Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Democrats’ diversity dogma means Kamala Harris is the only way forward
The Democrats face an exquisite diversity, equity and inclusion dilemma of their own making. They will have to pick a woman of colour, Kamala Harris, as their presidential candidate 2.0.
With DEI ingrained in their political DNA, even as great swathes of America are having second thoughts about diversity dogma, the Democrats can’t risk choosing anyone else to face off against Donald Trump in November – even if another candidate was more likely to win. That’s why, if Democrats stick to their DEI religion, their convention next month must be a coronation, not an open contest.
Back in February, when it was clear to many that Joe Biden was too infirm to be President, let alone up for another four years in the White House, New York Times journalist Ross Douthat was way ahead of the pack: “If (Biden) drops out and doesn’t endorse his own number two, he’d be opening himself to a narrative of identitarian betrayal – ageing white president knifes first woman-of-colour veep – and setting his party up for months of bloodletting and betrayal, a constant churn of personal and ideological drama.”
Having been dragged out of the race, Biden has done what all good DEI Democrats do: endorse a person as the next US commander-in-chief in large part because she ticked the two top boxes on the identitarian checklist.
This is not some wacky partisan myth. Biden was open about his reasons for picking Harris as his VP. “If I’m elected president … I commit that I will, in fact, appoint a, pick a woman to be vice-president,” he said in March 2020. Biden told a room full of black journalists in August 2019 that he would prefer as his running mate someone “of colour and/or a different gender”.
The dilemma for the Democrats – and their progressive boosters in the media – is doubly exquisite. Having been exposed as liars about Biden’s competence to run for a second term, they will now likely be complicit in a second big lie – that Harris, if chosen as the new candidate, was picked because she is the most competent Democrat to lead the next administration.
Harris is a Californian liberal, most comfortable campaigning on abortion rights and rallying black, young and progressive voters. How well will she resonate with voters in rust-belt swing states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio where cost-of-living struggles feature ahead of progressive shibboleths? Especially with Trump’s running mate JD Vance hailing from Ohio.
On paper, Harris has notched up an inspiring list of firsts. Even as a diversity pick, one might reasonably have expected her to pick up requisite experience and skills along the way. Not so much. Even some on Harris’s own side of politics have remarked on how underwhelming she has been as Biden’s understudy. The failure at the southern border is her biggest legacy as VP.
But in Democrat-land, Harris remains the perfect DEI pick for president.
Even if Harris proves herself as president, it won’t put to bed concerns that DEI has led us down a merry path where good people who lack DEI credentials are overlooked and discriminated against.
There is a growing backlash against DEI for two reasons. Sidelining merit is a dumb idea, no matter how fine the intentions behind giving the less competent a leg up. Once upon a time, at least, DEI advocates argued that if you define merit broadly enough, you could meet quotas without worrying whether the pool of available DEI candidates with the requisite skills was big enough. Not now. Quotas and targets are all-consuming.
DEI is patently bad for those it aims to help, too. Witness questions being asked about the role gender played in Biden’s 2022 appointment of Kimberly Cheatle as head of the Secret Service. Appointed by Biden in 2022, Cheatle is ultimately responsible for one of the biggest failures in the history of the American secret service, when a 20-year-old man tried to assassinate Trump, leaving one man dead and others, along with the former president, injured.
Prominent conservatives are calling Cheatle a “DEI hire”. “Somebody really dropped the ball,” Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, said. “You’ve got basically a DEI initiative person who heads up our Secret Service. This is what happens when you don’t put the best players in.”
There are questions, too, as to whether a female Secret Service agent on stage with Trump was the right pick to protect the former president.
Meghan McCain, daughter of former senator and Republican presidential nominee John McCain, pointed to a video spreading across social media from Trump’s Pennsylvania rally where the female agent appears to fumble with her gun.
“You need to be taller than the candidate to protect them with your body,” McCain said on X. “Why do they have these short women – one who can’t holster a gun apparently – guarding Trump? This is embarrassing and dangerous.”
Questions about the role DEI played in this catastrophic fiasco should depend on the circumstances. No wet-behind-the-ears rookie, Cheatle has been with the Secret Service for a couple of decades. But when DEI takes centre stage, as the Democrats have ensured, it’s open season to question the competency of anyone who ticks DEI’s favoured identity boxes. It may not be fair but it is inevitable. Worse, it’s logical, even if the DEI faithful struggle to see reason.
Take, as another example, Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who, by the way, told us last year that “80 is the new 40” when asked about her boss’s competence to lead.
Was Jean-Pierre appointed because she’s a gun press secretary – or because putting another black woman out front for the Biden administration would boost the President’s DEI cred?
The Democrats’ entanglement with DEI is happening at a time when the diversity project is unravelling elsewhere. There are now almost daily reports that companies and other institutions are done with DEI.
Last month it was Tractor Supply, a rural retailer that sells animal feed and workwear. The company announced it’s getting rid of DEI jobs. Last week came reports of Microsoft laying off staff in charge of DEI initiatives. Goldman Sachs has tweaked its admissions policies for something called its Possibilities Summit. Previously for black college kids only, now whites are welcome. How about that?
This growing anti-DEI push received help from the highest place when the US Supreme Court last year pointed out the bleeding obvious – that permanently entrenching positive discrimination was unfair. Though that case concerned university admission policies, the logic that unravels DEI applies everywhere. Except, it seems, in progressive quarters where DEI remains a religious sacrament.
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What irony: Democrats open new line of attack on Trump: his age
Hypocrisy comes so easily to the Left
In a twist, President Biden’s exit from the race now makes Donald Trump the oldest man ever to win his party’s nomination.
The irony isn’t lost on Democrats, who after aggressively playing down concerns about Biden’s age and mental acuity are seeking to flip the script on their GOP opponent.
“The American people are rightly concerned that the Republican Party has nominated Donald Trump, a 78-year-old convicted criminal,” said James Singer, a spokesman for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
Age has been heavy on the minds of voters in a race that was, until Sunday, between the two oldest presidential candidates in history -- shattering the record they set when they ran against each other four years ago.
Biden, 81, was to be the oldest presidential candidate if he was on the ballot this year. But with his withdrawal, 78-year old Trump is now positioned to top the record set by Biden in 2020, when he won the Democratic nomination at the age of 77.
“Donald Trump is now officially the oldest presidential nominee of a major political party in American history. Meanwhile. Vice President Harris is doing her thing,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), 53, wrote on X.
With the rise of Harris, 59, the expected Democratic nominee, and Sen. JD Vance, 39, recently selected as Trump’s running mate, the spotlight has now shifted to Trump’s age as many voters have yearned for alternatives to gerontocracy in Washington.
“It’s not about age, it’s about competence, and Kamala Harris has proven to be just as incompetent and ineffective as Joe Biden,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Leavitt pointed to Harris’s handling of immigration policy under the Biden administration.
Biden stepped aside after failing to quell Democratic concerns about his age, fitness for office and ability to win in November. His age was central to the Trump campaign’s attacks against the octogenarian president.
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Secret Service director resigns amid anger over Trump shooting
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday amid bipartisan outrage over her agency’s failure to stop a 20-year-old gunman from opening fire on former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally.
Cheatle’s departure came after a blistering congressional hearing in which she offered minimal new information about the July 13 assassination attempt in western Pennsylvania, which marked the Secret Service’s most stunning failure since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981.
The director vowed to get to the bottom of what she acknowledged was a colossal security lapse, but politicians on both sides of the aisle said her assurances didn’t inspire confidence and urged her to step down.
Cheatle in an internal email told employees she was resigning “with a heavy heart,” saying she didn’t want calls for her to quit to become a distraction. “The scrutiny over the last week has been intense and will continue to remain as our operational tempo increases,” she wrote. “However, this incident does not define us.”
Cheatle’s hearing performance “was awful. It was all secret and no service,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee who had joined Republicans in calling for her resignation. “She answered none of the questions that the American people have.”
The committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), said “there will be more accountability to come.” “The Secret Service has a no-fail mission yet it failed historically on Director Cheatle’s watch,” he said.
Ronald Rowe, the agency’s deputy director and a 24-year-veteran of the service, will serve as its acting head, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. Rowe previously led the Secret Service’s legislative affairs and held a top role in the office of protective operations, a division that oversees the work most commonly associated with the agency.
