Donald Trump — a former liberal and benefactor of Democrats — is still surging. But his loud New York lingo, popular put-downs of obnoxious reporters and trashing of the D.C. establishment are symptoms, not the catalyst, of the growing popular outrage of lots of angry Americans who are fed up. The fed-up crowd likes the payback of watching blood sport in an arena where niceties just don’t apply anymore. At least for a while longer, they enjoy the smug getting their comeuppance, as an uncouth, bullheaded Trump charges about, snorting and spearing liberal pieties and more sober and judicious Republicans at random.
Perhaps they don’t see the abjectly crude Trump as any more crude that Barack Obama calmly in academic tones assuring Americans that they all could keep their doctors and health plans when he knew that was simply untrue or announcing to the nation that his own grandmother was a “typical white person” or advising supporters to “get in their face.” They see Trump as no more vindictive that Harry Reid lying about Mitt Romney’s tax returns (and then bragging that such a lie helped defeat him), or a Sen. Barbara Boxer publicly attacking the single, non-parental status of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And they certainly don’t see Trump as uncouth as an Al Sharpton — former presidential candidate, chief advisor on matters of race to Barack Obama, and current TV news show host. Trump’s crass bombast is enjoyed by the fed-up crowd as the proper antidote to the even greater bombast of the Left, who created Trump’s latest manifestations.
The conservative base is tired of illegal immigration. Their furor peaked with the horrific killing of Kate Steinle by a seven-time convicted felon and five-time deported illegal alien. They are baffled that one apparently exempt and privileged ethnic group can arbitrarily decide to ignore federal law. They are irate that they are lectured about their supposed racism from an open-borders movement predicated on La Raza-like ethnic chauvinism. They do not want to hear about nativism from a lobby that so often at rallies waves the flag of the country that none of the protestors seems to wish to return to, a country whose authoritarianism is romanticized as much as their host country is faulted for its magnanimity. Call this what you will, but emotion over neglecting federal law is much less worrisome than cool calculation over violating it.
The fed-up crowd expects statistics to be massaged to counter reality; in the real world nearly a million illegal aliens have committed crimes, with almost 700,000 charged with felonies and serious misdemeanors. In fantasyland, they are said to be more lawful than U.S. citizens. Most Americans would be guilty of felonies for creating false identities, or using fraudulent Social Security numbers; in matters of illegal immigration, these common crimes are not even considered crimes.
The furor over the death of Ms. Steinle reflected the mounting outrage — especially at the hypocrisy of the elites who crafted sanctuary-city legislation. Would they be so nonchalant about the law if a daughter of one of the architects of the legislation were to be gunned down by an illegal alien? Would San Franciscans object if Tulsa nullified federal gun legislation or declared open season on federally protected species? Only liberalism can take a reactionary Old Confederacy idea of federal nullification and turn it into a progressive fad.
The recent disclosures about Planned Parenthood likewise infuriated the fed-up base. Again, they were not incensed just at the callous and sick way supposed humanitarians at Planned Parenthood talked of slicing up fetal tissue and selling organs, but at the hypocrisy of it all. At a time liberals are Trotskyzing our past to damn to memory any ancient historical figure who owned slaves or practiced racism, how does Planned Parenthood’s godhead Margaret Sanger, the racist eugenicist and promoter of abortion to curb minority populations, get a pass?
Liberals lecture about “settled science” and adherence to logic instead of myth and folklore. But they also insist on talking of fetuses as non-human organisms, even as they concede both that fetuses in the womb possess viable — and marketable — human tissues and that developing babies at 22 months are now viable outside the womb.
For those who bandy about words like troglodyte, it is quite Neanderthal, in the scientific sense, to believe that a baby is not a living, viable organism until it emerges from the birth canal. For a movement that talks of caring and compassion, it is hard to write a script more cruel and callous than that of the Planned Parenthood talking heads referencing a Lamborghini or a “less crunchy” abortion technique or the macabre house of horrors of the abortionist and convicted murderer Dr. Gosnell. As for the supposed questionable ethics of catching Planned Parenthood with ruse and stealthy tape, no one seemed to object over secretly taping at a private gathering Mitt Romney’s unfortunate quip about the “47 percent,” much less did liberals object to four decades of 60 Minutes ambush-style, secret-video reporting.
The fed-up crowd is tired of racial hypocrisy. In the Trayvon Martin case, the president weighed in on the ongoing case in blatantly racist fashion by announcing the deceased might have looked like his own son, as the New York Times invented “white Hispanic” to lessen George’s Zimmerman’s ethnic fides (e.g., is Barack Obama, of similar half-minority lineage, a “white African-American”?) and as the media photo-shopped Zimmerman’s head wounds and selectively edited his taped 911 call.
Fantasy was thematic ad nauseam from the Duke lacrosse fiasco to the Michael Brown mythologies, the font of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie that became a national slogan. But again, the hypocrisy is what irritates more — a Barack Obama siccing his administration after supposedly elite segregated neighborhoods as he sends his kids to Sidwell Friends.
The fed-up crowd expects that Paula Deen, the Duck Dynasty crowd, and Donald Sterling can become public enemies with a racist or insensitive word. But this is not so when a Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, Spike Lee, Al Sharpton, or Jesse Jackson mouths unequivocal racism. They assume that Jefferson can be rendered no more than a slave owner, but not liberal icon Woodrow Wilson who practiced 20th-century not 18th-century-style racism.
The fed-up crowd senses that if America continues its present regressive trajectory it will end up as a Greece, Detroit, or Chicago, without anywhere in America to flee to. It no doubt wants Trump to continue for a bit longer, as he struts about and shouts over why Hillary has a career when Gen. David Petraeus’s was ruined for roughly the same offenses, or cuts short an agenda-driven and biased Telemundo reporter as biased and agenda-driven. At some point the fed-ups will have vented and become fed up themselves with the circus-master Trump, who equates his own money-making with both virtue and wisdom. But we are not there yet quite yet.
To explain the inexplicable rise of Donald Trump is to calibrate the anger of a fed-up crowd that is enjoying the comeuppance of an elite that never pays for the ramifications of its own ideology. The elite media, whose trademark is fad and cant, writes off the fed-up crowd as naïve and susceptible to demagoguery as the contradictory and hypocritical Trump manipulates their anger. In fact, they probably got it backwards. Trump is a transitory vehicle of the fed-up crowd, a current expression of their distaste for both Democratic and Republican politics, but not an end in and of himself. The fed-up crowd is tired of being demagogued to death by progressives, who brag of “working across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” as they ram through agendas with executive orders, court decisions, and public ridicule. So the fed-ups want other conservative candidates to emulate Trump’s verve, energy, eagerness to speak the unspeakable, and no-holds barred Lee Atwater style — without otherwise being Trump.
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