By DEXTER DUGGAN
Despite his opponents’ plans to make him a pariah to the public, President Trump plunged into a populace eager to receive his presence in a steady schedule of additional campaign appearances during the final week before the midterm elections on November 6.
People thronged by the tens of thousands to attend his talks around the nation in order to affirm their support for this president and his well-known conservative agenda, not because they expected to hear surprise revelations by the president at each whistle stop.
Still, Trump showed he could bring forth yet another crowd-pleaser when he called attention to the misapplication of the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship, which he rejected. The amendment’s misuse has been a magnet to non-U.S. lawbreakers.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s wording specifies: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” This clearly shouldn’t apply to offspring of illegal aliens rejecting the jurisdiction of the U.S. by sneaking into this nation and continuing to defy its laws.
You’d think that being born a citizen with allegiance to, say, Costa Rica apparently should be regarded as shameful beyond endurance and to be renounced by any means at the earliest moment. But as a nationalist, Trump realized that other nations should cherish their own rightful pride, too.
Predictably, major GOP leader and departing House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) disagreed with Trump, saying the Constitution has to be interpreted as it’s written, and “I’m a believer in following the plain text of the Constitution.” Ryan seemed to accept others’ enduring errors about constitutional wording as defining what its “plain text” is.
Maybe an inclination to passivity is one reason Ryan decided he had to depart Congress.
If there weren’t many other Samsons in the national Republican Party to help Trump lift the load, the indefatigable 72-year-old president flexed his muscles some more to show he understood what supporters expected of him.
When he could have tried to distance himself from the campaign because a passel of pundits said the GOP would embarrass itself and lose the majority in the U.S. House, Trump showed his creed was that you can’t win much if you won’t fight for it.
This was the Republican leader so many people had yearned for, and his standing among GOP voters in the polls proved that. This was no Paul Ryan or John Boehner who’d sold himself as a conservative to get into and move higher up in Congress, but the main thing they seemed to want to conserve was their energy.
If there was a fight to be had with left-wing Democrats, they’d rather surrender and shovel more taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood’s abortionists than wage necessary battles.
If such negativity had rubbed off on the GOP image generally, Trump was doing his best to correct that rather than sigh and take to his couch. A multibillionaire businessman had learned a thing or two about the road to success, and saw no reason principled persistence shouldn’t work at the highest levels of his political party, too.
Still, many months of ferociously biased attacks against the president by dominant, Democrat-oriented media must have taken some toll. Had the poison mixed in with the barrels of ink and electronic pulses been strong enough to tilt the game against Trump, or had enough of the news-consuming public seen how untrustworthy these media were, so as to reject lots of their hokum?
These media realized they were in a desperate fight to retain their own power, their treasured ability to smear and deride any uppity conservative who dared stand against their left-wing agenda. Trump had a passion and determination that rejected their loathsome arrogance.
Media that had lied their heads off for decades now gasped in outrage that Trump, they said, was a liar. Ain’t room in this town for two sets of liars, they squealed.
Moreover, Trump acutely realized the power of daily direct contact with the public through his tweets, to what grew to more than 55 million followers, that soared over the heads of the unified resistance to him in major newsrooms.
As this was written the evening of October 31 for the hardcopy Wanderer that went to press the following day, the nation awaited the verdict on whether Trump empowered the GOP, almost against its will, to retain control of both houses of Congress on November 6.
The amazing “October surprise” is legendary, the last-minute development that redirects political trajectories. The surprises began a little earlier this year with hysterical Democrat opposition and mud-slinging at the September confirmation hearings for Trump’s second successful Supreme Court nominee, the Catholic Brett Kavanaugh.
Their crazed opposition played into Trump’s hands and allowed him to employ a powerful slogan about the good he was doing for employment versus the public fears they generated — “Jobs, not mobs.”
Not long afterward, marches northward of thousands or more proclaimed border violators were announced to surge into the U.S. Southwest in November. Trump pledged that he’d thwart them.
If Democrats had planned for late-breaking events to favor them, these weren’t working.