A number of investigations are under way into how Thomas Matthew Crooks fired at least six rounds from the roof of the American Glass Research building roughly 400 feet away from where Trump spoke, killing one spectator, critically injuring two others and leaving Trump with a graze wound to the ear. A Secret Service sniper team shot back, killing Crooks, whose motive remains a mystery.
Cheatle in her testimony acknowledged that Crooks had been identified as suspicious more than an hour before the shooting. Pressed by politicians, she said that Secret Service agents had received several notifications of a person acting suspiciously.
The director declined to elaborate on those communications. She also declined to say how Crooks got on the roof, or whether authorities sought to approach him after he was initially identified as suspicious. In one exchange, she suggested that the security team with Trump before he went on stage didn’t know that the former president was facing an active threat.
Her resignation marks an abrupt and unhappy end to a Secret Service career three decades in the making.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Tuesday, July 23, 2024
God bless America: Aftermath of an attempted assassination
Qanta Ahmed (who is a Muslim)
Seated on the South Lawn of the White House on 15 September 2020, we couldn’t help but stand as President Trump arrived on the Balcony, leading the three Middle East leaders into the afternoon sun. We were about to witness the signing of the Abraham Accords bringing Israel into peace with Bahrain and UAE that day, and soon after, Morocco and Sudan. I was seated towards the edge of the 600-strong crowd, surrounded by donors sporting Presidential Seal cufflinks, tribute to their deep pockets and deeper still networks.
Next to me Batsheva, doting aunt of a Jared Kushner senior White House staffer, began reciting a soft prayer. Hearing the Hebrew, I enquired about the prayer. She was incanting the Jewish Bracha (blessing) uttered when one sees a king. I wanted to join in. Following her lead phonetically, we prayed together, one an American Jewish woman, one an American Muslim woman, both understanding our President to be our leader.
In the years since that moment of hope and light, President Trump has faced first ridicule, then derision, then dehumanisation and censure; silenced on mainstream and social media, bound in a litany of legal cases, convicted in my city of New York and finally today, targeted for assassination.
As an American and a Muslim, I pray for the full recovery of our former and likely future President and his family. I pray for my nation, the United States, a generous home to me for over 30 years. And as a Muslim I am bound to follow the example of our Prophet as we are reminded in the Islamic Hadith (Sahih Muslim 1828) to pray to our Maker for whomever is given charge of our nation beseeching of our Creator, ‘Whoever is given charge over my nation and he is gentle with them, be gentle with him.’ In other words one prays that the Almighty ‘might treat the ruler as he reigns’. (I remembered this prayer when King Charles III was crowned and wrote about that in this column).
Tonight, I remember the other part of this prayer.
‘Oh Allah, whoever is given charge over my nation and he is harsh with them, be harsh with him.’
There has been harshness within our nation. There has been harshness directed at our great nation’s former president.
We are collectively responsible as a nation for this appalling moment, led astray by a recklessly vitriolic far-left which has co-opted the remnants of the Democratic party. Today, the generous and hopeful America I first moved to in 1992 is unrecognisable.
Consumed by narcissism, extreme left woke neo-orthodoxy and an obscene marriage (maybe not only of convenience but also perhaps of infatuation) with virulent Islamism, the Democratic party that President Bill Clinton once led has been largely devoured.
In the void remaining, President Trump and his supporters have relentlessly been ridiculed, ostracised, dehumanised and demonised. This Frankenstein left calls Trump Hitler even as they celebrate, sanction and refuse to condemn breathtakingly virulent dehumanisation of America’s Jews since 7 October unleashing an astonishing licence for public hate speech, hate crimes and acts of hate towards America’s Jews. All of this has contributed to these highly combustible moments we must now face as virulent antiSemitism flows in our colleges, schools and campuses in the guise of anti-Zionism while espousing blatant allegiance with US designated Foreign Domestic Terrorist Organisations including Hamas and Hezbollah.
Today’s events were not possible without extreme speech.
Extreme rhetoric in our nation has led to this moment. Islamist jihadist ideology I have examined for decades reveals the power of extreme speech and how it dehumanises, how it diminishes integrative complexity, how it devolves into us versus them, good versus evil, and binary constructs until – having successfully laid the groundwork in the previous absolute dehumanisation of ‘the other’ – there remains only the elimination of the other.
Who knew? While I was busy studying radicalisation in the foothills of the Hindu Kush in North-West Pakistan, or in the lands of Yazidism and the valleys of the Zagros in Iraqi Kurdistan, big-budget radicalisation was unfurling right under my nose here in America’s most moneyed zip codes.
America the Beautiful is approaching almost a decade of intense domestic political tribalism, poisonous identity politics and, thanks to Covid, a deeply frayed social fabric. Indeed, such a fraying of the social fabric characterises the aftermath of all pandemics, as the brilliant counterterrorism intellectual Brian Michael Jenkins clearly delineates in his work Plagues and Their Aftermath: How Societies Recover from Pandemics. This frayed fabric tends to persist – spoiler alert – not for decades but centuries in the wake of global plagues.
Extreme speech with its binary simplicity feeds a ravenous news cycle straining to capture an ever-diminishing attention span targeted by massive bot-farms financed by national and international malignant actors. The result: fraught with tension, suspicion, alienation and frightening hate, Americans are separated gaping chasm by gaping chasm.
As the prayer in the Hadith reminds us, our leaders at this moment will indeed be judged harshly by our Maker for our leaders have treated all of us harshly. They have manipulated us with extreme speech, silenced debate, and censured the target of their hatred, President Trump, who has been throughout captive like a moth to a flame in an incandescent crucible of their animus.
This harshness is exemplified by a government which shows compassion only to a rarefied elite, yet denies it to the everyman upon whom it only rains scorn; a compassion cultivating the rabid anti-Semite at the expense of the disempowered American Jewish citizen. When we cannot protect the most vulnerable minorities in our nation – the Jewish people – it must be said – we may not be able to protect our most empowered citizens, our former and future president.
Language, Foucault has argued, furnishes the building blocks of a particular reality. Language is the battlefield across which power struggles are waged. And it is to language we must now turn.
America’s origins were inscribed in some of the finest language to define a democracy. We must now turn to our founding documents and tenets: one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Melania Trump in her letter after the assassination attempt wrote that our ‘gentle nation is frayed’. Be gentle with my nation. God Bless America. God have mercy on us all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/god-bless-america/
*******************************************************World politics: Worth a chuckle and a tear
Judith Sloan
I tried to lose interest in UK politics but when you have been following events in that country for literally decades, it’s hard to withdraw. To say that the Tories in that country were a disappointment is to understate the point – completely pathetic, I say.
I was neither surprised nor particularly disappointed when the Tories were slaughtered at the recent early election brought on by Rishi Sunak, who acted like the turkey voting for an early Christmas.
To be sure, Labour’s Keir Starmer didn’t actually get a mountain of votes, proportionately speaking, but with first-past-the-post voting, he now has a commanding majority in the House of Commons. There is not one Tory-held seat left in London.
(By the way, I’m no fan of first-past-the post voting, although it’s very easy to understand. How is it defensible that the LibDems could get over 70 seats when it polled proportionately less than Reform which secured only five seats? The best option is voluntary preferential. Voters can mark just one candidate but if there are other candidates that they don’t mind, they can mark them 2, 3 etc. I’m also OK with compulsory voting because that takes the extent of turnout out of the equation.)
Of course, by the time Sunak received the baton, it was too late to rescue his party from its dire position. Years of bossy left-leaning dictates coupled with a complete failure to control immigration, both legal and illegal, had well and truly put paid to the Tories’ electoral prospects.
It’s hard to pin the blame on just one person but I’m sticking my pin in Boris. He was the man who had campaigned for Brexit; he was the man who had won a landslide electoral victory by capturing all those Red Wall seats that had never been held by the Tories; he was the man who blew it all up.
His love affair with the green hoax led to a series of bizarre decisions that alienated many ordinary voters. To see him prancing around the Cop climate conference in Glasgow with the equally appalling Cop Minister, Alok Sharma (who has been rewarded by being made a member of the House of Lords) was a dismal sight. (I blame Boris for convincing ScoMo to commit the Coalition to Net Zero 2050, a strategic political mistake if there ever was one.)
