is anyone to blame for the Republicans losing the House it is Ryan. One of his jobs as speaker was to raise campaign money and make certain that his party stayed in the majority. Ryan announced he was retiring and it appears that he had retired. Of course, Ryan is not a popular speaker. He certainly isn’t popular with the conservative Republican voters who got Trump elected. But there are a lot of ways to help candidates win without being out at campaign rallies.
If Ryan spent his time in Washington trying to get Republicans elected then he did a poor job of it. But wouldn’t it have been far better for the Republican Party if, instead of announcing he was going retire, he had simply retired? A newly elected speaker who was anxious to keep the job may have actually worked at keeping the job.
During this campaign how often did you see Pelosi in the news, and how many times did you see Ryan. Pelosi appeared to be all over the place and Ryan made the news mainly when he said that Trump couldn’t end birthright citizenship.
Besides not being a smart political move, it has not been determined if the president can end birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants or not. Even if Ryan personally felt strongly about it, from a political standpoint not arguing with Trump would have been the smart move.
Ryan has made it obvious that he doesn’t like Trump. He refused to campaign with Trump in 2016 after the Hollywood tapes were released and it doesn’t appear the two have ever really made up. But to come out during the midterms and indicate that you think your president is a nutcase is not going to help Republican candidates.
Everyone knew the Republicans were going to lose seats, but all they had to do was concentrate on wining enough seats not to lose 23. It doesn’t sound like an impossible task, but it is impossible if you don’t try or if you spend your time fighting amongst yourselves.
District 13 Congressman Ted Budd was in a tight race here and Ryan spent 10 minutes at Guilford County Republican Party headquarters. He was on message while he was there, but 10 minutes is not a whole lot of time to devote to a close campaign where the Republican candidate was being wildly outspent by the Democrat.
Ryan refused to answer a single question from the media while he was in Guilford County, which is vastly different from Trump, who will stop and answer questions even when his aides are trying to get him to move along.
How could it have hurt Ryan to spend two minutes talking to the local media? It’s not like he was going to hear some question he hasn’t heard a hundred times before. And Ryan has been around long enough to know how to talk about what he wants to talk about regardless of the question.
Talking to reporters in Guilford County wasn’t going to make or break any campaign, but it was an indication that Ryan’s heart was no longer in it. He may not have officially retired but he has been acting like a short timer who can’t wait to get out the door.
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The left blames Trump for dividing the country, which only proves how out of touch the left is with the rest of the country, which is clear to see if you look at the reporting by the leftist mainstream media of the 2016 election.
The mainstream media ignored the huge crowds that Trump was attracting to his rallies, including the people standing outside who came knowing that they could not get in but wanted to show their support. The mainstream media ignored them because they didn’t understand them.
All of the people representing the mainstream media have jobs; they didn’t lose their jobs because of the policies of former President Barack Obama. Not only did they have jobs but they all agreed that Trump was a pretentious jerk who, in the beginning, they believed would never win a primary; then they believed he would never win another primary; then they believed that despite winning all the primaries, the Republican Party would never allow him to be the nominee; then, when he became the nominee, they kept thinking that for various reasons the Republican Party would dump him and let Vice President Mike Pence take over.
They believed all this because they knew – and they figured the Republican Party knew – that there was absolutely no way that Trump could be elected president. Everyone in the mainstream media was voting for Hillary Clinton; all of their friends were voting for Hillary Clinton. In the leftist world of the mainstream media Trump would be lucky if everyone in his own family voted for him. Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that she ran a horrible campaign, was going to win in a huge landslide. The reason Trump was running all over the country at rallies and Hillary Clinton was quietly talking to a few big donors in California was that Hillary Clinton already had it in the bag. There was no reason for her to wear herself out campaigning when she had won the moment the Republican Party nominated Trump.
The fact that when Hillary Clinton did hold a rally they had to reduce the size of the venues as much as possible and force all the big Democratic operatives to attend didn’t matter because the people were behind Hillary Clinton; of course they were.
What the mainstream media missed and are still missing is that, while all of their elite friends were supporting Hillary Clinton, the regular folks who had been working for eight years without a raise if they were lucky, and working at a new job for a lot less money than they had been making if they weren’t so lucky, were not enamored with four more years of the same.
The rank and file didn’t like the fact that the US was being beaten up overseas or that Obama had decided that open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens was the way to go.
Having missed all of that in 2016, it’s sad but true that the mainstream media haven’t learned their lesson. The mainstream media believe that people who voted for Trump regret that decision and would not vote for him again. The fact that this time around his rallies were bigger is explained by saying that people go to a Trump rally for the same reason they go to a freak show, if there still is such a thing. It’s to see the show, not to support the man.
But once again Trump proved that the mainstream media are out of touch with a good half of Americans. The people who voted for Trump still support him. They like what has done and is doing.
Most people don’t like his tweets or the fact that he exaggerates as much as he does. But as I’ve said a thousand times, everyone exaggerates. What Trump supporters like about him is that he stands up to the left and he doesn’t whither up and run off and hide when he is accused of being racist when what he said wasn’t the least bit racist.
