Ashok Dhillon
Jan 27, 20196 min
For his recent decision to allow enough funding go through to open the US Government for three weeks, Trump is being excoriated by some on the ‘Ultra-Conservative’ side of the partisan divide. While the ‘Liberal Left’ is celebrating the defeat of Trump, and the win of his protagonist Democrat Nancy Pelosi in this latest partisan battle, it’s the prominent commentators of the Right that are skewering him more profoundly, and thus wounding him more gravely. Trump, politically, is more sensitive to attacks from the Right which have far greater credibility with his ideologically conservative support base, than from the Left.
The irony is that it was the high profile conservative political commentators and provocateurs like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh that set him up for failure in this shutdown-battle in the first place.
Trump had agreed to sign a bi-partisan funding bill to avoid a shutdown, temporarily, in early December (last month). But the ultra-Right among the conservatives tore strips off of him, calling him ‘gutless’, a ‘wimp’, a ‘joke of a presidency’, and such other less than flattering titles to which they knew he would be most sensitive to.
To the ultra thin-skinned and insecure Trump, such public name calling from the icons of the Right were tantamount to a near public-political-execution, leaving him no choice but to retract his decision to sign the funding bill, and rashly ‘own’ the ensuing and damaging shutdown – while engaging in an unwinnable political battle with the Democrats.
Trump desperately needs his core-non-judgmental conservative base to protect him while in power, and for any hope of winning his potential run in 2020, if he lasts that long.
This conservative core base is for him the bedrock of his current political legitimacy and the hope of any possible political future. And while most Americans, along with the rest of the civilized World, are deeply dissatisfied, and indeed even horrified by Trump’s performance as President so far, his core support base are almost unconditionally accepting, forgiving and reassuringly supportive of him. Trump needs them more than he needs almost anything else.
This base of his is not vulnerable to the incessant criticisms, attacks and public disgust proffered by the raging Left, almost daily, in fact the outrage of the Liberal Left energizes them (the great American divide), but it is affected by the acidic vitriol of an Ann Coulter, and the alternate-universe ravings of a Rush Limbaugh.
Trump being for all intents and purposes ideologically empty, he espouses the hot button issues of the conservatives as his political mantra, which position he had to adopt to win the Presidency in the thinly-seeded ideological field of the conservatives. His commitment to the conservative causes are purely political opportunism, to gain political backing from a Party that is for the most part, in its leadership, as morally bankrupt as he is. He is at home in the Republican Party.
And that is precisely why he is ultra sensitive to barbs from the influential spit-ballers of the Right, especially when that vitriol is being aimed at him through the unreservedly, unashamed, disrespectful name calling of the up till now Ann Coulter’s ‘conservative god’.
The daily abuse from the general Left, and the nightly abuse from the nationally prominent comics/satirists, does not matter to Trump, as much, because he knows by portraying it as victimization and obstruction from the Left, he can use it to inflame the Right, particularly his core supporters. And he has done this very successfully, these past two years of his increasingly dysfunctional Presidency.
But unhappiness of the Right is his political achilles heel, and his detractors unhappy with him for doing the right thing and opening the government without the funding for the ‘Wall’ know his growing vulnerability there. So they are going to continue to goad him for ‘caving’, until he capitulates again and veers towards doing the wrong and the hurtful, for the Nation and for himself, perhaps as quickly as three weeks from now when the government funding issue resurfaces.
It is ironic, the commentators of the Right that get under Trump’s skin profess outrage because they accuse him of reneging on his core campaign promises of building the Wall and curbing illegal immigration that according to them, and him, is threatening to swamp white America, flood the country with rapists, criminal gang members, and terrorists from countries unknown.
In other words Trump and the Right have made a career of proclaiming patriotism in the systematic stoking of fear from barbaric hordes at the Southern border. These hordes, perpetually invading America are now labelled by Trump and commentators as ‘Caravans’.
The last one, just prior to the November 2018 mid-term elections, was promoted as an imminent national threat, credible enough for Trump to order the US military to the Southern border. The ‘invading caravan’ came and went with no invasion of any kind, to the point the army units deployed in such loud and dramatic fashion, quietly packed up and slipped back to their bases without so much as whimper from Trump and fellow panic-rousers on the Right, particularly from the facts ignoring one-key-hole-viewed shills at Fox News.
Neither the fact that illegal immigration is dropping the past years is acknowledged, nor is the indisputable and glaring fact that Americans are killed overwhelmingly, distressingly, and in evermore predictable and verifiable manner, almost daily, by fellow Americans with uncontrolled access to unlimited guns, than by any illegal aliens from anywhere, or by any foreign terrorists.
These proven salient facts, pertinent in the argument for the requirement for security from the Southern border that ignores the immeasurably greater threat from within, through the means of a physical wall which every independent expert considers unnecessary and ineffective at best, are never addressed by the Right-Wing-Wall-Wanters, as they bully and push an intellectually and politically challenged Trump to fulfil a demonstrably stupid idea, at the cost of America not Mexico. Nor in their current outrage, do the Right-Wingers profess outrage in the fact that Trump’s Wall was to be paid for by Mexico and not by the US citizens. And most tellingly, they also completely ignore the fact that for two years of his presidency, the Republicans controlled the entire government apparatus, and both Houses, with Republican majority, wilfully chose not to fund the Wall.
Now, rather unpatriotically, these civil-conscience challenged, morally-outraged Coulters, Limbaughs and the Foxtrotters openly prefer that Trump keep the United States government shut, even with the incalculable and mounting governance, financial, and economic damage done every day that it is shut, including keeping 800 thousand government workers off work and unpaid, than open the government, which is indisputably the right and moral thing to do.
And, they are obviously alright with the American public picking up the cost of building the Wall, which amounts to tens of Billions of dollars, if it were to be constructed as the ‘biggest most beautiful powerful Wall’ according to Trump specifications, even though the Wall promises came with the unmitigated attached promise of no cost to the American public, but only cost to Mexico.
This willingness to saddle the American public with the costly side of the ‘Wall promise’ (the cost of building it) while insisting on the least profitable part of the bargain, the unquestionable uselessness of it, is so un-American that it might as well be coming from an adversarial source such as Trump’s mentor and guru Vladimir Putin. The ex-KGB agent’s tactics have burrowed so deep into the American body-politic that it has poisoned Americans against each other - to the point where some of Trump supporters prefer Russia’s despotic Putin, to any American Democrat. Putin’s brilliant strategy has gutted America from the inside.
But the Right has been quite alright with Russia gutting America, as they have screamed abuse at their own Intelligence Agencies, particularly the FBI and CIA, and hurled abuse at the heads of investigations, such as James Comey and Robert Mueller, Republicans both, or anyone else, American, who had the temerity to investigate anything related to Trump, regardless of relevant evidence requiring an investigation under all normal circumstances.
In fact, the Right has tried every foul tactic to shut and mitigate all investigations into Russian involvement in America’s current political distress. They rather hold Trump’s feet to the fire so he can do more harm than good to America and himself. How unpatriotic is that? A terrified, increasingly politically and legally vulnerable, and presidentially unfit Trump will surely comply with the demands of the aggressive Right - of the Members of Freedom Caucus, the Ann Coulters, the Rush Limbaughs, and the myriad conservative commentators and media outlets that challenge and wound him daily in an effort to force him to do the un-American, once again hold the country hostage through another shutdown, to build an unnecessary Wall, that has become a political millstone around his neck.