All that crap about electric vehicles and phasing out of petrol/diesel ones; about replacing perfectly adequate gas boilers with noisy and inadequate heat pumps; about subsidising extremely expensive offshore windmills; and about eating less meat and cycling or walking everywhere. The list goes on.
Let’s face it, most adults have had a gutful of being told what to do by their parents. They don’t appreciate having another version of their parents bossing them around and imposing additional costs on them.
Of course, the obvious point here is that the Keir Starmer government will be even worse on this score. He hardly had time to get his feet under the desk when Ed Miliband, new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – pause for groan here – cancelled new oil and gas projects in the North Sea.
Mind you, the Tories had dragged their feet on this, going for years without approving any new projects before finally relenting towards the end of their term. Miliband has also approved some massive solar factory on England’s green and pleasant land.
But when voters have had enough of an incumbent government, their main concern is to boot it out rather than carefully analyse the alternative. In due course, the British public may become equally appalled by the Labour government that has clear bossy tendencies, possibly even worse than the Tories. For example, Starmer has already pulled forward the date of exit for internal combustion cars to 2030. But this realisation will take a little while to emerge.
It is interesting to take a look at what has happened over the ditch – not our ditch, their ditch (the Channel) – after the snap parliamentary election called by President Macron. If single-round/first-past-the-post voting is bad, the French two-round system is even worse. Having secured the most votes in the first round, the conservative Marine Le Pen – hatefully called ‘far right’ by her enemies and the press – was dudded when the ragtag team of left-wing parties ganged up to work the system to their advantage.
Of course, playing electoral games doesn’t alter the opinions of the very large number of French voters who want to see the borders controlled and common sense policies introduced, particularly on climate.
In the meantime, the left is likely to engage in a fight to the death for electoral spoils given that not everyone can be a winner. These sorts of coalitions have a habit of falling apart, often over quite minor issues. At this stage, no decision has been reached about who should be the prime minister, with Macron’s man offering up his resignation and Macron refusing to accept it. In other words, things are not going well, even from the start.
What is perhaps even more concerning is the suite of policies that the left regard as non-negotiable: a reduction in the retirement age; a massive lift in the minimum wage; more public servants; and price freezes on food, energy and transport. And these are just the main ones.
Given that France has not run a budget surplus since 1973, when I still wore my hair in pigtails, this list of demands is absurd. The current budget deficit France is running – well above 5 per cent of GDP – is in clear violation of the EU fiscal rules, which is really saying something given Macron’s love affair with the EU.
It will be a case of being alert to the political and economic instability likely to overcome France in the coming months and years. As Henry Ergas has pointed out, it’s likely to be a return to the volatility of the de Gaulle years and the possible end of the Sixth Republic.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/world-politics/
*******************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Monday, July 22, 2024
Rise of the new Republican Party under Donald Trump
The writer below seems unaware that the 10% tariff idea is perfectly orthodox economics. Economists accept that there are some reasons not to have pure free trade and their preferred tariff in that case is precisely what Trump says. He is a graduate in economics, after all
I give more background on Trump's tariff ideas below:
http://jonjayray.com/trumpism.html
Trump says he will put a tariff of 10 per cent on all imports into the US. If he did that it would hurt the American economy, raise prices for all American families and damage the less well off more than the affluent. Trump is the leading candidate for president and his most repeated and earnest commitments deserve to be taken seriously. Biden is also a tariff protectionist. Yet it’s likely Trump looks on the universal 10 per cent tariff as merely the first play in a negotiation. This approach is maddening and destabilising and yet it’s not as inherently incoherent as it first looks. The integrating idea is Trump’s vision of nationalism.
Trump also said this week that he thought Taiwan should pay the US for security protection, that the US gets nothing from Taiwan and has no inherent reason to protect Taiwan. Trump’s overall theme, taken up strongly by Vance, is that allies are free-riding on the US. Inconveniently, that’s substantially true. And it includes Australia.
In truth, Taiwan, as an exemplary democracy, deserves support. Further, it would be disastrous for the US position in Asia, for the whole of Asia, if China conquers Taiwan and can project its military power across Japan to the south and all the way east to Hawaii.
The US interests are enormous. John Bolton, president Trump’s national security adviser, wrote in his White House memoir that there was always a strong chance Trump would sell Taiwan out in exchange for a deal with China’s Xi Jinping.
Yet here again, Trump is unpredictable on both the upside and the downside. The Chinese understand, and have certainly been told, that if they take actions that humiliate Trump and make him and his administration look weak and beaten, or even credibly threaten such action, then all bets are off.
The pro-Trump case among hawks is that America will be stronger under Trump than under any possible Democrat. A Trump Republican administration will spend more on defence than any Democrat would. The economy will be more robust. America’s enemies will be more worried about what Trump might do if they push him too far.
Not only that, Trump has helped create the situation in which the whole US political class is critical of China and sees the Chinese Communist Party as America’s adversary. It’s one thing to do a trade deal with China. It’s another thing altogether to cede Taiwan to China.
More concerning than anything, Vance has said he doesn’t care what happens in Ukraine. Trump has opposed US aid to Ukraine and his foreign policy surrogates talk of the Europeans financing Ukraine’s military resistance to Russia. Trump also, rather bizarrely, has claimed he’ll end the Russia-Ukraine war in a single day, in the time between his presumed election in November and inauguration in January.
That’s completely unbelievable. What Trump plainly has in mind, and it’s probably what Biden in fact has in mind as well, is freezing the conflict and getting a ceasefire, which becomes a peace agreement. This would be bitter for the Ukrainians for they would have lost Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine forever. However, if they were given real security guarantees, such as EU and NATO membership, they could feel that they’d preserved their nation.
Trump’s first term, before he disputed the election result, is mostly reassuring on substance. The economy did well. America was strong. No ally was abandoned or betrayed. And no one much messed with America.
But Trump had conventional Republicans in the key cabinet positions. That’s less likely to be the case this time. The first evidence for that is the selection of Vance as vice-president. In 2016 Trump chose Mike Pence, a sober, responsible, reliable established Republican governor.
Yet it’s also fair to say that Vance has about as much experience going into the vice-presidential candidacy as Barack Obama had when he ran for president.
Many conservatives across the Anglosphere have become national security conservatives, putting the need for a manufacturing base and for control of key supply chains above the efficiencies that free trade and just-in-time supply chains offer. Vance is a bit beyond that. Initially he was highly sceptical of Trump, but now he has embraced Trump as someone who works for his type of community.
On the other hand, Trump’s tax policies were very sympathetic to Wall Street interests that Vance is inclined to denounce. Vance wants to inherit the MAGA movement, so he’s very unlikely ever to defy Trump. Unfortunately, part of the price of getting inside the Trump tent, for Vance at least, has been to buy into the toxic fiction that the 2020 election was unlawfully stolen from Trump.
Yet speaking at the RNC, Vance stressed that sometimes he persuaded his colleagues and sometimes they persuaded him. He communicated openness to change. The Trump-Vance ticket at one level therefore offers a great deal of uncertainty.
But in reality most presidential tickets are like this to some extent. In 2020 Biden ran as a centrist yet has governed as an increasingly left-wing progressive. Trump-Vance may be no more fundamentally unpredictable than Biden was.
Trump won’t want America to be pushed around and he won’t want it humiliated by having its closest allies attacked. All presidencies, and all foreign policy, are transactional to some extent. With Trump this will be naked, perhaps extreme.
The Trump campaign has not produced any ads from Biden’s woeful performance in the TV debate three weeks ago because they actually don’t want to push Biden out of the race. But if the Democrats get their act together and find a better candidate, the US could be at a fundamental fork in the road: progressive liberalism versus national conservatism, as starkly delineated as any time in history. Perhaps this is the most important election after all.
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Hillbilly elegist a considered voice for outsider America
Vance is a populist but populists can make importat points. And when an ill-effect is the result of good intentions, it is still right to point out the ill-efffect
Everyone’s talking about Vance this week. That’s quite a feat given the major dramas concern a senile old Democrat refusing to step aside for a younger, competent candidate, and an assassination attempt against Donald Trump so close that a tilt of his head would have left him dead. A Secret Service failure of such mammoth proportions understandably raises questions about recklessness, at the very least.
