Today we will have a new president at noon. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (from that inauguration eight years ago.)
Yes, I voted for Donald Trump and I’m pleased he will re-enter the White House in about eight hours.
A great many Americans aren’t pleased. A casual tool around social media finds references to felonies, autocracy and a certain Fuhrer from 1930’s Germany. The complaints haven’t changed, only the amplification. Donald John Trump is the perpetual boogeyman, here to swindle the nation and run away with everyone’s rights lock, stock and barrel.
What amazes me, as it truly confounds me, is this man’s ability to weather everything which has been thrown at him since 2015. Lesser humans would have been devastated, frightened and crawled away at the prospect of a full-scale arsenal comprised of a large government bureaucracy and the majority of media outlets working in lockstep. Starting with a very real hoax regarding Russia, the Washington Post amplified Trump’s coming impeachments on inauguration day. Industrial media had taken sides, and the reliable virtues of journalism which taught me as a kid vanished from the modern American scene. I’m very sad about that. I hope traditional media returns to lessons of the 20th century which taught ideals of journalism elevated above the political fray.
What any journo might believe or prefer in private means nothing when the function of journalism is held as sacrosanct. That's how I was taught, and that is not what younger students of journalism are largely practicing now at the national level. To find classic journalism I'd recognize, you'll likely need to turn on your local television network affiliate. Your newspaper might have examples of it, at times.
What I also find astonishing is the absolute vacancy of scrutiny of Joe Biden – and his family which clearly sold access to Joe as their homespun business for decades. Under cover of a very real pandemic which cost our family one beloved uncle and nearly got me, Biden stayed smartly at home for two reasons. First, we saw little of him on the campaign trail. We received almost no detail on what his administration would actually do. All the nation had to chew on were Joe’s decades of experience and promise to govern as the unifying centrist he never was. He had one job, and that was to rid Earth of Donald John Trump. Democrats, ironically, would have been far better off had Trump won the 2020 election largely surrounded by an internal weasel cabal gleefully trying to oust him from the inside. He wouldn’t have had four years to regroup, time during which collaborative factions of our society worked tirelessly to jail and bankrupt Trump. Somehow, he fought off all that, too.
Second, Biden hid (and was hidden) to stave off conspicuous examples he was coasting into serious age-related decline. This was ignored in polite Washington, as every act Joe couldn’t handle on his own was gladly picked up by a gaggle of unelected underlings.
Whatever anyone thinks of the 2020 election, it arrived after four solid years of attempting to destroy Donald Trump using any means possible, plausible or even theoretical. We were told by major news outlets that Donald Trump was an agent of the Kremlin. Fingerprints and footprints of the Biden Administration were found all over the New York civil and criminal investigations. The same tangential connections extended into the Georgia election interference case. It took 29 federal agents just to arrest Roger Stone, somehow with CNN oddly pointing cameras at his house. FBI operatives got a good look at Melania Trump’s underwear.
Truth be told, at least as I see it, all of this stinks. And it stinks in a way which makes tens of millions of ordinary Americans not trust the most inherently necessary components of our federal government. There is no question the FBI has a series of black eyes so calamitous as to make an ordinary citizen like me wonder “what’s the point.” If the FBI cannot be trusted except by the political party receiving its majority service any given day, the FBI is worthless on the whole no matter its good work.
In the middle of all the stink is Donald Trump’s culpability for things he may have done which warrant actual investigation or action to protect the public trust. This isn’t lost on me as one of his voters, nor am I so blinded by my own political bias as to not want the high-minded judicial equality our system must deliver.
There was a day in the last nine years when too many pieces of our American system flew apart to function with worthy results. For America’s international prescription for democracy to retain its full dose bioavailability, our systems cannot become the political tools of tin-pot dictatorships and actual autocrats. But that happened between 2015 and, well, 2018.
I can’t point to a calendar and show you that day when too many of our core American functions entered Hell, I simply know it’s there. Boxes of documents next to Donald Trump’s toilet in Florida somehow meant he was a criminal of the highest order and deserved years in prison starting now.
Yet Biden, who didn’t even have plausible protection of the presidency when he stuffed boxes of whatever next to his Corvette, was a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” according to Robert Hur. Hur would be beaten senseless by that description, parsed by Democratic leadership and their complicit media as an assault on a perfectly functioning, sharp-as-tack president. Well, what is it?
In 2018, New York’s attorney general race was more a reverse auction than a traditional campaign. In a reverse auction, buyers present their need and sellers bid for the work. In 2018, “Get President Trump” was clearly the need and Letitia James answered the call. Honorable mention goes to George Soros who funded James and many other far-left prosecutors, circuitously rewarded by a certain Medal of Honor by President Biden.
The attempts to take down Trump elevated with Alvin Bragg’s election to the Manhattan DA’s office. The many claims Bragg is another “Soros funded DA” really don’t pass muster, although a significant amount in Bragg’s campaign coffers did come from an organization partly funded by Soros. It’s the strange contortion of law Bragg used, which had never been applied to anyone but Donald Trump.