The current standard on the left is that if you say anything that offends a minority you are a racist whether that person had any reason to be offended or not. If you criticize a minority, even if the criticism is warranted, you are a racist. If you are a man and criticize a woman then you are a sexist. If you say anything the least bit derogatory about a member of the LGBT community then you are a homophobe. The only people left in the country that you can speak about any way you want are white males and you can say any harsh, critical thing you want about them because they deserve it.
A lot of people simply don’t agree with that philosophy and they love the fact that Trump doesn’t pay any attention to it. He calls women “beautiful,” something that is not politically correct.
Trump is, in many ways, in an enviable position. It doesn’t matter what he says, the mainstream media and their cohorts on the left are going to jump all over him, so he doesn’t worry about it. He’s willing to take the left on – something politicians like Ryan avoid at all costs. In fact, some Republicans have become more politically correct than the Democrats because they know that they are far more likely to be brutally attacked for anything they say.
Trump isn’t just willing to go out there and take the punches; he punches back, sometimes at 3 a.m., and sometimes he doesn’t spell words correctly when he tweets. It’s amazing that anyone has the gall to make a big deal out of spelling in tweets because anyone who has tweeted more than once or twice has misspelled words or, even worse, had spellcheck replace a perfectly good word with something that makes no sense. Why is that acceptable for everyone else in America but not with the president?
If Obama were still president and spent part of his day tweeting without a filter the left would be all over themselves about how open and transparent Obama was.
Obama was the opposite. He refused to even speak to schoolchildren without a prepared speech and teleprompters.
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Trump said that Middle Easterners and Asians were among those in the caravan of immigrants headed for the US. The New York Times characterized this as “baseless” and said it was a lie.
Now Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said that it is true. According to Nielsen, her department has seen Middle Easterners and Asians in the group. So does The New York Times have better information than the department of Homeland Security? It seems unlikely.
Has The New York Times run an apology and correction? If it has it has been in tiny type in the bottom left corner of some page.
But the original attack by The New York Times would not be allowed if it had been about anyone else. The NYT couldn’t possibly know if it was baseless or not. Trump could have received that information as part of his daily security briefing. Just because The NYT didn’t know where Trump got the information doesn’t mean that it was baseless. In fact, the claim that it was baseless was baseless.
It’s like when they accuse Trump of lying when what they mean is that they disagree with him.
Trump, like everyone, is entitled to his opinion. You can certainly lie about your opinion but your opinion itself cannot be a lie, even if it is demonstrably wrong.
In my opinion the mainstream media are filled with bounders, cads and poltroons. Someone might fact check that and find that while there may be some bounders, a few cads and a fair number of poltroons in the mainstream media, that to say that it is “filled with” is incorrect.
Even if they are correct, my opinion is not a lie and I have every right to dispute the fact checkers definitions of bounders, cads and poltroons. I might even want to point out that since the fact checker is obviously a cad himself he cannot make an unbiased judgment. But what I would not do is call the fact checking cad a liar for disagreeing with me.
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How about some honest reporting on the caravan of migrants traveling from Honduras to the US?
The mainstream media constantly talk about them walking but then slips in information like the caravan was traveling from Cordoba to Mexico City – 178 miles – in one day.
No one can walk 178 miles in a day. Rather than saying the caravan is walking, marching or trudging along pushing strollers from Honduras to the US, it would be more accurate to say they are riding in transportation provided by the organizers of the trip, or they are hitchhiking.
It is absurd to say that the 5,000 (or is it 14,000, or is it 2,000 people?) in the caravan are walking to the US and that there is no organization behind the trip. It is not possible for 5,000 people to gather in one place by chance, all with the same idea – that traveling 2,000 miles to the US is the right thing to do and they should leave now. Organizing a trip for 10 people is not easy. Organizing a 2,000 mile trip for thousands of people is a task that takes a lot of planning and organization.
Unfortunately for the mainstream media, the people in the caravan haven’t gotten their script memorized and when they get interviewed they often explain that they are going to the US because they couldn’t find jobs in Honduras.
Being unemployed will not get them refugee status in the US. What they are supposed to say is that they are running from gang violence and they feared for their lives. No doubt by the time they get to the border, they will be all on script.
I don’t see why gang violence in their home country is a reason for the US to give someone asylum. People are killed in the US by gangs every day. So why are they coming here to get away from gangs?
If their government was trying to hunt them down and shoot them or put them in prison for their political beliefs, that is a good reason to grant asylum. And in that case a person can’t simply say that is what is happening; they should have to have some evidence.
If unemployment, poverty and fear of violence from their neighbors become sufficient reasons to grant refugee status then we don’t need to worry about a wall because the country will be inundated.
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The Chinese have put a tariff on soybeans from the US and this has hurt one small part of the US farm economy. The soybean growers and brokers are suffering because of the decreased demand for their product.
Absent the tariff, this should have been a really good year because prices are up for soybeans. The mainstream media have focused on the plight of the soybean growers, but the goal is to have an equitable trade agreement with China in place of the current one that heavily favors the Chinese.
It seems like having a fair trade agreement is worth some discomfort by a small industry. In the end the country will be far better off, and some of the soybean farmers agree.
It’s not possible to reach a fair agreement with China without some discomfort by some Americans, but government decisions often cause problems for one group to help another.
In this case to back off tariffs with China because it’s costing some in the soybean industry money would only prove to the Chinese that the US isn’t serious about a more equitable trade agreement.