Those going crazy about Vance, one way or another, see another Trumpian-styled saviour or another Trumpian devil. It’s cartoonish. Vance is more complicated than that. His policy positions from Ukraine to globalisation and the role of government most certainly deserve scrutiny. He’s not a neat fit for Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or even Trump.
His critics don’t like his lack of political experience. What they don’t address is this: what have the vast numbers of long-in-the-tooth experienced politicians done for American politics in recent decades? Except in many instances to ensure their disconnect from their own country?
The 39-year-old cleanskin gave an electrifying address at the Republican National Convention on Thursday. His pitch to the American heartland was authentic, compelling. “When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico,” Vance said.
When he was in high school, Vance noted, Biden backed a China trade deal and the US invasion of Iraq.
“And at each step of the way, in small towns like mine in Ohio, or next door in Pennsylvania, or in Michigan and other states across our country, jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war,” he told the packed stadium in Milwaukee.
Watched by millions more outside that stadium, Vance beseeched Americans to be “united in our love for this country and committed to free speech and the open exchange of ideas”.
Trumpism was never about Trump. It’s not about his chosen running mate, either. It’s about people left behind by elites on both sides of the political divide. That said, it won’t hurt that Vance is smart, handsome and young – the first millennial to feature at the top of the Republican ticket – and he hails from the downtrodden de-industrialised American heartland. That’s why so many are going back to his memoir.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was a wild success when it was published in June 2016 just months before Trump won the November ballot.
Back then Vance wasn’t a politician. He was a guy in his early 30s who worked in finance and penned a gritty, gut-wrenching memoir about growing up in a de-industrialised part of America. Vance was among the millions of American outsiders cast adrift by an elite culture, left behind by Wall Street and ignored by Washington.
He grew up poor in the midwest rust-belt of Middletown, Ohio, and spent summers with his mother’s family, a ragamuffin crowd of Kentucky hillbillies. There is an alcoholic father somewhere, and a revolving door of deadbeat men who hooked up with his drug-addicted mother.
And a smoking, cursing, loving grandmother – his Mamaw – who extracted him from a destiny where kids leave school early and end up jobless and hopeless. Where teenage pregnancies are rife, along with broken homes, crime, addiction and violence. Against all odds, Vance joined the military, served in Iraq and went to Yale law school.
During Trump’s election campaign in 2016, everyone was interested in the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy. A New York Times review in August that year praised Vance for advancing an important conversation about the causes of dysfunction among America’s white underclass.
“Mr Vance has inadvertently provided a civilised reference guide for an uncivilised election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans,” wrote Jennifer Senior from The Atlantic.
Vance ticked the top four boxes on the checklist of modern privilege, wrote Senior. He was white, male, straight, Protestant. But she pointed out that those boxes told you very little about Vance – and indeed many like him: “His people – hillbillies, rednecks, white trash, choose your epithet (or term of affection, depending on your point of view) – didn’t step off the Mayflower and become part of America’s ascendant class.”
“Poverty is the family tradition,” wrote Vance. White privilege was always a poor choice of words for Vance, and people like him who grew up in rust-belt towns and rural parts of America where blue-collar industries were dying. His life gave him authority to describe a broader social decay within a hillbilly culture where “learned helplessness” had taken root. His story about a substratum of American society untethered from personal responsibility resonated with its frankness.
Peak wokeness was just around the corner. The day before Netflix released Ron Howard’s movie version of Hillbilly Elegy featuring Glenn Close and Amy Adams, staff at Penguin were having a big cry – as in literally crying their eyes out during a staff meeting where they complained that their employer was publishing Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.
In many ways, Trump picking Vance as his running mate makes perfect sense. Though Trump is not mentioned in the book, or the movie, Vance’s bootstrap story of survival and success explains why millions of Americans, left behind by globalisation and other elite obsessions, sided with a wealthy insider who campaigned for the working class as a shameless outsider.
Trump used three words during the 2016 campaign that resonated the most: “Drain the swamp.”
In the years since, Biden and the Democrats have done little to settle that sentiment. Neither has the other side, hence Trump’s takeover of the GOP.
It’s true that Vance described Trump as “unfit for office” in a column he penned for The New York Times in August 2016. But to understand why Vance is on the Trump ticket, one needs to move beyond an excitable media reaching into the past for “gotcha” moments. What matters is not that Vance has changed his mind about Trump. What matters more is the other stuff that Vance said that the media isn’t reporting.
Writing two months after Hillbilly Elegy was published, Vance recalled his grandma – Mamaw – reminiscing with pride about World War II.
“We did it,” she beamed when speaking to Vance some 50 years later. “We freed the whole world from tyranny.”
Yet when her grandson enlisted weeks after the US invaded Iraq, she called Vance a “grade A-idiot”. Though proud of serving his country, Vance wrote that “war is about more than service and sacrifice – it’s about winning”.
While tyranny was defeated in Europe many decades ago, “Americans today look at a Middle East that is humiliatingly worse off than when we found it,” he wrote.
Vance understood that the human cost of that humiliation fell hardest on Republican strongholds. The military is filled with men and women from the south, from rural communities, with whites making up a disproportionate number of those killed or injured in action. Add in the failure of Department of Veterans Affairs to care for those who returned.
“The Republicans never addressed the anger of their own voters,” wrote Vance.
But Trump did, Vance said in that New York Times column, some seven years before the man from Ohio entered congress. Trump spoke to those furious with a political elite that sent their children “to fight and bleed and die in Iraq”.
There is a lasting scepticism among many Americans towards spilling blood and treasure on foreign soil with no hope of winning.
This week, Meet the Press host Kristin Welker tried to ping Vance for something else he said years ago. As Trump took the mantle from Barack Obama, Vance wrote nice things about the former president. The NBC host thought she’d found a skeleton in Vance’s closet. It was amateurish stuff.
“The president’s example offered something no other public figure could: hope,” Vance wrote in The New York Times in January 2017.
“I wanted so desperately to have what he had – a happy marriage and beautiful, thriving children. But I thought that those things belonged to people unlike me, to those who came from money and intact nuclear families. For the rest of us, past was destiny.”
“On Jan. 20, (2017) the political side of my brain will breathe a sigh of relief at Mr Obama’s departure. I will hope for better policy from the new administration … But the child who so desperately wanted an American dream, with a happy family at its core will feel something different. For at a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I’ll miss him, and the example he set.”
Vance told the NBC host that he stood by his comments, that admiring a good husband, a good father, has nothing to do with politics.
Once you read Hillbilly Elegy, and go beyond clickbaity headlines about Vance, his meteoric rise to become Trump’s running mate is not hard to understand and admire.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Sunday, July 21, 2024
Why I am more convinced than ever that Trump has the strength and bravery to save Ukraine and end this appalling war
By BORIS JOHNSON (Former British PM)
It was the moment when Donald Trump won the November presidential election. I don’t mean the fateful decision to turn his head, which saved him from death by a quarter of an inch.
We are not talking about the miraculous fact of his survival, at 6.11pm in Butler, Pennsylvania, when tens of thousands of horror-stricken admirers saw him go down, with blood streaming from a head-wound whose significance was at first worryingly unclear.
No, the moment of truth, perhaps of revelation, came a few seconds later when the Secret Service agents were trying to bundle him horizontally — without his shoes — from the scene. It was then that Donald Trump showed his character.
He confirmed in a flash, not just his theatrical instincts, but also his courage. Having just been struck by a high-powered rifle bullet, he did not allow himself to be passively carted away. He took command of the situation. Wrestling himself free from his security people, flouting their safety protocols, he raised himself up until he was sure the crowd could see him.
Pumping his fist, he urged his supporters to ‘Fight, fight, fight’; and in so doing, at the moment when it really counted, he surely proved the most important fact of all: that he is made of the right stuff.
He knew that there was one thing far more important than his evacuation from the scene, and that was showing America that the assassin’s bullet had not prevailed against him — either physically or psychologically.
That photo, with the police officers arranged in what art historians would call ‘heroic diagonals’, and with Trump’s blood-streaked face and hand at the apex, has already become, in the minds of many Americans, the defining image of this campaign. That is because of the message it sends.
This is Trump saying to America and to the world, I will not be bowed, I will not be beaten.
