Just how did Donald Trump manage to get so far? Think about it. He’s a businessman and reality TV star with no political experience whatsoever and yet he managed to beat what is arguably the strongest GOP primary field in history and is now, at worst, tied in the polls with Hillary with less than eight weeks to go. That is an astonishing achievement, no matter how you look at it. And, fortunately for us, someone with a great deal of insight did look at it.
Don Surber has written Trump the Press: Don Surber’s Take on How the Pundits Blew the 2016 Republican Race. What I found interesting is that Surber started out the 2016 so conventionally – and, honestly, exactly where I was:
I began 2015 by accepting the conventional wisdom about the deep bench of Republican governors in the race. But I liked Trump’s message. No one else was willing to say what he said: Build the wall. Challenge political correctness. Make America great again. My first choice, Scott Walker, faded, while Donald Trump blossomed. The napalm-vitriol used on Trump by conservative commentators intrigued me. The hotter their hate, the more I realized his prospects were rising.
I, too, got a bit of a boost at (some) of Trump’s rhetoric. Keeping in mind that I was and remain an amnesty shill (we really can’t deport 11 million – or whatever number it really is – people), I still saw the logic behind Build the Wall. After all, the fact that we don’t control our border doesn’t mean it is uncontrolled – it just means we’ve turned it over to criminal elements who ruthlessly exploit the people who illegally cross it. Mercy, if nothing else, requires us to build the wall – and, yes, if that means a twenty foot high, concrete wall from one end of the nation to the other, then that is what we’ll have to do. Build the wall – whatever sort of wall proves necessary to ensure that 99.9% of the time, no one crosses into the United States without our knowledge. But, still, as expressed here, I retained my doubts and shifted from Jindal to Walker to Rubio to Cruz. Anyone other than Trump. But while I – and so many others – were casting desperately about for any expedient to stop Trump, Trump was winning – and Surber has found out why.
One other assumption that drove the doomsayers to their demise was that this was an unusual election year full or surprises.
Well, Trump was unusual, but the path to his victory was pretty routine. Like Reagan, he won the debates and pilled up primary wins early and often. Trump succeeded because, like Reagan, he could speak through the media filters to get his message across. In Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, his critics, too, call Reagan racist and stupid and dismissed him as a celebrity and a joke…
…Those who wrote off Trump when he entered the race will write tomes to explain what happened. It boiled down to four words: Make America Great Again.
Ignore the press, find a way to get your message out, root for a strong America. Pretty simple, huh? But no Republican since Reagan has figured it out as well as Trump has. So far, of course! Surber is pretty convinced that Trump will win – I’m still not so sure. But if he loses it won’t be because of the reasons given by the MSM and the cohort of disappointed (and increasingly irritating) Never Trumpers. If he loses, it will because of the sheer political muscle that Team Clinton can bring to bear. Remember, almost all power centers in the United States are now pulling for Hillary – they are scared to death that someone they don’t own will get in. But once you’ve read Surber’s book, you’ll start to understand how much of a disadvantage they have against Trump; and like they had against Reagan, it is because they still refuse to take him seriously. I still don’t know how I’ll vote in November – but one thing that I have learned is that Trump is a formidable candidate. I’ve been saying for a long time that I suspect Trump is working from a strategic plan. I even suspect that at least some of his verbal gaffes were tactical. Don Surber’s book lays out just how wrong the experts have been so far in 2016 and are likely to remain wrong right up until, say, Colorado is called for Trump on election night.
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I get so frustrated by this drumbeat of how it took the Mighty Trump to finally—FINALLY !!!—-have the manly parts to come right out and say “build a wall”. Bull.
That whole schtick is built on four letters.W.A.L.L. I think every other candidate was in favor of border control. Their problem was that they used grown-up words without graphics. They didn’t boil it down to four letters that come with an easily pictured graphic. A wall. We can all envision a wall.
Of all the lessons I have learned, or had reinforced, in this election cycle, this is the biggest, and the most depressing: You simply cannot talk to the average American voter as if he is an adult with a functional IQ. You have to talk to him as if he is in kindergarten.
As for “amnesty” the word really means, if I remember correctly, waiving of a penalty for a misdeed. So illegals could stay in the country, without “amnesty”, if they pay the piddling fine, if the government chooses to impose that penalty instead of deportation.
Of course many who are here illegally should be allowed to stay, for the many reasons we have gone over here so many times. I think the one thing that the “deport ’em all” people haven’t thought of, or have just ignored, is that we have no way to force any country to accept people if they don’t want to. Do they really think Mexico would accept 9 or 10 million people dumped on their doorstep?