Then a middle-aged mystery man, Cesar Sayoc, was arrested October 26 for allegedly recently mailing bomb-like devices that didn’t explode to prominent Democrats whom Trump had criticized. Hostile media inaccurately referred to them as “Trump’s targets,” almost as if the president had instructed Sayoc to make the mailings.
His van windows were plastered like a clown car with pro-Trump and anti-Democrat stickers that must have made driving difficult, but certainly raised questions about the suspiciously convenient election-season timing of the activities by Sayoc, who had registered as a Republican.
At least one observer noted that when Republicans send bombs, it’s by B-52s, while it’s Democrats who use the mail.
However, the very next day, October 27, there was no quibbling about the severity of a massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill where an allegedly Jew-hating, anti-Trump assassin shot down 11 defenseless worshipers. The suspect was identified as Robert Bowers.
Eager to stir any sort of additional hatred against Trump, some media outlets picked up the meme that the president had a kind of responsibility for the Pennsylvania attack and should stay away rather than arrive to offer his condolences. Media reported angry opponents telling Trump to keep his distance.
Fox News reported that both Republican and Democratic congressional leaders declined to accompany Trump to Pittsburgh on October 30, although the synagogue’s Rabbi Jeffrey Myers said “the president of the United States is always welcome” to visit. “He’s my president. He is certainly welcome.”
While media coverage tended to portray Trump as his usual troublemaking, selfish self, medical workers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where the wounded, including four police officers, were taken, cheered Trump’s arrival.
A video posted October 31 at the Washington Free Beacon site showed Trump, wife Melania, and Trump’s Jewish daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, walking along a hospital hall as doctors and nurses to the side begin calling out in thanks. Curious, Trump comes over as they thank him for visiting, and one man asks to shake Trump’s hand.
As Trump reaches out, others shake his and Melania’s hands, then a man calls out, “I love you, Ivanka,” causing widespread laughter.
It was a lighthearted moment arising from a tragic event, but it must have set newsrooms seething that they still hadn’t prevented ordinary Americans from feeling respect and friendship for Trump.
Two days after the murders, conservative activist David Horowitz told the Laura Ingraham national radio program on October 29 that while Trump’s alleged hate was being protested, there are anti-Semitic “Justice for Palestine” groups at university campuses across the U.S. that left-wingers weren’t protesting.
No Monopoly On Violence
The Wanderer asked conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard what he thought of demands that Trump not even go to Pittsburgh to honor Jewish martyrs.
“Leftist protesters will hassle Trump wherever they can, so them doing so under these circumstances is hardly a surprise,” Querard said on October 31.
“And they will be joined by leftist elected officials who will make a big thing out of boycotting the president because they’re afraid of what their supporters will do if they see them merely shaking hands with him at something as non-political as honoring the dead after an act of terror.”
As for the man who mailed the bomb-like devices, Querard said, “The bomb-maker is obviously a damaged human being. What did the damage is still largely unknown, as is what his intentions were. Press reports differ on whether or not the bombs were obvious dummies designed to scare or badly executed attempts at causing real deaths. Still, neither is the act of a rational or decent human being.
“The usual rush of one side to point out the ideological affiliation of the villain in a particular story is usually reversed one or two acts of evil later,” he added. “The left may have an affinity for violence that is particularly strong, but neither side has a monopoly on it.”
Meanwhile, Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Republican Party, told The Wanderer that the attack on Trump for going to Pittsburgh was predictable.
“In ancient times there was a group similar to the MSM (mainstream media) and the millionaire leftists whose job it was to protect the status quo. They comprised the Sanhedrin Court. The attack on President Trump by the gullible flash mob for attending the services for the Jewish martyrs was predictable,” Haney said on October 31.
“The MSM and millionaire leftists are the present-day Sanhedrin protecting (Barack) Obama’s legacy,” Haney said.
“Since Trump is so hated for reversing Obama’s legacy, we can anticipate that these attacks from the New Sanhedrin will continue for the foreseeable future. We should ignore the screamers and support Trump’s lead if we are to save our republic.
“On November 6, vote for candidates who will reverse the progressive movement. I am not aware of one Democrat candidate who would oppose the progressive ideology,” he said.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress