Opinion

Conservative And Liberal Readings Of President Trump

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

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Over the years, as a conservative and while working in the world of politics, I was able to make a number of friends on both the liberal and conservative ends of the ideological spectrum.

I am a better person for the diversity of opinion.

As corny or naive as it may sound to some, I still believe we are all Americans who have a shared responsibility to make our nation work for all of her citizens and that is never going to be achieved if we don’t at least – minus the haters – speak to each other.

With that in mind, over these last several months, I have been having an ongoing and ever interesting conversation with a former very high level Democrat friend of mine who is now in the business world.  A friend I have known for twenty years.

A friend who – like me – chooses to put commonsense and pragmatism before party or ideology.

Precisely because of that mindset, it was her unshakeable belief during those months — and right up until election night — that because of the “growing anti-establishment mood” and because Hillary Clinton “was a flawed candidate with a long and controversial public record,” that Donald J. Trump would prevail in the presidential election.

The election, costly and useless recounts, Russian fables, and “faithless” electors continually proved her correct.  No matter how much some on the left tried to game the system or reverse the will of the nation, Donald J. Trump still won, then won again, and then won for the final time.

On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump will indeed become our 45th President.

What then?

Well…according to my prescient Democrat friend, that is when the total meltdown of those on the left who refuse to accept the results or refuse to work with the Trump administration – be they in the media, in entertainment, in academia, in politics, or other liberal entities – will begin.

More than that, she believes that behind the scenes, they are in a full-blown panic that every success President Trump achieves with his “unconventional cabinet picks and methods” will expose them as charlatans who purposely sold “Nanny-State-Snake-Oil” to poor and hard-working Americans while they enriched themselves behind the scenes.

One of the main reasons Donald Trump won the election was because he was able to prove that the shrill voices of the entrenched establishments from across the political divide were totally irrelevant.

An unmasking which only served to infuriate them.

Most of those who have inhabited the Ivory Towers of these elitist entrenched establishments have very little or no real-world experience.  For years, they have spouted ideological nonsense to either help themselves or their parties, or simply to keep the American people from learning the truth.

Donald Trump quickly cracked the code and went around them to speak directly to the American people.

About a year ago now, in order to break down the “Trump Phenomenon” into a fun and relate-able example for a few media buddies, I compared Donald Trump to the Rodney Dangerfield character in the movie “Back to School.”  Whereas in that movie, the tough, “uneducated” construction CEO enrolls in a college to keep an eye on his weakling son.  While there, he proceeds to undress a no-real-world-experience liberal economics professor by telling him exactly how the “real world of business works.”  So much so, that the students turned to face the Rodney Dangerfield character to take notes.

In those emails to my media friends, I said that a growing number of Americans were now “taking notes” from Mr. Trump.

A year later, both my Democrat friend and I believe that Donald Trump is driven by pragmatic results and not ideology and that to achieve those results, he will continue to refuse to have his voice filtered, interpreted or twisted by entrenched establishments who have failed our nation time and again.

He will speak directly to the American people in “unconventional” ways.

And because his words will get through, my Democrat friend strongly believes that come November of 2018, if the Democratic political leadership and their surrogates in the mainstream media, entertainment and academia still refuse to give then President Trump any credit purely out of spite, hate, or blind loyalty to a failed ideology, they will suffer the largest mid-term losses in the history of our Republic.

I suspect that if for no other reason than ‘self-survival,” more and more Democratic politicians will push aside the haters and jump on the quickly accelerating Trump-Train.

We will know shortly.