“Why I Like Trump” by Sydney Williams
http://swtotd.blogspot.com/
Self-examination is important. It is healthy to try to understand why we believe this or that, why we like this person but not another. Since my support for the President is controversial, even among those who agree with me in other matters, I thought a public self-examination would be welcome.
Ado Annie Cairns would never have fallen for Donald Trump. He doesn’t talk “purty.” He is the antithesis of me, of the way I was brought up, the way I live my life. His clothes are too fancy, and I don’t like the way he dyes his hair. He loves money and power and does not seem interested in history or philosophy. He butchers the English language when he speaks. I doubt he reads Trollope. He is boastful in a way I hope I am not. I would have no interest in living the life he has lived. Nor would he want to live mine.
So, why do I like and support him? Why do I feel he was what the Country needed in 2016 and again in 2020? He has an intuitive sense, I believe, of what troubles America. I doubt he has read much American history or is familiar with our Constitution. I am sure he has never read the Federalist Papers. But he has an instinctual understanding of people.
All societies create ruling classes. I was a beneficiary of that, in that my family were prominent in the last half of the 19th Century and into the early years of the 20th. It was a time when the Country was governed by white, Anglo Saxon Protestants, WASPs as they are lovingly called. That era began to decline slowly in the years after World War II and a new class took the reins – technocrats, bureaucrats, educators, scientists, and businesspeople, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. They came from all walks of life, represented all races, religions and sexes. They helped lift up the Country after fifteen years of depression and war. They built highways and put man on the moon. They desegregated schools and offered equal opportunities to women. They won the Cold War without firing a shot.
But with success, came smugness. Over time, they became distanced from their forebearers in media, universities, banks, multinational companies and politics. As in George Orwell’s story, Animal Farm, the new elite became the oppressors. They lost touch with who they once were. Their attitudes became more supercilious than that of those they supplanted. The pomposity of WASPs was displaced by the sanctimony of this new, technocratic class. There was always a sense of Protestant guilt in old WASPs that stemmed from their Judeo-Christian values – feelings of self-doubt that is missing from the new elites.
Despite having made his money in the murky world of high finance and commercial real estate, Donald Trump sensed the discontent their piety raised. While he lived in New York, the city of his birth, he was always an outsider. He was brash and unpolished. He was like Caddyshack’s Al Czervik, an obnoxious “nouveau riche” interloper against the establishment’s imperious and dated Judge Smails.
Trump is in the forefront of a revolt – not against science as some claim, or against morality as others assert, but against an establishment class that left huge segments of the population behind. Unlike most politicians, he is untutored, saying what he believes, with a “Devil take the hindmost” attitude. He may have personal baggage, but he doesn’t have hangers-on. He may not be literate, but, as Victor Davis Hanson has written, he is “cunning.” When he takes on a snarky, hypocritical press at his daily COVID-19 meetings, one can see pleasure in his eye. Most of them detest him, for they are part of the class – in their comfortable world of moral superiority – he wants to overturn; so, they ask him questions, looking for “gotcha” moments they can later air on CNN and MSNBC. Instead of falling into their traps, he reminds me of the Yankee farmer who outwits the city slicker. No President has spent more time with the media – a media that doesn’t like him, in part because he doesn’t talk “purty” like his predecessor.
The political Left likes to think of themselves as at the vanguard of a revolution. They are not. Either they are boosting a tired socialist venue that for eight decades has proven detrimental to the people it alleges to help, or they are defending the status quo, especially in education and government bureaucracies. They believe in virtue signaling, not virtue. Their base is composed of elites in media, universities and tech companies, bureaucrats in Washington, trial lawyers, hedge fund managers, public union bosses and those dependent on government largesse. Mr. Trump is the change agent, a disruptor to this world. Power is an aphrodisiac, so the establishment will not easily give in. But the world has always changed and the elites that were forged over the past seventy-five years are bereft of new ideas. The generations that came before accomplished great goals, in terms of scientific advancement, rising incomes and improving equality where race and sex are concerned. We are a better country for what they accomplished. But in the past two decades their offspring have become arrogant, with little to say that is new. With wealth gaps having widened, they want to protect their positions at the expense of working families whose values align more with Western traditionalists than with global multiculturalists.
All societies need diversity to adapt and to survive, especially of thought. We have achieved diversity in race, religion and sex. Is there more that can be done in those areas? Of course. But consider how far we have come and think of those left behind, who are mostly white working families from the South and Midwest – Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables” who cling to their guns and Bibles. There is a sameness in thought among elites today that needs to be challenged, not belittled. Approximately 70% of the media and Hollywood support leftist policies, while about 90% of educators and Washington bureaucrats supported Democrats in the last election. A change is what these people did not want, yet a change-agent is what they got, and that has threatened their comfortable lifestyles.
So, I like Trump because he represents change. He seeks equality of opportunities, not outcomes. He understands the dignity of work and the desire for self-sufficiency. He favors the individual over the institution. He trusts the people, not the State, He supports independency over dependency. He believes in moral absolutism, that there is good and that there is evil in the world, and that not all cultures are equal in how they treat women and minorities. He recognizes the need to coexist in a multicultural world but does not believe one has to assume the mantle of his neighbor to live in harmony.
These attributes may reflect instinct on his part, not a philosophical understanding through study. But I have long said about Trump – as is true with all politicians, including the most mellifluous – it is not what he says, but what he does. His coarseness is off-putting but his caring for “deplorables” is real. Many of you will disagree, but that’s okay; this is America.
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