By PEGGY MOEN
Watching Trump’s wins mount up was like watching a newsreel of Patton’s Third Army tearing through Europe. I was at the MN GOP victory party at the Radisson Blu, Bloomington, Minn. Two huge screens showed Fox News’ coverage of the November 8 election.
At the party’s opening, at 8 p.m., the electoral vote total was Clinton 97 to Trump 139 — I was amazed to see Trump ahead. The crowd was light then, milling around the party room.
If great generals can feel a battlefield, so can political activists sense whether a victory party foretells the candidate’s win.
Trump’s totals began to grow — so did the crowd. When a candidate appears to be losing, the crowds thin.
People got louder as the big wins rolled in. They waved Trump/Pence signs and chanted “Trump! Trump!”
When North Carolina was called, the crowd stood up and screamed — no doubt thinking of the transgender controversy there. British troops dubbed North Carolina a “hornet’s nest” of revolutionaries, said a Fox commentator, and perhaps that has happened again.
Victory in hard-fought Florida brought dancing, and the revelers raised the roof of the elegant hotel after Ohio fell to Trump.
A giant blue elephant walked around, greeting the partiers and posing for photos with them.
Victories in Wisconsin and Iowa were especially popular with this crowd, thinking it meant neighboring blue state Minnesota would also go for Trump.
That didn’t happen, though other state GOP victories got announced from the podium.
State GOP Chairman Keith Downey greeted his “fellow Minnesota deplorables,” and throughout the evening announced several critical U.S. House victories (Minnesota has eight congressional districts).
Cong. Tom Emmer spoke a couple of times. Emmer and another incumbent Minnesota congressman, Erik Paulsen, fought off Democratic challengers. Local radio star Jason Lewis also prevailed in a tough fight for a congressional seat. All three are pro-lifers.
Republicans increased their majority in the Minnesota House and won the Minnesota Senate. Pro-abort Democrat Gov. Mark Dayton has two years left in his term.
So why was the top of the ticket victorious nationally?
Trump worked hard to win over social conservatives, and was battling ideas that should have died with the Protest Era. Hillary with her tired ideology worked just as hard to alienate religious conservatives — witness “deplorables,” WikiLeaks reports of staff slurs against Catholics, and the biggest insult of all: her choice of “Catholic” Tim Kaine as her running mate.
Pew Research reports that Catholics voted for Donald Trump by a greater margin than for any other Republican candidate in the five elections of the new millennium. Catholics favored Trump by seven percentage points: 52 percent voted for him and 45 percent voted for Hillary Clinton.
White evangelicals backed Trump by a reported 81 to 16 percent.
Thus, Christians pulled off a surprise attack on the left.
Another, odd factor in Trump’s victory may have been Janet Reno’s death. The Reno obituaries included reportage of the horrors of the first (and, thankfully, last) Clinton administration — Branch Davidian and Elian Gonzalez.
People therefore remembered all that and they were also tired of even hearing about the FBI’s dithering over Hillary.
The common sense of everyday folks who can distinguish between flawed character and inculcation of evil won out. These are people whose lives were hurt by Democratic policies, from NAFTA to Obamacare. They are human beings; they are not abstractions. It has been said that liberals love mankind but can’t stand people.
As to Donald Trump — after the Billy Bush recording episode, he stated that he is no longer the same person who made those remarks 11 years earlier.
If we don’t allow that change and conversion are possible, everything we do is close to useless.
EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo interviewed Trump October 27 on The World Over. Arroyo, noting that Trump is Presbyterian, asked him if he had a favorite saint. Trump mentioned Mother Teresa, and then John Paul II: “There was a toughness, but there was a warmth that was incredible” about the Polish Pontiff.
Indeed he was tough — the young Karol Wojtyla opposed both Nazism and Communism in Poland, and lived to become the Pope who coined the term “culture wars.”
And this election was culture vs. culture, as Greg Gutfeld of Fox News put it.
As this battle in the culture war wore on in the evening, like Patton’s Third Army, it stalled. No more states were announced for several hours: Cries of “Lock her up” and “Call it” arose from the Minnesota crowd.
Finally, Pennsylvania was called for Trump, putting him over the 270 electoral votes needed to win.
Many pro-lifers stress that the battle continues — pro-lifers need to push the Trump administration for an end to Obamacare, an end to the HHS mandate, and much more.
Steven Ertelt, founder and editor of LifeNews (www.lifenews.com) wrote on November 9: “We must make sure [Trump] nominates good judges to the Supreme Court who respect the Constitution and the rule of law and who would be likely to overturn the worst decision in the High Court’s history.
“We must make sure Donald Trump makes good on his pledge to sign a bill defunding the Planned Parenthood abortion business and protecting us from funding America’s largest abortion company.
“We must make sure Donald Trump makes good on his pledge to sign pro-life legislation to stop late-term abortions.
“We must make sure Donald Trump makes good on his pledge to uphold and respect the religious liberties of pro-life Christians who don’t want to be ‘forced to promote or be involved in abortion and abortion drugs’.”
At the same time, we should remember what we could have been facing.
Brian Clowes outlined the looming horrors in his “Never Trump” Wanderer series. He wrote in part 2 (September 15, 2016, p. 3A):
“So, if Hillary Clinton becomes our 45th president, all or most of the following will inevitably occur: The Hyde Amendment will be repealed, resulting in full funding for all abortions under Obamacare, in turn leading to a 25 percent increase in abortions to at least 1.2 million a year; the Helms Amendment will be repealed, meaning a huge increase in abortion and population control funding by the United States, leading to many Latin American and African nations legalizing abortion on demand; the Weldon Amendment will be repealed, forcing thousands of pro-life medical professionals out of practice. . . .
“There will be a gigantic increase in federal funding of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, making the abortion giant virtually invincible; the Freedom of Choice Act ( FOCA) will be signed into law, meaning a total ban of all pro-life picketing and praying outside abortion mills; pro-life crisis pregnancy centers will be actively suppressed by the government through continuous legal harassment or outright closure for alleged ‘false advertising,’ which NARAL and other pro-abortion groups have already demanded.”
Final thought: I don’t have much sympathy for the losers, not this time. It doesn’t take having the mind of John Paul II to understand that abortion is a more fundamental issue than climate policy, and that the partial-birth abortion Hillary favors is infanticide.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress