Posted on 12/05/2016 6:41:20 PM PST by Mariner
Let me help you out Gerald.
Strict immigration Control: Conservative (not Republican, but CONSERVATIVE)
Re-industrialization: Conservative
Tax Cuts: Conservative
Regulation Slashing: Conservative
Education Re-localized: Conservative
Rejection of Regime Change as foreign policy: Conservative
Rebuild the US Army/Navy/Airforce: Conservative
Protect and “cherish” the 2A: Conservative
Slash size & cost of Federal Gov’t: Conservative
Kill off Political Correctness: Conservative
F*ck Globalism: Conservative
Reform the VA: Conservative
Rescind Obama’s Exec Orders: Conservative
Renegotiate our God awful Trade deals: Conservative
Put America FIRST: Conservative
Go after Sanctuary Cities and Anchor Babies: Conservative
Appoint strict originalists to SCOTUS: Conservative
Open up lands for energy extraction: Conservative
Get rid of assinine Rules of Engagement for our warriors: Conservative
Killing ObamaCare and opening up insurance to competition: Conservative
Re-dedicating ourselves to Israel’s security: Conservative
Treating Arab Princes like the arseholes they are: Conservative
Calling out the MSM as lying sacks of poop: Conservative
The rest of his agenda is a mish-mash of smelly republicanism and liberalism. But we have not been offered so much conservatism from one candidate since Coolidge, and all from a non-ideologue at that.
“Shuffles the ideological deck” is too close to “New Deal”
I think he’s missing more than a few cards from the Ideological Deck but I guess as the Trump Card he makes up for all that and more.
also, internally the division will be between the old, rapidly-becoming-obsolete urban Ruling Class, and the new, emerging, nationalist-populist County class.
It includes a naughty word so I’ll post the link rather than the image, but Kid Rock’s T-shirt here says it all:
except its just some idiot writer pulling it out of his rear end.
Before 2015, he was clearly a center-left Democrat on every issue, except business.
If only.
Six days after the election, Trump hired Reince Priebus as his Chief of Staff.
Priebus publicly supported Marco Rubio’s Amnesty bill in 2013.
Five days after the election, Trump told 60 Minutes he would wait to make a “determination” about illegal immigrants whose only crime was being in the USA until after the border was secured and the situation was normalized.
Translation: Amnesty after Trump is reelected in 2020.
The opening sentence shows the author to be out of touch with reality. Obama launched a new race war.
Really? Already in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump was talking about the problems of an open border and illegals ("America is experiencing serious social and economic difficulty with illegal immigrants who are flooding across our borders…It is a scandal when America cannot control its own borders…It comes down to this: we must take care of our own people first. Our policy to people born elsewhere should be clear: Enter by the law, or leave.").
By 2011 in his book, Time to Get Tough, he was calling for a border wall, many more border patrol agents, an end to citizenship for “anchor babies,” and deportation of illegal criminals. In a similar vain to his speeches during the campaign, he wrote: “Look, if a nation can’t protect its own borders, it ceases to be a country.” He explicitly wanted U.S. immigration laws enforced (“This wholesale abdication of a president’s constitutional duties is as shocking as it is foolish…Sacrificing American laws on the altar of political expediency is immoral”).
In 2013 in multiple tweets, his CPAC speech, and an interview with the Breitbart website, he said the proposed amnesty bill was a "monstrosity" and would be the death of the Republican Party.
By 2000, he was also for cracking down hard on terrorism, which he saw as a big growing threat. Terrorism was also a topic that he criticized Bill Clinton and his administration over in The America We Deserve. The threat of terrorism was a large focus of the book. He devoted a whole chapter to it, plus discussed it in various other places in the book. This was the book where he mentioned Osama Bin Ladin before 9/11.
In Time to Get Tough (2011), he was for strengthening the military (he attacked Obama for defense spending cuts), but using it more judiciously (“Only go to war to win”). He devoted an entire chapter to “Taking the Oil.” He predicted that the Iraqis would never be able to keep control over it themselves. In regard to foreign policy he wrote: “American interests come first. Always. No apologies.” In 2011, he said on O’Reilly and in a CBN interview that’s on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWzDAvemJG8) that the world has a “Muslim problem,” because of all the Islamic terrorist attacks.
In The America We Deserve (2000), he called out the damage that teachers unions and federal centralization were doing to the education system. He wanted school choice, decentralization, the ability to fire incompetent teachers, etc. I don’t consider these to be to “center-left” positions, and they’re obviously not business-related economic issues, so I don't think this is as "clear" as you imagine.
Your comment is very well researched and very well written.
I have actually never read a Trump book.