More important still, that image says to Americans, with me as your leader, YOU will not be bowed. YOU will not be beaten. That is why the gesture has thrilled the hearts of his fans — and perhaps even some others.
I believe that indomitable spirit is exactly what the world needs right now, and exactly what is needed in the White House.
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Former President shows strength and humility at RNC acceptance speech
“I'm not supposed to be here tonight, not supposed to be here.”
That was former President Donald Trump’s assessment of the near-fatal assassination attempt against him on July 13 at his Butler, Pa. campaign rally, that it was a miracle he was still alive, as he accepted the Republican Party nomination on July 18 in Milwaukee, Wis.
As the crowd chanted, “Yes you are!” Trump insisted he should be dead: “But I'm not [supposed to be here] and I'll tell you. I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God. In watching the reports over the last few days, many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was.”
At his first speech since his brush with death, Trump recounted that but for referring to a chart on illegal immigration, where he turned his head at the last second, and “if I had not moved my head at that very last instant, the assassin's bullet would have perfectly hit its mark and I would not be here tonight. We would not be together.”
Trump’s humble retelling carried over into the rest of the speech as he softened his attacks on President Joe Biden and offered a less partisan style speech, stating, “I am running to be President for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.”
That set the mood for the remainder of Trump’s speech: This is a man on a mission to finish what he started when he began running for President the first time in 2015 and won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton, overcoming incredible odds.
Illegal immigration has never been worse, with 8.1 million southwest border encounters since Biden took office in Jan. 2021, the most in American history over comparable time intervals. In part, it is that stat that explains Trump’s decision to run for office again, and it is definitely that stat that saved his life.
To address it, Trump says he will finish the border wall that began under his watch. He will reinstitute the Remain in Mexico policy that Biden ended. And he plans to undertake a massive deportation operation.
To garner international support for the policies, Trump promised to once again leverage economic aid and tariff threats against countries that do not cooperate with U.S. policies on trade, immigration and fighting the drug cartels.
On foreign policy, Trump once again warned not just his supporters by all Americans and indeed the entire world that we are on the brink of nuclear war: “our planet is teetering on the edge of World War III. And this will be a war like no other war because of weaponry. The weapons are no longer army tanks going back and forth shooting at each other. These weapons are obliteration. It's time for a change. This administration can't come close to solving the problems.”
On the campaign trail, Trump has supported pursuing a diplomatic strategy specific to Ukraine to achieve peace — if possible — and to avoid the worst as the war there continues to escalate.
Trump also threatened Hamas to return all American hostages currently being held before he returns to office or “the entire world, I tell you this, we want our hostages back, and they better be back before I assume office… or you will be paying a very big price.”
On the economy, Trump referenced inflation 14 times, and promised to reduce costs on food and energy by boosting production, and also with tax relief including no tax on tips, regulation cuts and lower interest rates. On the latter, interest rates might come down all on their own as the economy overheats, Americans max out their credit cards and prices cool, with the unemployment rate already rising, from a low of 3.4 percent in April 2023 now up to 4.1 percent in June.
A lot of the speech was largely boilerplate from Trump campaign rallies as the former president occasionally broke into adlibbing, but the overall moment was well-crafted, including a touching tribute to Corey Comperatore who lost his life at the Butler, Pa. rally while he was heroically shielding his family.
Following the assassination attempt, Trump’s rhetorical challenge was to meet that moment, to relate what happened to him and to show that he was okay, and that he was back. As the tempo of the speech shifted to more upbeat and animated in the second half as Trump really got into the swing of it, the American people were treated to a candidate who is fully able and motivated to lead the country he loves.
Trump showed strength.
At Butler, Pa., Trump told the assembled crowd to “Fight!” and in Milwaukee, Wis. he started to show how he intends to do that on the campaign trail with a message that can resonate not just with Republicans, but also independents and Democrats who might be on the fence. America’s leadership is currently weak, but Trump is strong — and America needs to be strong.
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Leftist desperation after the Trump shooting
Conservatives are calling for MSNBC anchor Joy Reid to be taken off the air after she shared inflammatory theories about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
Reid, 55, angered critics on two occasions after a gunman shot Trump in the ear, including sharing a video to X implying that he was not even shot at all.
And after President Biden tested positive for Covid days after the assassination attempt, Reid said on a broadcast that Biden's brush with the virus was as heroic as Trump's reaction to narrowly avoiding a bullet.
Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk led the criticisms of Reid's remarks, as he called on MSNBC to 'take Reid off the air' for her 'outrageous, insane, defamatory' theories.
She appeared to imply it was a staged event that allowed Trump to 'pose' for the iconic photo of him pumping his fist in the air - which Kirk said would mean Trump's 'campaign and the Secret Service colluded to kill two people in a fake assassination attempt just so Trump could have a photo op.'
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Whoopi Goldberg attacks Kai Trump's rousing RNC speech about grandfather Donald - urging viewers 'not to fall for it'
She is not in the best position to allege deception. She has adopted an Ashkenazi surname instead of her own much more mundane name. Does she really have any Jewish ancestry? The Ashkenazim are brilliant and heroic. She has no right to that name. She defiles it
And what is this about "humanizing" Trump? Is she saying that Trump is subhuman? In the light of history, that's not the wisest thing for a black to say
Whoopi Goldberg didn't hold back when sharing her thoughts about Kai Trump's Republican National Convention (RNC) speech, urging voters 'not to fall for it.'
Donald Trump's 17-year-old granddaughter took to the stage on Wednesday night, telling viewers he was 'just a normal grandpa.'
However the 68-year-old host of The View called out the teen's stirring speech; arguing it was a trick to 'humanize' Trump - particularly after Saturday's assassination attempt.
'I know his grandchild was up on the thing and they're trying to humanize [Trump] and change your idea about who this guy is,' Whoopi said on Thursday's episode of the ABC talk show.
'Don't fall for that.'
Kai, who is the daughter of Donald Trump Jr. and his ex-wife, Vanessa, took the stage on the third night of the RNC in Milwaukee.
'The media makes my grandpa seem like a different person, but I know him for who he is. He's very caring and loving, he truly wants the best for this country,' the teen said.
Kai, who is the eldest grandchild of Trump, described him as 'just a normal grandpa.'
'He gives us candy and soda when our parents are not looking,' she said.
'He always wants to know how we're doing in school. When I made the high honor roll, he printed it out to his friends how proud he was of me.'
She then commented on the Saturday's attempted assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, calling Trump an 'inspiration.'
‘A lot of people have put my grandpa through hell, and he's still standing,’ she told thousands of cheering GOP delegates. 'Grandpa, you are such an inspiration and I love you.'
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Thursday, July 18, 2024
Trump, Not the Left, Embodies Unity Message and Looks to Build Strong Middle-Class Coalition
Just days after surviving a near-deadly assassination attempt, former President Donald Trump kicked off the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee Monday night by selecting a vice president who was once a vocal critic of his in 2016 and extending an invitation to a union chief to speak at the convention.
The devastating events of last Saturday are still reverberating through the nation, as Americans grapple with the chilling reality that less than an inch of space prevented former President Trump from death or grave injury over the weekend. Thankfully, Trump emerged from the horrific shooting unscathed except for a grazed ear and kicked off the Republican National Convention less than 48 hours after surviving the attack.
While prominent Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media have used Saturday’s assassination attempt to do everything from attack the Second Amendment to blame Trump himself for the attempt on his life, Trump appears to be focused on unifying Americans regardless of identity politics, something the left is failing miserably to do.
In a grave example of misinformation, President Joe Biden appeared to double down on at least partially blaming Trump for Saturday’s horrific shooting in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt. Biden appeared to blame Trump for incendiary rhetoric, bringing up an utterly out of context statement Trump made about a “bloodbath” for the auto-industry if he lost the election. Trump did in fact use the word “bloodbath” at a March rally to describe the situation if he loses in November, but Trump was speaking about the U.S. auto industry becoming a “bloodbath” if he loses, nothing else. Biden however, apparently had either not been briefed and corrected on the bloodbath statement or did not care that it was out of context because he told Lester Holt that Trump, “talks about bloodbath if he loses”.
While the left is busy blaming Trump for finding himself in the crosshairs of an assassin, Trump appears to be forging ahead, focused on building a strong coalition of working-class voters this November and embodying a unity message the left is not.
