By D.C. McAllister
Monday, February 20, 2017
Many in the media are warning that President Donald Trump
is incompetent and doesn’t know what he’s doing. His ignorance, they say, will
mean the downfall of the republic. The hysteria is unwarranted and merely part
of a Democratic Party campaign to oust the president and derail his agenda.
This isn’t the first president to face claims of
incompetence. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes not. Such charges were made
against Barack Obama, and most were warranted, coming not only from Republicans
but Democrats. In November 2010, Joe Scarborough reported that several
Democratic senators had told him they thought Obama was out of his league.
“Democrats in Washington have been horrified by this
president’s handling of things for a year and a half now,” Scarborough said.
“The top Democrats in the United States Senate have all told me individually,
‘This guy has no idea what he’s doing.’”
Sound familiar?
We Also Saw an
Employee Exodus
The Guardian
also lamented during the same period that the exodus of employees from the
Obama administration was a bad sign.
Political analysts attribute the
attrition rate to exhaustion, but Republican opponents blame disarray inside
the White House, with an insular team responsible for too many policy failures.
In a blog on the Politico website,
Alvin Felzenberg, the presidential historian and author of The Leaders We
Deserved, writes: ‘These departures are a reflection of Obama’s leadership
style. Why he has such a difficult time earning and retaining the loyalties of
people outside his circle of intimates is anyone’s guess.’
So Trump isn’t the only president with a trusted inner
circle. The difference is, however, that Trump has stepped outside that circle,
meeting with people from all stripes and political parties, industries, and
interests. Obama didn’t do that. Yet Trump is the bungling idiot? I don’t think
so.
In June 2010, Democrat Mort Zuckerman, who voted for
Obama in 2008, wrote
at U.S. News that the “world sees
Obama as incompetent and amateur.”
The reviews of Obama’s performance
have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading
other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about
America’s role in the world.
Even in Britain, for decades our closest
ally, the talk in the press—supported by polls—is about the end of the ‘special
relationship’ with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized
Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United
Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual
world, a clear reference to Obama’s speech on nuclear weapons. When the French
president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that
something is awry. Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of
Obama’s visions. Relations with the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start
with the president’s poorly-organized visit to China, where his hosts treated
him disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television
audience of the Chinese people. The Chinese behavior was unprecedented when
compared to visits by other U.S. presidents.
Note how Zuckerman was bothered that Putin opposed
Obama’s visions. Yet Democrats today (and too many Republicans) think Putin’s
reported embrace of Trump’s vision is something to fear. So which is it,
Democrats? Do you want to work with Russia or not?
Zuckerman saw Obama as a failure in other ways outside
foreign policy. “He speaks as a teacher, as someone imparting values and
generalities appropriate for a Sunday morning sermon, not as a tough-minded
leader.”
The Obama presidency has so far
been characterized by a well-intentioned but excessive belief in the power of
rhetoric with too little appreciation of reality and loyalty. . . .
Strategic decisions go well beyond
being smart, which Obama certainly is. They must be based on experience that
discerns what works, what doesn’t—and why. This requires experienced staffing,
which Obama and his top appointees simply do not seem to have.
Even more scathing was liberal extraordinaire Gore Vidal
with this evaluation
of Obama that same year: “I was like everyone else when Obama was elected –
optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated,
but he’s incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because
he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t
hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed. And who wouldn’t be? The United
States is a madhouse.”
Vidal called Obama a “kid” who has never “heard a gun
fired in anger.” The president is “absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell
him lies and he believes them,” Vidal continued. “He’s not ready for prime time
and he’s getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once.” Hold your horses!
Generals lied to Obama? But I thought
that only happened to Trump.
‘Amateur Hour at
the White House’
Even the Washington
Post had to admit all was not well in Obama world when they reported that
the White House wasn’t ready for conflicts over policy: “President Obama’s
advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift
that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a
firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the
initiative on the president’s top legislative priority.”
Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics was “stunned” that Obama
“would be caught off guard by this,” adding that his “lack of foresight” was
“absolutely inexcusable.” “How could they not have anticipated this?” Cost
asked. “How could they possibly have been surprised that the left and right
flanks of the party would not see eye to eye?”
Seems like things haven’t changed that much, at least
rhetorically. “But Trump is worse!” many might claim. Yet that isn’t true at
all. What’s worse is the way it’s being reported and repeated. The claims of
incompetence are rushing like a torrent from every direction and with such
hysteria that you’d think the chaos of Armageddon was upon us.
Paul Krugman refers to the “staggering ignorance of Trump
and says we have “an intellectual vacuum at the top” where “ignorance is
strength.” Therefore, we must “be afraid, be very afraid.” Dana Milbank claims
that “competence questions arise daily,” plaguing the White House at every
turn.
CNBC predicts, as if it has a crystal ball, that “White
House tumult threatens to derail Trump’s broad agenda.” Never mind that these
same people were constantly wrong about Trump throughout the campaign. But the
“incompetence of Trump” fits nicely into their effort to undermine that agenda.
As John Harwood writes, “Chaos within the Trump White House has placed a new
hurdle in front of Republicans’ goals of enacting health care and tax reform
this year.”
They only wish. This is the goal of the mainstream media
today: derail Trump’s agenda and hopefully Trump himself either through
impeachment or defeat in 2020. We shouldn’t be surprised by Democrats engaging
in such propaganda, but what about Republicans? I hear too many of them echoing
the Left.
It’s Trump Against
the World Again
They might think they’re being principled and objective.
They’re not. They’re useful idiots. Trump is not the first president to undergo
difficulties in transition. As I’ve stated, Obama faced the same critiques.
Trump, however, is getting it from all sides. He’s being undermined and
attacked by the media, Hollywood, Congress, the administrative state,
Democrats, intelligence officers, and even his own party.
There are forces at work today that Obama never even
imagined would raise a finger against him. The cultural and political Left want
to delegitimize and defeat the Republican Party, conservatism, and all who are
committed to the Constitution as originally written. They want to transform our
nation into a collectivist nightmare that rejects our principles of liberty and
equality before the law. They will lie, cheat, steal, and punch to achieve
their goals.
Republicans throwing Trump under the bus because of
pride, lust for power, hurt feelings, or irrational fear will do more to put
our republic in jeopardy than any cabinet resignation or travel ban on foreign
nationals from hostile regions ever could.
Any Republican, conservative, or American who really
cares about freedom and preserving the Constitution needs to stop with the
knee-jerk reactions and parroting of the Left. If they continue, they need to
be called out and challenged. They need to stop the rhetoric and join the Right
in its fight against the Left’s cultural and political Marxism.
We need to stand united against the leftist tyrannical
aggression cloaking itself in the revolutionary garbs of resistance or even the
preening dress of so-called principles. The Right needs to remember who the
real enemy is, and it’s not the current president of the United States.
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