Much as Romney was excoriated for his comment about self deportation, it would be a reality if we were to:
(1) Change the law to make it a felony to be here without proper government approval
(2) Implement a registration program which includes fingerprinting, etc. for any illegal to get a TEMPORARY visa until investigation into his application is completed and approved
(3) And this is seldom if ever even addressed—limit the amount of money that can be sent out of the country. Stand in line at a customer service desk at any big supermarket on a Friday afternoon and you will see tens of thousands of dollars being sent back to the home nation, usually Mexico. That is one store in one town in one state. Cut that off and many people will have no reason to be here.
Yeah, we need a barricade of some sort along the border. A fence here, a wall there. But it took the repetition of a little word everyone could understand and envision to shove Trump ahead of the people who didn’t understand the marketing of an idea to an Idiocracy populace.
You simply cannot talk to the average American voter as if he is an adult with a functional IQ. You have to talk to him as if he is in kindergarten.
And you can thank the Democrat controlled bureaucrats at the education Dept. for this, but this is what I mean when I say you have to play the cards that are dealt. None of us have any control over the IQ of the populace or what flavor of candidate will emerge from a primary, but what we can do is plug in and begin to steer the movement to conservative principles and start a systematic campaign to reeducate the next generation. Conservatives have allowed the take over of education and culture by the progressive movement over the last few decades so we should not be surprised by the current environment we find ourselves in. The good news is that progressivism always fails so each election cycle we have another opportunity, but when conservatives become indignant at either the candidate or the electorate, we usually blow yet another opportunity, all the while progressives once again rally around their failed candidate stoked on by nothing more than hyper emotional accusations of racism, bigotry, etc., etc.. Rinse and repeat. We can do better, we just need to rethink our strategies.
You’re right. Obviously the hardest way to accomplish real education is to take it out of the hands of the educrats, which is why the combination of home schooling and school vouchers is the only thing that is going to produce generations of students who actually know something.
It’s not just that students today are not being taught how to think. It’s not just that they are being passed on from grade to grade without ever being exposed to great literature or even the idea of great literature. It’s that what they ARE being taught is not only wrong, it is toxic. If you want to see the single thing that is most responsible for the undermining of America it is what is so laughably called out “educational” system, which is using our taxpayer dollars to teach our young people that this is a vile nation, built upon vile principles, by vile people, and that we and our original form of government are responsible for pretty much every bad thing that has happened in the history of the Earth. We are bad, our constitutional form of government is bad, our country is bad, and we need to get slapped around and brought down to the level of the rest of the world, lot of which will be accomplished by adopting always-failed social and economic policies. (Of course they leave out the always-failed part, which is of course the most important.)
I think the only hope is for those who have escaped this fact-bending, mind-bending, distortion of reality to educate their own children, independent of government intrusion, either at home or in schools they design and oversee and control.
Here is one approach:
About a new Catholic school opening, and having a foundation of “classical education”:
“The classical model of education, as its name suggests, dates back to as early as the 6th century. It strives to lead students to discover knowledge and truth that is ordered, coherent, integrated and is rooted in the wisdom of the past, particularly in Western civilization such as Greece and Rome.
The three primary pillars of classical education, sometimes called the trivium, are grammar, logic and rhetoric. Furthermore, the study of Latin, art and music is integral to classical education. In the early grades, exploration and memorization are encouraged, and as students progress to higher grades, they transition from memorizing to engaging in learning activities that stress synthesizing ideas across academic subjects.”
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About another school in Denver: “In the midst of dropping attendance, Our Lady of Lourdes Principal Rosemary Anderson switched the school to a classical model of education beginning in 2011, and since then, their enrollment has increased drastically, jumping from 90 students in 2011 to 175 as of January 2016.”
Great points Ama. I would also add that US employers must be heavily leaned upon to stop hiring illegals; e-verify, fines and that sort of thing. People freak out over the logistics and humanity of deporting “every last illegal”, but that’s just taking the matter too literally Nobody is proposing that. It’s a scary fiction from the left. If Trump follows up on Romny’s self-deportation plan coupled with some measure of deportation of the less desirables the situation would resolve itself and most importantly would signal an end to would-be illegals wanting to gain entry in the future. They’ll make opportunities for themselves in their own countries, and that should benefit everybody.
Remittances to Mexico are now Mexico’s largest source of foreign revenue, surpassing oil. Clamp down on that alone and we’ve accomplished something.
I have to admit it Rusty, I like the way you think. And e verify is a must
e-verify is great, but it doesn’t seem to cover a lot of the more underground or casual jobs, like lawn care and other unskilled labor. This is where a combination of limiting remittances and having a Fair Tax where people are taxed on what they spend, not what they earn, would eliminate a lot of the attraction of working here without proper documentation.
It has occurred to me that if we limit remittances, we might face a whole new kind of cross-border smuggling, as people smuggle cash back to Mexico.