I was relying on my memory of Trump's public statements when he quit the Republican Party, and when he publicly expressed an interest in running for the Democrat presidential nomination, and, two years later, when he expressed an interest in running for governor of New York as a Democrat.
I don't have enough time to research this today.
However, I don't feel the issue is quite as cut and dried as you present it.
I vigorously opposed Trump during the GOP Primary last year - because he is motivated by political whim, not by political principle, and because I have zero confidence in his political integrity.
However, I voted for Trump, and I never criticized him after he locked up the nomination.
Then, less than a week after the election, on 60 Minutes, Trump backed away from his promise to deport 100% of illegal immigrants.
The next day, Trump hired Reince Priebus as his Chief of Staff.
In 2013, Priebus publicly supported Marco Rubio's U.S. Senate Amnesty bill.
I will boil it down to an even simpler paradime
Conservative polices are winners. Trump will do everything he can to be a winner. His “brand” is his id and his ego. You don’t bet on his “ideological soundness”; you bet on his ego and need to win. In order to win, he has to “Make American Great Again”. Our vision of politics supports that MAGA value, the Left is diametrically opposed to that value.
I see you are still clinging to your Cruzite butt hurt by posting your usual absurd claims completely devoid of any factual merit.
Amusing to watch your sort of infantile intellect in action. You are incapable of making rational fact based points and instead, like most elementary school IQ’s, think mindless sneering the height of “wit”.
To think that the largest and most competitive economy in the world is going to suddenly become isolationist and protectionist is truly infantile intellect at work. To this date, I've only seen such charges hurled by the left.
Thanks for the nice words. I’d especially recommend Time to Get Tough (politics) and The Art of Deal (autobiography), if you did want to check out any of his books.
What Trump said during that 60 Minutes interview wasn’t actually new. He had already been saying the same thing periodically for months. I figured the press didn’t want to cover it very much because they thought it would win him more independent and undecided votes. The ironic thing was that the press eviscerated him for his hardline immigration policy speech in Phoenix from the summer because they thought it was too tough; yet that was the first time he said that once the border was secured, the wall built, eVerify put in place, sanctuary cities defunded, illegals with criminal records deported, etc., then we can decide what to do with the remaining illegals, which suggests that maybe some could stay. (He actually did mention the possibility of “work permits” for farm workers during the primaries, but that would still be much better than Hillary’s pathway to citizenship and voting rights).
Since the 1980s, Trump really has been consistent in a broad sense on having a nationalist-leaning worldview and being tough on crime. Immigration enforcement falls under both of these. Even if he doesn’t deport every last illegal (which would be a heck of a task for the government), his immigration proposals are still many times better than any president’s in over half a century. Just getting the border secured would be a huge thing, not to mention the rest of his 10-point plan to end illegal immigration (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/policies/immigration/).
Also, Chief of Staff is an administrative role; it is not a policy job. It doesn’t really matter if Priebus supported Rubio’s bill. He’s not going to be overseeing our immigration policies. Our soon-to-be chief law enforcement official, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is much more relevant, and he’s a hardliner on illegal immigration, as is Kris Kobach who is also working with Trump on immigration policy.
That’s what I’m here for . . . to amuse you so that you feel intelligent. Sure, I preferred Cruz at the outset, but for you to suggest that it is dispositive of my “absurdity” when all I am doing is pointing out your (likely) hypocrisy about “globalists” now that Trump has appointed “them” [queue spooky and dramatic music] to his Cabinet has vanished . . . .
Sorry, I meant to call you a hypocrite, and refer to your “dislike” of globalists.
I imagined that maybe the hatred for “globalists” would have diminished now that Trump has chosen one or another, but I guess not.
When Trump won the GOP presidential primary, almost all his supporters believed he was going to vigorously enforce all the immigration laws - and Trump knew that.
However, as I wrote earlier, vigorous enforcement has now become a “determination,” to be made at some unspecified future date, for millions of illegal immigrants.
Just yesterday, in his Time Magazine Man of the Year interview, Trump refused to re-commit to his earlier position that he would deport Obama’s 1 million “Dreamer” immigrants.
Instead, he said he would offer a solution that would make everyone “proud and happy.”
Translation: Here comes Amnesty - after Trump is reelected in 2020.
Actually, ILLEGAL immigration has never been my main focus, although Amnesty would give the Democrats almost instant control of the Federal government.
My main issue has always been massive LEGAL immigration, which is enthusiastically supported by a majority of rank and file Republicans.
Massive LEGAL immigration is political suicide for Conservatives.
The Democrats currently have enough LEGAL voters to win the White House any time they want to, as long as they get their core voting groups to the polls.
Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by a total of 100,000 votes.
We got lucky.
I voted for Trump in the hope that Conservatives could postpone their political suicide for four more years.
I'll probably get exactly what I voted for.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.