President Trump

An Independent’s View of President Trump. I’m not a Republican and I’m not a Democrat. I’m an Independent, which really means I’m a little bit of both. What I am pretty much depends on the issue. Sometimes I’m conservative and sometimes I’m liberal. Since I can’t be easily categorized, tell me the issue and I’ll tell you what I think and you can decide what I am. I pretty much don’t like either side, and I think most Americans think like I do. This makes it very difficult for us to decide whom to vote for in a two-person race. More often than not we are forced to vote against one candidate rather than for the other candidate. Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. If you disagree, I only have to offer one reason why I’m right: she was beaten by an even worse candidate—Donald Trump. That one sentence really says all you need to know about Hillary Clinton. Yes, I know she won the popular vote, but who cares? We don’t elect presidents by popular vote, and if she’s just figuring that out now, she was an even worse candidate than I thought. I did vote for her though, not because I wanted her for president, but because I really, really didn’t want the other guy, and I’m still angry at the Democrats for not putting up someone I could truly get behind. Maybe they’ll do better next time, but somehow I doubt they will. The Republicans are even worse. I believe in a large part of the Republican platform, but I keep having to ask myself—where do they find these guys? They have to be even worse than Hillary because Trump beat all of them first. How did this even happen? No one really knows for sure, but I’ll give you my two cents worth, since this is my blog and not yours. I’ll preface what follows with a disclaimer: I’m probably wrong, but if you’re going to convince me of that you’d better bring some real strong evidence. The election of Donald Trump was the perfect storm of American politics. Prior to 2016 I truly believed he could not have been elected. What happened was that there were too many people who were simply pissed off at politicians, Washington, and government in general. If you voted in the past for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney or Bill Clinton or George Bush (either one), you had some minor philosophical differences with the other side, but in reality, not much was actually going to change—and it didn’t. And 2016 was shaping up the same way except for one thing: Donald Trump. Donald Trump said things no politician would ever say. He was different. He wasn’t a politician. He wasn’t from Washington. He was rich and didn’t need the job. He spoke his mind and didn’t care if you liked what he was saying or not. He called out the media for doing such a lousy job (and they were). He also gave a voice to misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. Millions of people who’d never had a voice before began to hear Donald Trump say things that they believed. He struck a chord with millions of disenfranchised people who hadn’t benefited from either the Republicans or the Democrats. The more outrageous he became, the more he horrified the left and scared the right, the more he attracted people who realized that Donald Trump was not going to be business as usual. They voted for him by the millions, and in doing so raised a giant middle finger to everyone in government everywhere. I know a lot of very smart people who voted for Donald Trump—people you would never expect. They tell me that they voted for him because they were sick and tired of politics and maybe it was time to elect someone who was really going to shake things up. A lot of the people I know who voted for him don’t even like him. They just wanted him to “clean the bastards out of Washington,” as one of them put it. They don’t care that he scares our allies even more than our enemies. They wanted America to stop taking care of the world and start taking care of our own people right here at home. They didn’t like the creeping globalism they saw everywhere. They wanted America to be strong in every way, and they believed Donald Trump would do that. I’ve watched President Trump for almost a year now, and I don’t think he’ll be able to do that. I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but I can tell you this: Politics will never be the same again.