First, Trump announced Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate from a shortlist that included Florida Senator Marco Rubio and others. Vance, a 39-year-old self-made man from a modest background and the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” was highly critical of Trump eight years ago during the 2016 election. However, Vance now says Trump ended up being a great president and he believes his judgement was partially clouded by the mainstream media’s attacks on Trump back in 2016.
In a Fox News interview after being announced, Vance responded to Sean Hannity’s probing questions about negative statements he made about Trump back in 2016. “I don’t hide from that, I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016”, Vance told Hannity. “But president Trump was a great president, and he changed my mind. I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans, because again he delivered that peace and prosperity.” While left-wing pundits like to claim Trump relentlessly criticizes or punishes those who disagree with him, Trump bypassed other vice-presidential picks in favor of a man whose opinion of the former president changed significantly over the past eight years. That’s not the move of someone with a fragile ego, in fact it is quite the opposite.
Then there was Monday’s closing speech at the Republican National Convention, which came from an unlikely source in the form of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien. O’Brien seized on the opportunity to rail against big business and declared that the Teamsters are, “here to say we are not beholden to anyone or any party”.
In his address to the RNC, the first to come from a Teamsters president in the organization’s history, O’Brien declared, “we will create an agenda and work with a bipartisan coalition, ready to accomplish something real for the American worker. And I don’t care about getting criticized.”
While not endorsing Trump, O’Brien congratulated Trump for being willing to listen to other points of view. “President Trump is a candidate who is not afraid of hearing from new, loud and often critical voices”, O’Brien said. “And I think we all can agree, whether people like him or they don’t like him, in light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough S.O.B.”
For years now, a series of worrying polls have put Democrats on notice that Trump is making significant inroads with groups Democrats have long depended upon, including independents working-class whites, minorities and young people. Days after surviving a vile attack on his life, Trump is embodying unity in a way that goes far beyond words. Through his actions – nominating a vice president who was once highly critical of him, inviting the Teamsters to speak at the RNC, and consistently reaching out to groups Democrats believe belong to them alone – Trump is standing up for a unified middle-class, regardless of labels.
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‘Fight!’ Poll shows 74 percent say Trump acted with bravery and defiance after assassination attempt
That was former President Donald Trump’s immediate statement to his supporters at the tragic Butler, Pa. campaign rally on July 13 that claimed the life of Corey Comperatore as he shielded his family and injured Trump and two others, letting everyone know that he and America were going to be okay following the assassination attempt.
And it did not go unnoticed. 74 percent of registered voters said Trump acted with bravery and defiance, including 94 percent of Republicans, 56 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of independents. 68 percent say he has urged unity and calm, including 88 percent of Republicans, 49 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents.
As for causative factors 64 percent agreed that “[T]he core message of Biden campaign and the Democratic party that Trump is a threat to democracy and freedom and a dictator has gone too far,” including 80 percent of Republicans, 52 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents.
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Navarro released from prison, to make return to Republican National Convention tonight
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in response to former White House advisor Peter Navarro being released from federal prison:
"The political prosecution and imprisonment of Peter Navarro for having the audacity to claim executive privilege in response to a Congressional subpoena has come to an end. It is astonishing that the Biden administration would choose to prosecute a political opponent with all of the inherent risks to our nation that it entails in order to put someone in jail for four months. This same Justice Department, which prosecuted both Navarro and former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon, for failing to testify to Congress, over their executive privilege claims, at the same time, is led by an Attorney General claiming executive privilege in defiance of a Congressional subpoena and found in contempt of Congress. Naturally, Biden's DOJ is refusing to prosecute itself for violating the very same law, exemplifying the current two-tiered justice system. Thankfully, Peter Navarro survived his prison sentence and will be making a triumphant return as a political martyr to the public stage at the Republican National Convention tonight."
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Trump and I Have Proved Conservative Policies Work, Virginia’s Governor Says
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said both he and former President Donald Trump have shown that “commonsense conservative leadership works.”
Youngkin, a onetime businessman elected in 2021, said Monday night at the Republican National Convention that under President Joe Biden’s administration, Americans are facing 7.5% mortgage rates, while their raises can’t keep up with 30% increases in grocery prices and a 40% jump in the prices at the gas pump.
“Tonight, America—the land of opportunity—just doesn’t feel like that any more,” Youngkin said. “But eight years ago, there was an outsider, a businessman who stepped out of his career to rebuild a great nation, with the strongest economy, the mightiest military, energy independence, unlimited opportunity, lifting up every American. That outsider businessman was Donald J. Trump, and he will do it again.”
Youngkin said that the 2024 election “could not be more simple” and cast it as a contest of strength versus weakness and common sense versus chaos.
He also promoted his own record in Virginia, where he was the first Republican governor elected in 12 years.
“President Trump proved that commonsense conservative leadership works. It works for America,” Youngkin said. “We are proving it in Virginia, too, with $5 billion in tax relief, backing the blue, slashing red tape, declaring loudly that ‘yes, parents matter,’ and creating lots and lots of jobs. We were just named America’s top state to do business.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/15/youngkin-says-he-trump-proved-conservative-policies-work/
***************************************************Trump looks to appeal to Reagan Democrats and independents with Vance pick
Vance
Former President Donald Trump wants to engineer a landslide in 2024. In 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won monumental 49-state, 44-state, 49-state and 40-state landslides in their respective re-election and election bids.
Eventually earning the moniker, Reagan Democrats, the appeal was to working class Americans who were underrepresented by elites in both political parties. It was critical to Trump’s narrow win in 2016, picking up the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and in 1992, it was a great deal of the reason why Bush lost with Ross Perot in the general election and Patrick Buchanan in the primary eating a great deal of those voters who were not being adequately represented by the Republican administration.
In 2020, those voters did not fully turn out for Trump, who although he improved on his 2016 showing, could not overcome the economy temporarily jettisoning 25 million jobs during Covid lockdowns, and Trump went on to lose Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and also losing Georgia and Arizona in President Joe Biden’s Electoral College win.
To restore and broaden the Trump coalition, he is going back to his 2016 playbook in selecting his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and with a selection of convention speakers who were once adversarial to Trump, whether model Amber Rose or Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien (who didn’t endorse but whose appearance also green lights members to vote for Trump), but also in his determination to campaign in New York, New Jersey, Virginia and other blue states that have not supported a Republican candidate for president in a long time.
Vance agrees with Trump’s positions on trade, illegal immigration and foreign policy, supporting tariffs on Chinese goods, closing the U.S. southern border and opposing U.S. intervention in Ukraine. He also comes from humble origins in a working-class family, and whose personal story of self-determination and serving his country in the Marines and now the Senate, plus his youth — he’s only 39-years-old — makes him an able-bodied heir of the Trump legacy.
As for the convention, instead of putting on nothing but supporters, Trump has opted for at least a few speakers who looked at Trump and discovered he wasn’t who or what his opponents and media said. Vance, who was once highly critical of Trump, also fits this mold.
Trump is making a play for blue states. If the broader strategy works, it will do so by winning the so-called Reagan Democrats who Reagan’s successors took for granted, and could be a landslide and also prove pivotal to helping Republicans get elected in Congress. Trump will need larger majorities to get anything done.
It’s a higher risk strategy — some Republicans and conservatives were offended by the Rose and O’Brien appearances at the convention, for example — but also one that can produce a higher reward when voters get to the ballot box.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Wednesday, July 17, 2024
Another deletion
Google have deleted another of my posts here -- dated 16 June. It is still available on that date here:
http://jonjayray.com/covjun24.html
************************************************Physically unfit, under-qualified agents with a diversity-obsessed boss chosen by Dr Jill Biden!
Consider what happened when Donald Trump was shot on Saturday night.
The initial response was by the book. Brave agents piled on him to protect him from further bullets. They kept him down until they were told the shooter had been killed.
But they had no idea if others shooters were involved and, as they escorted him off the podium, they left him badly exposed, partly because some of the agents were not tall enough to give him proper cover.
If there had been a second shooter they would have had a clear line of sight as Trump fist-pumped the air.
There was even more chaos by the time they reached Trump's SUV. Far from the efficient, speedy exit all those years ago outside the Washington Hilton for Ronald Reagan, it took too long to get him in the vehicle and even longer for it to depart.