The money on Trump’s balance sheet used to pay hush money showed up in company records as a legal expense, which isn’t beyond the scope of argument. It would be problematic if such hush money was illegal in New York, except it isn’t. Nothing regarding the recordkeeping would have constituted tax avoidance, which is usually what bothers New York in such matters.
In order to elevate any of this to a felony, New York Penal Law §175.10 requires an intent to defraud which must include concealment of the commission of another crime. Problem is, and a key reason this may die on appeal, is Bragg can’t prosecute the federal election crime alleged by this microscope on Trump’s accounting. The Federal Elections Commission, however, can prosecute such crime if it exists. The FEC has already reviewed the matter and found there’s no “there there.”
Absent crime, New York Penal Law §175.10 shouldn’t have provided a ground floor for felony indictments. All Bragg really had, at the end of the day, was misplaced expense dollars which existed and a theoretical yet already dispensed federal crime upon which to stake his claim. As for crime prosecution in New York, one will notice virtually everything at retail is locked up. Bragg routinely downgrades violent crime, yet found a quite fanciful way to manufacture felony charges which have never applied to anyone else. This, to me, is not equal justice.
Except for memes on X breathlessly touting Trump’s 34 state felonies, Trump is unscathed by yet another attempt to end his political career. While Judge Juan Merchan made sure Trump would enter the White House a felon, does that make our highest national office any less presidential? Will Trump wield any less Constitutional authority?
Ironically, Bragg and Judge Merchan seem to have harmed the intense meaning of felonies themselves more than their latest felony recipient. Felony classification, in my understanding, is designed to magnify the most serious crimes. It is a notification that one of our most severe criminal acts as citizens has been committed, usually paired with the greatest risk to society should that brand of behavior not be punished severely. Biases for or against Trump aside, is this Alvin Bragg sorcery actual felony material to you?
Now it is true they laid some harsh realities on Donald, namely he can't own a gun or get a casino license (in his own name) (likely for awhile). For someone who probably never hunts or target practices, and is surrounded by Secret Service for the rest of his life, he'll be just fine. And I'm pretty sure The Donald never wants to bankrupt another casino. The most delicious irony of this boiling legal cauldron of nonsense is that a guy who can't own a gun becomes Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest arsenal at noon today. "No guns, Donnie, but here's 5,000 nuclear warheads at your command. Have fun."
Like most of his left-induced publicity contusions, Trump will wear it as a specter of pride as he no doubt attempts to reverse the judgment. His detractors will adorn themselves with burdensome crosses and walk the city complaining that a felon sits in the White House, his supporters will ignore it. Much as Biden’s voters never asked how Hunter landed that sweet, super high-paying job at Burisma, we individually calibrate our blind spots at will.
To me, the last four years have been an ideological forest fire from coast-to-coast. It has reduced our nation’s discourse to an all time low, the reward for electing a man who promised unifying centrism as the value add to his decades of public service. We didn’t get the unifying, and we didn’t get the centrism. We didn’t get the president for all Americans, not that we’ll be getting that now. The entrenched Trump resistance will also resist any olive branch.
What we got over the past four years was, to many, only the ghastly mirage of what Biden faithful needed him to be. From the political center-right where my mind lives, we got far less than nothing. The American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act were terribly expensive salve which created permanent increases in prices along with spectacular additions to our national debt. The US-Mexico border was completely denuded in favor of importing the world to our doorstep, for what reason I’m quite unsure. Tent cities forming in our major metros mirror exacerbation of general disarray. To invite China’s Xi to San Francisco, a massive cleanup effort was necessary to sanitize the view for elite politicians. Potemkin Villages re-entered our lexicon, as we’ve become too shabby to invite diplomats to our former glorious cities on any given day.
Joe Biden unleashed the inner sanctum of liberalism’s fringe theorists on our governance, Biden himself too weak to hold back the unpragmatic dam of untested ideas and ideals. Climate change, healthcare, student loan relief – these were his hallmarks of hope, none of which particularly advanced during his single term. Internationally, Russia and Iran both sensed weakness in the international order, each exacting horrific damage on their neighborhoods. Would Ukraine and the Israel incursion have happened during a second Trump term? We’ll never know, we were told Joe was ready to helm America’s escape from global pandemic. We escaped only into Biden’s gaffes and confusion, so much so his truly unprepared second in command took the lead to blow $1.5 billion dollars in 100 days.
Common sense and basic biology took the hardest beating during the Biden years. With no clear leader, every extreme theory and activist group came out to play with an empowered vengeance. No matter my lifelong rabid support for LGBTQ issues (and I mean it), I was stressed all to hell by the last four years. And so were millions of people. Ordering me and everyone else to begin lockstep adherence to an unlimited range of variable pronouns was a mile too far for me, as was the notion that certain states can make medical decisions for minors while hiding significant developmental matters from parents under the guise of equality. Equality for whom? Governed by what? With what guaranteed long term results? Please, someone please answer that. If you’re a natural born male and declare yourself trans on Monday, you’re eligible to upend female sports on Tuesday. And if I dare want to debate or clarify any of these matters, I’m guilty of anything from microaggressions requiring hostile public belittlement and HR involvement to actual hate crimes worthy of pecuniary judgment for questionable damages or legal punishment. Many of these issues are absolutely unsettled and a non-compliant no thank you is all I can offer.
