Donald J. Trump: Reviving the populist spirit

By David Zukerman, AMERICAN THINKER

Will someone explain why the anti-democratic left keeps demanding clarification from President Trump on his position vis-à-vis neo-Nazis, the KKK, and white supremacists, among others?  Would anything the president said on the subject of Charlottesville satisfy them?  Started differently, would anything the president said on the subject cause the totalitarian left to end its campaign to cut short the Trump presidency as soon as possible?

Not only is President Trump a racist-sympathizer, at best, in the eyes of his enemies, but he is also “un-American.”  See the August 14 column by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that ends with these words:

[W]e don’t need to wonder whether an anti-American cabal, hostile to everything we stand for, determined to undermine everything that truly makes this country great, has seized power in Washington. It has: it’s called the Trump administration.

For Krugman, we did not have a national election November 8, 2016 – we had the seizure of “power” by “an anti-American cabal,” apparently let by Donald J. Trump.  Clearly, for the enemies of President Trump, there is no room for reason in analyzing the Trump presidency.

And so the irrational allegation of President Trump’s colluding with Russian president Putin has been replaced by the Big Lie narrative that President Trump is soft on racists, with the narrative to be sprinkled across the news pages.  See, for example, the New York Times August 24 story that rabbis will shun the president for the Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement: “[Trump] has played down the racist and anti-Semitic views of white supremacists demonstrators in Virginia.”

I am Jewish.  When I voted for president, I asked God that Donald Trump win the presidency.  I understand from his New York Times column, August 19, that for Bret Stephens, Jews who support President Trump should consider themselves morally embarrassed.  Well, my political outlook is informed from the populist views expressed in the first half of Federalist No. 57.  When President Trump says, as he did in Phoenix, August 22, “Washington is full of people who are only looking out for themselves,” I am reminded of Madison’s warning at the beginning of No. 57 that there are people seeking the “ambitious sacrifice of the many to the aggrandizement of the few.”

When President Trump also said in Phoenix, “The media can attack me. But where I draw the line is when they attack you, which is what they do when they attack the decency of our supporters”…when I learned of that comment, I got the notion that this president will stand with the John Does (as Frank Capra might have called us) of the country against the self-serving aggrandizers.

And when President Trump further said in Phoenix, “I came to Washington for you.  Your dreams are my dreams.  Your hopes are my hopes.  And your future is what I’m fighting for each and every day”…when I learned of those words, I thought not only that we finally have a president faithful to the populist spirit of Federalist No. 57, but that we have a Frank Capra-type hero – a Longfellow Deeds, a Jefferson Smith, a John Doe, a George Bailey – come to life, and in the Oval Office, at that.

The enemies, I think, of President Trump are of the ilk of the cinematic enemies of Deeds (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) and Smith (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) and Doe (Meet John Doe) and Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life).  Recall, please, Hillary Clinton’s derisive reference to Trump voters as “deplorables.”  How far is that slur from the “discontented rabble” reference the banker Henry F. Potter applied to the plain people of Bedford Falls in It’s a Wonderful Life?

And these words, spoken by President in Phoenix, could have been spoken by John Doe (played by Gary Cooper) in Meet John Doe:

We can do anything, we can build anything and we can dream anything. It’s time to remember what our brave soldiers never forgot. Americans share one flag, one home and one glorious destiny. We live according the same law, raise our children by the same values, and we are all made by the same Almighty God.