Agents were darting about, some running in circles, clearly not sure what to do. One, overweight and looking panicked, pointed her gun all over the place. Another had trouble holstering her pistol. A third found time to put on her sunglasses and straighten her jacket.
Perhaps it was just a coincidence – but when Trump entered the Republican National Convention hall in Milwaukee on Monday night, his security detail was made up almost exclusively of tall, chunky men.
The Secret Service endlessly game-plans and practises evacuations. 'Get him and go' is the simple guidance. The Secret Service likes to regard itself as the global gold standard for the protection of public figures. Not after Saturday night.
But what happened after Trump was shot is the least of its problems.
How the shooter ever managed to get any shots off in the first place has the makings of the biggest crisis of modern times for the Secret Service.
Security experts are still baffled that a roof top overlooking the presidential podium, just over a football-field away and with an elevated, unobstructed view of Trump, could have been left unguarded so that the shooter could make it on to the roof and then, unhindered, position himself for his assassination attempt.
The Secret Service has yet to offer a credible explanation for this. Instead its director, Kimberly Cheatle, incredibly appeared to tell ACB News on Tuesday that health and safety protocol was to blame.
'That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point. And so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof,' she said.
Cheatle and her acolytes have also been busy throwing local law enforcement under the bus.
The warehouse on top of which the shooter clambered (we still don't know exactly how) was outside the Secret Service's perimeter of responsibility, she claims. It was the job of local police to secure it — and it's true that local law enforcement has some questions to answer.
It's been revealed that a local police counter-sniper team was stationed inside the warehouse. They were using it as a 'watch post' to scan for threats.
Pity nobody thought of having a look at the roof of the building they were occupying since its location and view overlooking the rally made it the most obvious threat. Perhaps the Keystone Cops were on duty at the weekend.
Local police also failed to react to people on the ground around the warehouse shouting that there was somebody, possibly with a rifle, on the roof, a few minutes before he started firing. Several videos provide convincing evidence to confirm this — and of the police's lackadaisical response.
'Look, they're all pointing,' one man is heard saying as he pans his smart phone from the stage to the roof of the warehouse, where a figure is seen crawling. 'Yeah someone's on top of the roof — look!'
The police don't seem to react, though there are reports that one local cop climbed a ladder leaning against the warehouse wall (used by the shooter?). He saw the would-be assassin when his head reached roof level — and quickly ducked back down the ladder when the shooter trained his AR-15 on him, before he then turned back unimpeded to take his shots at Trump.
Another report extraordinarily claims that local police noticed the shooter on the roof 26 minutes before he opened fire, and even took a picture of him.
Clearly, the police incompetence on depressing display during the Uvalde school massacre shooting in Texas two years ago was not a one-off.
But the Secret Service cannot be allowed to pile the blame on a police force in rural Pennsylvania with no expertise or experience in protecting high-profile targets.
It is the job of the Secret Service to devise and give final approval for the security blueprint covering events like Saturday's rally. It is the responsibility of the Secret Service to ensure all vulnerable points are covered, inside and outside their specific perimeter, even when local police provide the manpower.
Above all, it was incumbent on the Secret Service to ensure that such an obvious security weakness as the warehouse was properly policed. One drone with infrared sensors would quickly have spotted the shooter, probably before he even made it to the roof. If that drone had been equipped with offensive capabilities, the shooter could have been taken out long before he ever managed to pull his trigger.
But we understand no drones were deployed. Why not?
It would seem the Secret Service under Director Cheatle has had other priorities. A former Secret Service agent told me privately that she quit because field agents were understaffed (working 60 consecutive days with no time off).
Money has instead been diverted to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). Investment in new technology, including state-of-the-art drones, was also sacrificed at the altar of DEI.
Director Cheatle was appointed two years ago by President Biden with the blessing (perhaps even active support) of his wife Jill.
Cheatle had been on the Biden family's security detail when Joe Biden was Vice President. Jill Biden is obsessed with DEI, like most leftwing pseudo-academics. Cheatle talks more about reaching 30 percent female agents by 2030 than she does about protecting those under her agency's tender care. Her ambition is all over the Secret Service website.
When I was a White House correspondent in the 1980s, the Secret Service was part of the US Treasury Department, a hard taskmaster.
Now it is part of Homeland Security, whose boss, the hapless Alejandro Mayorkas, is also 'passionate' about DEI. He also assures us the Southern border with Mexico is secure.
The standards and governance of the Secret Service are clearly less rigorous than they once were. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at the weekend has made that painfully obvious for all to see.
No doubt its shortcomings will be revealed in agonizing detail by the numerous congressional committees about to investigate it. I'd be surprised if Cheatle survives the scrutiny.
She could always return to be head of 'global security' at PepsiCo, from whence she came. They're big on DEI there too — but the consequences are less profound for American democracy.
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Thomas Matthew Crooks' lonely world: Donald Trump shooter went from popular 10-year-old to secretive loner
Today, through a trove of pictures and the accounts of family friends, Dailymail.com can give the first real glimpse into the childhood of the boy who would grow up to try to kill a president.
He went from the 'normal little boy' who liked to play soldiers and miniature golf, to the increasingly disturbed young man who grew his hair long, isolated himself from friends and became plagued by mental health disturbances that led some to believe he was either bi-polar or schizophrenic.
It was a journey that ended catastrophically at Trump's campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday when Crooks, 20, took aim at the former president hitting him in the ear, killing one member of the crowd and seriously injuring two others.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one person who knows the family well said, 'He was a cute kid, maybe a little bit off, maybe a little bit of a loner.
'But in the past couple of years he started suffering what we all suspected was mental health issues.'
From the 'normal little boy' who liked to play soldiers and miniature golf, to the increasingly disturbed young man who grew his hair long and isolated himself from friends
The friend, who has known the family throughout Crooks's childhood, continued, 'We never knew for sure if he had been diagnosed or if he was being medicated but he started growing his hair long, he withdrew.
'There was nothing super alarming but looking back of course you question what was missed? His father was a psychologist.
'I'm not blaming the parents but did he suppress something? Was there some denial there? Was there anything hidden?'
Crooks, known as Tom to his family, grew up in the Bethel Park suburb where his family still live with his parents and older sister, Katherine, 22.
He attended Abraham Lincoln Elementary School from 2009 to 2014, before moving on to Neil Armstrong Middle School 2015 to 2016, then Independence Middle School 2017 to 2018, and ultimately Bethel Park High School from which he graduated in 2022.
Seen in pictures across the years it is impossible to look at the face of the little boy who poses in yearbook picture after yearbook picture in his polo shirt and glasses without straining to see some foreshadowing of the change that, friends say, overtook him in the end.
In one, under the banner of 'Follow your Dreams' he is dressed in combat gear, the innocent costume of so many little boys now cast in a more sinister light by the act he would ultimately commit.
But as a child, he was, friends say, if not exactly outgoing then certainly apparently 'normal.'
One said, 'He was definitely very intelligent that's something that was always clear. He was in the math club; I think that was the only club he was part of other than the gun club later, and he won quite a big scholarship for math.'
In early photographs he is surrounded by friends, on costume days or mini-golf outings.
Later he is at the edge, peaking round a bandstand pillar or kneeling at the end of a line with a basketball and his peers.
Contrary to what one 'friend' has publicly claimed in recent days those who spoke with DailyMail.com insist he did not dress in hunting or camouflage gear but instead was always smartly turned out in a polo shirt and pants or shorts.
A source said, 'He was always smartly dressed. He came from a good family – his mother is a very nice woman, and his father is actually very accomplished. I believe at one point he was earning between $300,000 and $500,000 a year.'
Today the modest family home, a small brick bungalow in a quiet suburban neighborhood sits under the watchful eyes of law enforcement and the world media.