Dare disagree? Need to discuss? Unclear on proof? Have an alternate prescription for society? You’re some form of raging -ist or -phobe and your social media accounts should be cancelled as well as your source of employment. You will obey, as we at (D) Incorporated now have custody of all civil rights matters and will deliver the exclusive authorized recipe for our nation’s discourse.
Back at Reality Farms, neither the fringe left nor right should be given much sway over the nation as a whole. I wouldn't wish our country led by either the Seattle City Council or the Heritage Foundation, thanks.
All of the aforementioned questions have serious civil rights implications and deserve what America used to present to the world among our finest attributes: Reasoned debate held in antiquated chambers of high-minded discussion. Not that they’re the best examples, but President Ronald Reagan (R) and House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D) were famously friendly. When you saw them walk together, they each carried a radically different view of the United States, its purpose, past and future. There was a deep care for each other which elevated above their political purpose and drive.
“They had mutual respect for each other that separated their ideological bent from the need for basic human decency. Reportedly, the two political rivals were good friends who frequently enjoyed a drink together at the end of the day.” ~ Boston College
Instead of that, the first Trump and sole Biden administrations have broken and rebuilt our national Overton Window in so many shapes that it now won’t open, leaks when it rains and only lets in sun between midnight and 2 a.m. It has been warped and abused so violently our national discourse is now the unrecognizable voice of ping pong authority.
Instead of Tip and Ronnie, we have Trump scaring vulnerable groups with his rally banter, and Nancy Pelosi ripping up the State of the Union on national television.
Machines break when their internal parts are exposed to repetitive stress, and this back-and-forth knee jerk election process exacts just that stress on our nation. Did Biden have to open his administration by cancelling our national perimeters, and end with the snark of auctioning off expensive fence materials to the lowest bidder? No.
Now, partly by absolute necessity and partly because he can, Trump will enter office just as Biden did with a flurry of eff ewes toward the previous administration. Were two impeachments necessary during the first Trump admin? Absolutely not. In my view, the left’s political fever escalated to removal of Trump by any means necessary, despite automatically disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans should they have succeeded. One look at a couple of Trump’s oddly bumbling Secret Service agents on that fateful day in Pennsylvania didn’t dissuade my theory on the matter. To coin a phrase, they did not send their best.
Yes, I am exceedingly pleased Trump was elected. I feel many of his proposals represent common sense responses to intense national problems, though Americans have been trained to react in incendiary ways to any concept they don’t like.
Our nation is broken because our civics are broken. Our ability to debate is broken. Our limited-character social media attention span is exacerbated by the ability to digitally curate our own narrow worldview. Our gift of technological wonder has resulted in many ironies, one being a national curse of ideological myopia as we’ve lost the capacity for civil discourse. We used to be better dealmakers as a citizenry. Colleges used to be centers for expansion of individual thought rather than centers to produce activists deeply unaware of what they’re parroting.
In addition to civil discourse we need civil servants. I’ve often discussed my favorite Democrat, Senator Tommy Burks of Monterey, Tn. Tommy was a farmer, a devoted Tennessean and cream of the political crop. In my teens as a young broadcaster he gave me one of my first serious political examples, one too good for today – or so it seems.
I have a variety of friends I love very much who were actively convinced Kamala Harris needed to be the next president, and not necessarily because they detested Donald Trump. As I studied the matter with interest, it seemed Harris' innate surface characteristics were most prevalent as the drawing card. Some dreamed of a female president for the first time, no matter who it was. Some justifiably wanted for their daughter a president who looked like her. Some were convinced her job as vice president was given less authority and fewer serious projects than her resume deserved. Some championed her promises to help the middle class or end gun violence, although the specifics on those goals were largely missing. Time and again, however, articles promoting Kamala Harris spent many more words on Donald Trump’s negatives than the few positives Harris brought to any table.
To me, Kamala Harris was a high officer who’d received a series of field promotions without much learning at each stop. When she spoke, there was no substance. Yet by existing in her position, she could serve as avatar for any characteristic someone wished for her to represent. In every way, Harris presented a blank slate.
With all my excitement tempered by reality, I wish Donald Trump exceptional success against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Perhaps in her second term, Kamala Harris would’ve had the first term training and underpinning to be able to lead on her own.
At noon today, we’ll start finding out how well that theory works.
God Bless America.
Jason M. Kibby (Walker)
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Thank you for your unbiased letter to The Chattanoogan.com regarding our new administration.
I pray that our beloved country can reverse course staring today. I concur with your views almost 100 percent and I wish President Donald J Trump astounding success.
We need common sense and morals to be reinstated back into society.
I enjoyed reading your thoughts.
Chuck McDonald
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I enjoyed Mr. Kibby's letter immensely. It is refreshing to hear from someone that feels that there is plenty of blame to go around for our political and societal downfall and discord for both political sides.
I also, along with he and Mr. McDonald, wish President Trump success with most of his agenda but on the morals being reinstated I think Mr. McDonald is barking up the wrong tree.
Sam Lewallen