The Upside-down world of Trump

 

With America in the grips of near neurosis, the dancing celebrants of what seems to be an impending Biden victory reminds one of what Umberto Eco wrote in Travels in Hyperreality, that of a reunion of a mass of clichés.

Because if one stops and thinks about the 2020 election for more than five minutes, a few things might strike one as anything but cliché.

Why did Donald Trump, who is probably the most maligned public figure in modern history by an overwhelmingly hostile media, and who had both a pandemic and an array of riots across the country during an election year, receive more than 11 million additional votes than in 2016, breaking Obama’s 2008 record by more than 4 million votes? Why did the supposed racist receive more minority votes than any Republican candidate in over half a century? And why is it that the Republicans are looking to flip more than half a dozen seats in the House elections?

All of these, as in 2016, going against the pollsters and the TV pundits in a big way.

In the face of events that should excite some serious thinking, the media and those they are able to lead by the nose are comforting themselves with the stale series of unserious claims about Trump that they have tried on for more than four years.

While it irks me to defend Trump, who has many, many flaws, it irks me much more that the media and the Democratic Party have fused into a chimera. And for those who are still old fashioned enough to value facts, here are some squares to fit into the neat circles that is the world view of the ‘woke’ regarding the Trump presidency.

 

Trump the ‘racist’

Trump the supposed racist is married to a Slavic immigrant and has Jewish grandchildren. Furthermore, under his tenure, the black unemployment rate has dropped substantially to near historic lows of 5.5 percent. Hispanic unemployment equalled record lows of 4.2 percent.

Trump’s prison reforms meant that thousands of people, the majority of whom are of minority background and incarcerated due to harsh drug laws, have had their sentences commuted or reduced.

Trump signed a bill in 2019, permanently providing more funding to historically black colleges and universities and other institutions that serve large shares of minority students, something Obama never did.

In the 2020 election, Trump generated the highest percentage of minority votes for a Republican candidate in 60 years. This includes eminent scholars and commentators like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Larry elder, Candace Owens, and a surprising array of minority celebrities like Kanye West, 50 Cents, Ice Cube, Lil Wayne, Lil Pump, Stacey Dash, Shaq, and Floyd Mayweather, who have become outspoken in support of Trump, a rarity in the insular and far-left Hollywood set that enforces leftism.

On the other hand Joe Biden more than equal any Trumpism. Biden was against school integration and had stated that he did not want his children to grow up in a ‘racial jungle’. He signed the 1994 crime bill that led to mass black incarceration. His own VP candidate Kamala Harris (who is of Indian-Jamaican heritage, which is historically, culturally and ethnically very different from African Americans, and whose CV consists of largely locking up black people while she was DA in California) implied that he was a racist during the Democratic Primaries. His racism keeps leaking out in conversations—just recently, he had said that ‘poor kids are just as smart as white kids.’ And that if a black person even contemplates the choice between him and Trump for the 2020 election, then ‘you ain’t black.’

 

Trump the ‘Wall Street shill’

The allegations persist that Trump’s policies favour the big corporations and the billionaires. But even during the pandemic, a Gallup poll found that 56% of people saw themselves as better off than four years ago. In comparison, the same survey in 2012, after four years of the Obama/Biden administration, found only 45% saw themselves as better off than four years prior. Under Trump’s tax cuts and trimming of red tapes, the economy is revved up far more than it did under Obama’s eight year tenure, which saw the slowest recovery from an economic recession since WWII.

Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that real median household income rose by $4,144 or 6.8 percent since Trump took office. Compared with Obama, during the seven and a half year of his presidency, to start at the end of the recession mid-2009, the median household income rose by only $1,043, or 1.7 percent. Poverty rate dropped every year of the Trump presidency, to 10.3 percent in 2019, the lowest level ever since 1953.

While his policies have enriched middle class Americans, Trump’s net worth is estimated to have dropped 31% during his presidency, losing $600 million. Whereas ‘middle-class Joe’ quietly became a multi-millionaire on a public servant salary, with the FBI reported to be investigating his son Hunter Biden’s business associates over allegations of money laundering. What’s more, evidence is gathering that point to Joe Biden benefiting from Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings with Ukraine, Russia and China.

Finally, billionaires and the major corporations massively favour the Democratic Party in donations. Whereas Trump raised 45% of his contributions from grass root small donations ($200 and under).

 

Trump the ‘warmonger’

Trump is the first President in decades to make any meaningful progress with North Korea, facilitating the first ever meeting between leaders of the US and North Korea in 2018. The recent peace deals brokered by the US between Israel and Islamic countries such as the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan are the first meaningful peace agreements in decades in the Middle East. These garnered him multiple nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.   

Trump is the first president in 39 years not to enter the US into a new war or armed conflict. He did however facilitate the end of ISIS, which has been estimated to have killed almost 30,000 people through terrorism, most of whom in the Middle East. He has also brought home over 6,000 US troops from Europe and is also advocating withdrawing troops from the Middle East.

Biden was in favour of the Iraq War in 2003, and supported the 2011 Libya intervention that has led to continued turmoil.

 

Trump the ‘homophobe’

Trump named the first openly gay person to a cabinet-level position in Richard Grenell.

The Trump administration also spearheaded a global initiative to decriminalize homosexuality, which carries the death penalty in 13 countries and is illegal in many more.

Dave Rubin, the gay, liberal interviewer, recounts an insightful episode of meeting Trump with his husband, which offers a little personal vignette of the man.

Biden had been against gay marriage even after he became VP. In 1994, he voted to cut funding for schools that taught acceptance of homosexuality as a lifestyle.

 

Trump the ‘authoritarian’

Trump is pretty much Hitler, the media wails. To believe that you’ll have to believe that Hitler would: 1) be pro-gun rights for the people, 2) would resist the excuse of a pandemic to centralise power, and 3) would follow the constitution and not send in federal troops to cities overrun by looters and rioters when not invited to do so by the Democratic governors, who are willing to let their cities burn.

Despite his crass rhetoric, Trump has not arrested or tapped any journalists, unlike the Obama/Biden administration, which holds the record for the number of prosecutions against whistle blowers using the Espionage Act, something few realises because of a fawning media.

It is the Democrats who are wanting to pack the Supreme Court, showing their instinct of changing the rules of law whenever it suits them to get their way.

 

These are just a fraction of the facts that stand in the way of the mendacious press, who are continuing to fabricate an alternate reality by censoring news unfavourable to Biden and the Democrats.

A recent survey of more than 1,700 Biden voters in 7 swing states by the Media Research Centre found that a huge proportion of them were not aware of Biden’s sexual assault allegations or Hunter Biden’s scandal. Similarly, huge proportions did not know many of Trump’s achievements, such as the economic growth, job creation, and the Middle East peace deals. Seventeen percent of the surveyed Biden voters stated that they would not have voted for him had they known about one or more of these issues. This number is more than enough to have given Trump the election win.

 

One might still vote for the Democrats, having weighed up the options, but at least vote out of your own earned wisdom or ignorance, and not be a votary, herded by self-appointed priests, offering paper-thin analysis and reporting so ‘impartial’ that it might bring a smile to the moustaches of Stalin.