It gives little indication of its owners having any significant wealth.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Tuesday, July 16, 2024
ALG Praises Trump Choice Of J.D. Vance As Running Mate
Good to see the skepticism about Ukraine. American aid is just prolonging the war. Putin is ready for an armistice. It's time for Zelensky to to come to the party. The bloodshed has got to stop. And Trump is the one to stop it
I am myself very pro-Indian (been there 3 times) so I am pleased to see that Vance is married to a very accomplished Indian lady. I have also known impressive Indian ladies
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement praising former President Donald Trump’s choice of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his Vice Presidential running mate:
“President Donald Trump’s choice of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate demonstrates the President’s commitment to growing the Make America Great Again movement for decades to come. J.D. Vance is a warrior for the forgotten middle-class. Vance is in alignment with President Trump’s willingness to change our international trade policies to meet the needs of American workers, and has demonstrated a healthy skepticism over how U.S. taxpayer dollars have been spent in Ukraine. Americans for Limited Government strongly supports the ticket of President Donald J. Trump and J.D. Vance.”
https://getliberty.org/2024/07/alg-praises-trump-choice-of-j-d-vance-as-running-mate/
*******************************************************Tucker Carlson: All the Right People in Washington ‘Against’ Trump’s VP Pick
Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson told Republicans gathering in Milwaukee on Monday that Americans should “be thrilled” by Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick.
Earlier in the day, as the Republican National Convention opened, Trump posted on social media that he had chosen Sen. JD Vance, an Ohio Republican, as his running mate in the Nov. 5 election.
“So now JD Vance is the VP pick, and I think every person who pays close attention has got to be thrilled by that,” Carlson said in a speech to convention delegates.
“And if you don’t know much about JD Vance, I’m not even going to make a case for [him],” the former Fox News host said.
Vance, 39, became a celebrity after writing the bestselling autobiography “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis,” published in 2016. A venture capitalist, he won election to the Senate in 2022.
“I’m going to tell you what I just saw, which is that every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against JD Vance,” Carlson quipped to the convention audience, referring to recent speculation by liberal media outlets and others that Trump would pick the conservative Ohio senator.
Carlson said Vance’s enemies are establishment politicians who support U.S. involvement in “pointless wars.”
“Every single one of those people, in a line that would extend from Milwaukee to Chicago, was lined up over the last week to knife JD Vance,” Carlson told the RNC audience. “Not on personal grounds. I mean, he’s a perfectly nice guy. He’s like one of the only members of the Senate with a happy marriage.”
The criticism of Vance came “because they thought he would be harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people,” Carlson said. “That’s it. That he would be an impediment to their exercising power.”
“And boy, they went after him in a way I’ve just kind of never seen,” Carlson said.
Carlson went on to describe what he sees as a “spiritual battle” America faces in light of the attempted assassination of Trump at a campaign rally Saturday evening in Pennsylvania. The gunfire wounded the former president in the right ear, narrowly missing his brain, seriously wounded two attendees, and killed a third.
“There is no logical way to understand what we’re seeing now in temporal terms,” Carlson told the crowd. “You just can’t.”
“These are not political divides. There are forces, and they’re very obvious now, … whose only goal is chaos, violence, destruction,” he said. “And there are the rest of us who … are not always certain we’re right, but we know that that’s bad. And we’re against that.”
Carlson predicted that voters in November will return Trump to the White House because the former president showed “strength” Saturday night when he raised his fist and mouthed the word “fight” repeatedly after being shot as Secret Service agents sought to carry him offstage.
“Trump’s going to be president because he’s brave,” Carlson said. “Period.”
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Trump classified documents case dismissed
Washington: Donald Trump will no longer face trial for mishandling classified documents after a federal judge he appointed threw out the case, ruling that the prosecutor overseeing the charges was improperly appointed.
In a major win for the former US president days after his attempted assassination, Judge Aileen Cannon – who was appointed under Trump’s administration – filed a court ruling on Monday dismissing the charges.
The move is the second significant legal victory for Trump in as many weeks, following the US Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents and ex-presidents substantial immunity from being prosecuted for official acts that took place while in office.
Conversely, it is a major blow for Special Counsel Jack Smith, the former war crimes prosecutor who charged Trump last year after highly sensitive documents were found at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Those documents included information relating to nuclear programs and military vulnerabilities, and to intelligence that should have only been shared with the “Five Eyes” countries, including Australia.
“Upon careful study of the foundational challenges raised in the motion, the court is convinced that Special Counsel’s Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme – the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorising expenditures by law,” Cannon concluded in her 93-page order.
Smith’s office said it would appeal Cannon’s decision, which legal experts have slammed. The Trump-appointed judge has long been criticised for making rulings that appear to favour the former president. She has also been accused of unnecessarily delaying the case with long, drawn-out proceedings.
In response to the decision, Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor and president of Citizens for Responsible Ethics said: “This is a lawless, outlier decision with no basis in statute or case law. It is deeply dangerous for accountability and checks and balances going forward. This decision should and assuredly will be appealed immediately.”
But the ruling was welcomed by Trump and the many Republicans descending in Milwaukee this week for the party’s national convention.
Trump will be formally appointed as the Republican presidential nominee at the event on Thursday, but his vice presidential running mate was expected to be announced as soon as Monday (local time).
“As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts,” Trump posted on social media.
The classified documents case is one of four trials the former president was due to face. He has also been charged over election interference in Georgia and Washington DC – but both cases have been delayed – and he was recently convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal ahead of the 2016 election.
However, his legal team has long considered the classified documents case to be the strongest one, partly because it related to acts that took place after he left office.
The documents in question were taken after Trump left the White House in 2021 and were stored in boxes all over his Mar-a-Lago resort, including “in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room”.
Trump has long maintained his innocence.
US President Joe Biden has also been investigated by a separate special counsel over his own handling of classified documents. However, that case was dismissed and the special counsel noted in his findings that Biden’s age and hazy memory would make it challenging to secure a conviction.
“At trial, Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury as he did during our interview of him: as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” he wrote in his 388-page Justice Department report released in February.
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Jack Smith’s Other Big Trump Case Could Go Down In Flames After Judge Finds His Appointment ‘Unconstitutional’
A judge’s Monday decision finding special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment “unconstitutional” will almost inevitably end up before the Supreme Court, potentially dooming Trump’s Jan. 6 case along with his classified documents case.
Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not have the authority to appoint Smith, a private citizen who was also never appointed by the president nor confirmed by the Senate, to prosecute the case against Trump. Cannon’s decision to dismiss the classified documents case — which comes just weeks after the Supreme Court agreed that former presidents have immunity for official acts committed in office — is good news for Trump that will not be limited to the prosecution in Florida but will likely impact Smith’s other prosecution of Trump in Washington, D.C.
“The Mar-a-Lago documents case has long been considered the strongest one against Trump,” former federal prosecutor Joseph Moreno told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “With this decision, it is now indefinitely prolonged and may even fall away.”
Smith will appeal the ruling, his office said Monday. Smith could appeal Cannon’s ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which will take time and will likely result in a circuit split that would make a Supreme Court review almost certain.
“Although Judge Cannon will, no doubt, be attacked by the Left as a political hack who is doing Trump’s bidding, this would be a grossly unfair characterization,” John Malcolm, vice president for the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government and former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Criminal Division, told the DCNF.
Malcolm said Cannon’s 93-page ruling “should be judged on its merits, not on whether someone likes or dislikes the outcome of this particular case.”
“Indeed, the appointment of special prosecutors vested with almost unlimited authority and without any input from the legislature was one of the grievances cited against King George III in the Declaration of Independence and is the reason why the Constitution’s Appointments Clause was crafted to give Congress a role in the appointment of special prosecutors,” he told the DCNF. “Cannon’s opinion points out precisely why Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Smith violates the Constitution, since Congress never passed a statute giving Garland such authority.”
Trump’s case brought by Smith in Washington, D.C., where Trump was indicted on four counts for alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, will likely be impacted by Cannon’s decision.
“Technically [District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan] is not bound by Cannon’s decision, and based on her hostility to Trump in the past she likely will not follow it,” Moreno told the DCNF. “But this allows Trump to raise the same issue and, again, knowing that the Supreme Court will ultimately back him.”
The D.C. Circuit previously rejected the argument Cannon accepted when it ruled on a challenge to special counsel Bob Mueller’s appointment in February 2019. This means Cannon’s ruling likely won’t have an immediate effect on Trump’s other case, Malcolm told the DCNF.
“That is the law in the D.C. Circuit, where the Jan. 6 case is pending,” he said.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/15/judges-jack-smiths-appointment-shakes-up-trump-federal-cases/
************************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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