RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://The Curious Attraction of Donald Trump

Despite the fact that he is coarse, rude and humorless, Donald Trump is attractive to millions of Americans. Most are religious and believe in their families and communities; they are patriotic, diligent, and endowed with an uncommon level of common sense. But what accounts for this attraction? While I don’t pretend to have all the reasons, simply addressing the question is instructional. He is despised by those who have made service in government their life’s work. He is despised by those who find vulgar his ravaging of the English language. He is despised by those who cannot stand his orange hair and red ties. On the other hand, he is loved by those who represent what Franklin Roosevelt once referred to as the “Forgotten Man” – America’s working men and women at the middle and lower end of the economic scale. His acolytes are those who do not neatly fit into an elitist identity – meaning they are largely white, working class people from fly-over states, those who Barack Obama once derided as clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” In other words, he is attractive to America’s broad middle class.

These people have watched as Democrat-led, Washington’s establishment divided people into identifiable sectors – women, people of color, proponents of LGBTQ, etc. – those seen as victims of white oppressors. His fans, the so-called oppressors regardless of social position or economic status, love that he is nemesis to progressive politicians; to administrative lawyers who feed off government; to university professors and administrators who rely on public grants; to private sector union leaders (but not union members); to school boards who protect predators and approve schools dispensing tampons in boy’s bathrooms; to spoiled college students who want their student loans paid off; to a media enriched by political ads, and to those enthralled with a sense of their own virtue; and to an entertainment industry that lacks any moral sense.

Using data from Statista and OpenTheBooks, spending on federal elections (President, Senate and House) compounded annually at roughly 14% between 2000 and 2020, while government spending compounded at about 7.5% over that same time. However, over those same twenty years median household income only compounded at two percent. The consequence is that lower and middle-income families have been left behind, as government bureaucrats, bankers, and media people have grown fat. Has this increased spending helped the middle classes? Last week, The Connecticut Mirror reported that United Way estimates that 40% of Connecticut’s households faced poverty in 2022. Keep in mind, Connecticut ranks eight when states are measured by median household income. Also donors, be they individuals, corporations or unions, expect a return on their investment. Remember Solyndra, the California-based solar panel company that in September 2009 received $535 Million from President Obama’s Energy Department and two years later filed for bankruptcy.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/14/the-strange-mythological-campaign-of-kamala-harris/

Increasingly, little if anything remains real about the Harris campaign.

Take ideology and the issues.

It is now well known that Kamala Harris was rated as the most left-wing of all current senators, including Bernie Sanders—according to GovTrack, a non-partisan compiler of evaluators in Congress. The Voteview project found her voting record the most liberal of all senators of the 21st century, except for radical Elizabeth Warren.

Harris as vice president in a 50/50 Senate has proven the decisive passing vote on more deadlocked bills than any other vice president in history—all thirty-three of them proudly progressive legislation. She has done more to ensure left-wing government at the national level than any prior vice president.

Indeed, Harris, as both a California state official and its senator, and as vice president, has for some thirty years championed almost every issue dear to the left—Medicare for all, an end to private health care plans, banning fracking, mandatory EV requirements, unrestricted abortion, wealth taxes, income and inheritance tax hikes, defense cuts, price controls, open borders, ending the border patrol, stopping all deportations, opposition to a border wall, mass amnesties, free transition surgeries for illegal aliens, and mandatory buyback of semi-automatic firearms.

In most of these cases, Harris not only voiced support but did so proudly and emphatically in front of hard-left constituencies. She has declared that she is a radical and woke.

During the 2020 Antifa and BLM riot after the death of George Floyd, Harris unabashedly helped to raise bail for arrested violent demonstrators in Minnesota. Indeed, she went on national television to warn the nation that the protests were a “movement” that would not and should not stop.

Given such a long record, Harris should have been proud of her politics, which had done so much, especially over the last four years, to change the very nature of the nation. Why, then, is she not campaigning on the allegedly superior record of the Biden administration, the innate advantages to voters of the progressive project, and the need to implement a further left-wing agenda? Rather than promising “change,” should she not be advocating “four more years of the same?”

Answer—Joe Biden has proven to be one of the most unpopular presidents in history. His approval ratings hover around 40 percent, and less on the very left-wing policies he and Harris implemented.

So, Harris is not proudly boasting of her past efforts to open wide the southern border, to support defunding the police, or to call for reparations. Instead, she has renounced most of her prior radical agendas and embraced their antitheses. In eerie examples of projection, whatever particular unpopular policy is most associated with Biden-Harris, she claims Trump, out of office since January 2021, was responsible for the fiasco.