Donald Trump: Man in the Arena

Sundance, that tireless intellectual warrior standing guard over at The Conservative Treehouse, occasionally jeers: “You ‘conservative pundits’ still don’t get it. Trump isn’t our candidate. He’s our murder weapon. And the GOP is our victim.”

Recently, he returned to that refrain after highlighting an interview in which Mitt Romney announced his intention to vote for a Democrat unless Republican primary voters nominated Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, or Ron DeSantis for president. Given that Romney tried to remove President Trump from office for Joe Biden’s quid-pro-quo crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere, his continued betrayal of grassroots voters is no surprise. Still, considering how many ordinary Republicans held their collective nose to vote for John McCain in 2008 and then for Ol’ Pierre Delecto four years later, it would be nice to think Establishment Republicans could be convinced to show some reciprocal respect for their voters’ wishes.

Professional Republicans’ sustained contempt for the electorate has been infuriating. For this reason, there was a time when candidate Donald Trump was more “murder weapon” than presidential dynamo in my mind. I loved what he had to say in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and I believed he was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale political pantomime. However, confronted with the Establishment’s absurd attempt to saddle voters with another Bush or Clinton eight years ago, voting for Trump felt, first and foremost, like swinging a sledgehammer through a mold-laden Uniparty wall in dire need of being knocked down.

Since his victory over Hillary Clinton — an unindicted co-conspirator in the Russia collusion fraud against the American people — President Trump has proven himself far more capable and consequential than I ever imagined. As evidence for how much the Deep State fears this one political outsider above all others, compromised prosecutors, judges, bureaucrats, and lawmakers have done nearly everything they can to deprive him of his property and liberty. Still, the man stands with a vim and vigor that is inspiring. Even while fighting one legal battle after the next in courtrooms across the country, he holds back-to-back campaign events and political rallies. The contrast with Dementia Joe’s lethargic attempts to merely walk across a stage without falling down is stunning.

Watching Trump persevere, despite the forces arrayed against him, is like witnessing President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 Paris speech, entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” come to life: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly.” In the arena, President Trump is a sight to behold.

Just as astonishing, the U.S. government has plumbed to insidious depths to keep Trump from the presidency. Obama’s FBI not only spied on his campaign but also framed him as a Russian spy. While Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann attempted to cover up the government’s ongoing criminality, they spent two more years threatening the Trump administration with selective prosecutions and process crimes. Congress impeached him for noticing Biden’s pay-to-play family corruption in Ukraine. Those same turds impeached him again for giving a speech a mile from the Capitol concerning the 2020 election’s obvious fraud. After killing four unarmed Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, authorities in D.C. pushed ridiculous propaganda defaming J6 protesters as “insurrectionists” attempting to overthrow the government. The FBI and DOJ have spent the last three years hunting down Trump supporters, sanctioning election lawyers for daring to combat fraud, censoring and prosecuting pro-Trump meme-makers for exercising their free speech, and secretly listing anyone who denounces these tyrannical actions as a potential “domestic terrorist.” As for the coming 2024 election, Joe Rogan says it best: the Uniparty’s only campaign strategy is to imprison Donald Trump.

The U.S. government’s unconstitutional and criminal behavior has been shockingly atrocious. If nothing else, Donald Trump’s rise to power has revealed a level of entrenched D.C. corruption and rampant authoritarianism that most Americans never imagined possible. It has been enough for General Mike Flynn — one of the first Trump administration officials to be targeted by the Deep State — to conclude that the United States is “now officially a communist third world banana republic.”

The U.S. government does not believe in freedom. It believes in propaganda, deception, and force. It believes in mass surveillance and the criminalization of speech. It believes in religious and ideological discrimination. It believes in unfettered illegal immigration, widespread and unchecked violent crime, and the unconstitutional confiscation of citizens’ firearms. It believes in putting Americans on secret lists in order to monitor their movements and influence their behaviors. It believes in endless wars all over the world — including all-out gun battles on city streets right here at home. What it will not countenance, however, is limited government, individual liberty, and long-term peace.

Every four years, two private corporations posing as political parties offer the American people a choice for president that almost always consists of two crooks who have long been on those corporations’ payrolls. The State-controlled press calls this “democracy.” It is no such thing. It is an illusion of choice — or at least it was until the American people found a workaround and successfully put Donald Trump into the Oval Office.

Now we aren’t even allowed our traditional quadrennial illusions. After the “never let a crisis go to waste” use of COVID to skirt state voting laws and usher in a new fraud-filled era of anonymous ballot dumps, elections look even less real than they did before. Successful campaigns may depend entirely on an avalanche of mail-in ballots and an army of political operatives willing to collect them, fill them out, and return them to unsecured drop boxes sometime between the months before Election Day (ballot hunting season) and the weeks after that now irrelevant endpoint when undated, unverified ballots are still permitted to flow in and be counted.

In response to the American people’s Trump workaround, the Establishment Class simply constructed a workaround of its own that eliminates the need for any real voters. If the Uniparty gets its way, elections will be nothing more than illusion and fraud mixed together until the pungent smell of horse manure is strong enough for the “authorities” to claim victory.

However, the feeling among Trump’s supporters is neither apathy nor dread. If D.C.’s Establishment Class assumed that its constant bombardment of injustice and harassment would wear voters down until they begged for mercy by agreeing to vote for another Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, or Hillary Clinton, that plan has backfired. Instead, the Uniparty mass produces one feeling among the public: sheer rage.

It has been said that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — another warrior worthy of Roosevelt’s gladiatorial arena — carried around a poem written by Charles Mackay, the nineteenth century Scottish writer perhaps best known for his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In that poem, Mackay asks:

You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,

Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,

You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.

It seems to me that no U.S. presidential candidate has ever had more skin in the game than Donald Trump. As the unaccountable Deep State’s true enemy, he deserves all Americans’ support. Or, as I like to say: MAGA like YOLO ‘cause FJB.