“President Trump could find a cure for cancer and his critics in the media would not give him any credit,” many Trump supporters claim as Trump is leaving the presidency.
This may seem an outrageous comment, but the basic point is valid. As Trump departs, he has, once again, done some controversial things.
GregoryBresiger.com. has had mixed feelings about this unusual, at times strange and other times effective, president. I want to examine some of these controversies, and the reactions to them.
Trump Wants to Give You More
Tens of millions of Americans are hurting. They lost their jobs. Many of them have little or nothing in cash reserves. Millions of them can’t pay their rent. Another stimulus relief bill—a bill designed to give money to individuals and businesses that have been hurt through no fault of their own—had been stalled in Congress since last summer. That’s when previous relief money ran out. Congress took its time passing another package in part because things were stalled in the House of Representatives, where all financial legislation must originate.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently admitted she didn’t want to pass a new relief bill until the election was over so relief money wouldn’t help Trump’s re-election efforts.
Que?
That, by the way, should outrage Americans who needed federal help back then and need it even more now, some five months later.
Recently, in the last month of this session of Congress, a new stimulus bill passed that included a $600 payment to most Americans. The bill, which was some 6,000 pages and required lawmakers to vote on it within an hour and without any hearings, contained tons of pork besides the stimulus relief money.
This was anything but “a clean bill.” This was an invitation to many lawmakers to add on incredible amounts of pet projects that would never pass as standalone bills. These projects were ridiculous. They included a security wall between Jordan and Syria, gun money for the Egyptian army, among others. What does any of the latter have to do with helping millions of suffering Americans?
Nada.
It is disgusting that this tying arrangement, this political bait and switch, comes at a time when millions of Americans are desperate. Think of it this way. Suppose you want to go a game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The ticket seller tells you: “Yes, I can sell you tickets for that game, but you’ll also have to buy tickets to 50 others games.” You answer: I only want to see the Yankees against the Red Sox. I’m not interested in those other games. They mean nothing to me. Sorry, the smiling Ticketmaster replies, it’s everything or nothing. Now pay this big bill if you want to see the Yanks against the Sox.
Trump looked at the huge pork package and said he was disgusted. Cut out the pork, he argued, and give the average American a lot more. Give the average American $2,000 instead of $600. Hearing complaints from almost everyone, Trump ultimately signed the doorstop “stimulus relief package” but asked for it to be amended to give everyone $2,000.
What was the reaction of many of his critics, several of whom I see every day: “Trump is no good. I hate Trump.” And I believe they will say that even if they get the $2,000 Trump insisted that they get.
Trump and the Vaccine
The development of vaccines in the bureaucratic United States normally takes many years. Maybe as long as 11 years. So the mainstream media, which was so biased in this last election that they were almost crying tears of elation on election night when Joe Biden won, ridiculed Trump last January when he said he would throw aside bureaucratic hurdles and deliver the vaccine in a year.
His operation Warp speed actually took only 11 months. This is, without doubt, a remarkable achievement. And Trump, for all his craziness and unpredictability, deserves credit for overseeing the project and insisting that the medical professionals and everyone else step on it en seguida. (Aside: I’m not surprised that Trump did the seemingly impossible on the vaccine. Forty years or so ago, as a builder in New York City, he fixed a skating ring in the middle of Central Park that the city had failed to fix for years).
The reaction to the Trump vaccine triumph?
President elect Joe Biden, an elderly person who took the vaccine, said he gave credit to “the administration” for the vaccine. Notice he carefully left out the word Trump. This is par for the course among Trump’s critics and the mainstream media. None of them will ever give Trump credit for anything, no matter what he does that is good. Yes, that’s true even if he cured cancer.
Trump is not my ideal president and I certainly believe he should concede the election to Biden. That’s even though there is some evidence that there was fraud. Still, I believe he did a fair number of good things—cutting taxes, protecting American interests against a predatory Chinese government that is swallowing up half the world, following an “America First” policy that appealed to tens of millions of Americans who live in Middle America. They are often frequently disparaged by costal elites who often call them “deplorables” because they believe in the Second Amendment.
And one can praise those things without becoming a Trumper. And no, I don’t believe that Trump has ever been in the back pocket of the Russians. That’s despite the relentless narrative of the mainstream media. It began even before Trump was actually president. It started on election night 2016, with some reporters screaming that Trump was being blackmailed by the Russians. Yet no one has yet to find one piece of evidence supporting that remarkable charge.
Trump should realize that he lost the election to the weak Biden. He has to live with it; just as Coke Stevenson had to live with having a Senate seat stolen from him by Lyndon Johnson in 1948 and Richard Nixon possibly had a presidency stolen from him in 1960. By the way, in the former there is no question. In the latter, reasonable people can debate if Illinois and Texas were stolen from Nixon.
Still, Trump should ignore the mindless critics. The ones who have argued he is a traitor, that he did nothing to fight Covid and that his economic policies were all a failure. These perceptions of him, many of them wrong, were brought to us by a mainstream media that is largely corrupt, incompetent or lazy.
As I wrote previously, the biggest loser in the last election isn’t Trump: It is a media that ignores or covers up stories—such as the Biden crime family story, which certainly affected the election—that hurt their favorite candidates. They got what they wanted: Biden, God help us, is president. Now watch closely how mainstream media reverse themselves. Their stories will now be that the reclusive Biden is our new lord and savior.
