Dakota Beacon

The following stems from a conversation with my brother.  I think there is a lot to think about here.

Is Donald Trump simply a stalking horse?  Is his candidacy merely a ploy by Democrats to avert pay-back time for the devastating Biden term?  Think about it.  In 2016 we had every expectation of a conservative win.  EIght years of Obama was enough.  By 2009 there was a powerful tea party movement growing.  It was reaching a crescendo by the 2015-2016 campaign season and the obvious choice was going to be Ted Cruz.  He had become a beacon of conservative reaction against the dangers of growing state power over our lives.   Then Trump made his famous showboat ride down the old escalator and threw around a lot of insults and people loved hearing them.  His insults were not confined, however, to the Democrats against whom he expected to be nominated to run, but against people in his own party.  Some of these - in fact many or most of them - were just inane or irrelevant.  Chris Christie was “fat”, a picture of framed patsy Lee Harvey Oswald appeared to show someone who resembled Ted Cruz’s father, a legal Cuban immigrant who had escaped persecution in Castro’s hell.  Never mind that the entire case against Oswald himself rested on the famously absurd “magic bullet” theory proposed by LBJ shill Arlen Specter.  And in the end the people decided they would rather have what they thought was entertainment than a serious effort to do the hard work of restoring our republic.  That’s no fun, after all.  

So Trump got his day.  He won the nomination.  He also beat Hillary Clinton, although she still says he “stole” the election and she vowed to make him pay.  Pay we all did; for four years all we heard was “Russia collusion”.  Well, that and “covid”.  And he’s still paying and we’re still paying.  There is no evidence of a stolen election or of “Russian collusion” in Trump’s win in 2016, and he remained phenomenally popular in 2020, with tens of thousands regularly attending his monster rallies.  It would have taken either some sudden event or a systematic process to get him out of office.  But he is out of office.  And he’s still on Page One everywhere because of his multiple indictments.

How does this come to be?  Trump was given the shiv by his own appointees, more or less.  His own “allies”.  It is odd, indeed.  The guy who was put into office to finally “drain the swamp” is mired in it at the moment and all of the swamp creatures are doing just fine.  In fact, there are a few more that have benefited from Trump's term - people like Anthony Fauci.  Trump abdicated our rights for us - our rights to have drugs and treatments tested and found to be both safe and effective before being made available to the general public.   He did that.  He did nothing and said nothing to deter rogue governors across the nation from illegally shutting down our businesses, our schools and our churches.   

At this point it behooves each of us to stop and think for a moment.  Were we more free at the beginning of Trump’s term (in other words after eight years of Obama’s reign) or at the end of it?  By the end of Trump’s term as president we no longer had the right to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly or freedom to petition our own government for redress of our grievances.  These words, of course, mean nothing to Donald Trump.  They might as well be quotes from King Lear or Don Quixote as from our own plainly written Constitution.  He never read that either.   Why should we have expected a constitutionalist or a conservative when we all knew damn well that he was neither and that he has zero acquaintance with the Bill of Rights or the Constitution?  Only if we were fools.  

Now many are scratching their heads, wondering why Trump isn’t acting to save himself in some way?  Steve Deace can’t understand why he isn’t putting pressure on a Republican-controlled House of Representatives to simply defund the Justice Department until it stops persecuting citizens for exercising their God-given and constitutionally-guaranteed rights.  It seems weird that no one in his family, none of his most ardent supporters or his paid legal counsel have said a word about this to anyone.  No one in Congress seems to be thinking about this either.  Matt Gaetz, where are you??  

What is obviously going on at the moment is that Trump is worth gold to Democrats.  How so?  There is really only one candidate who is genuinely feared by Democrats.  It’s not RFK, Jr, although they probably should fear him.  It is the leading opposition to a Donald Trump candidacy in 2024 - Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.  They dread a contest where they will have to face off against a governor who has proven that he has the stuffing to take them on and the know-how to beat them.  They fear the principles on which he is running and they above all fear that they haven’t found a way to buy him yet.  They can’t come out swinging against DeSantis, however.  To do so would be to give him a stronger footing and more standing as the heir apparent to Donald Trump but with none of his baggage.  

But Trump can.  And every time he opens his mouth he spews filth and hatred for the person he fears most at the moment - Ron DeSantis, who could take away his cheese.  He can’t bring himself to step aside - he can only bully others until he gets his way.  He cares more that he didn’t beat the rigging of 2020 by the sheer power of his great persona, overriding all the odds that were stacked in every crooked county in every swing state, than that he is not fulfilling promises made to his constituents.  He cares about his own pleasure at any given moment, not about principles or even draining swamps.  He likes revenge in selected circumstances.  He was forgiving of Hillary even as she was perpetrating the Russian hoax against him.  He says the “jury is still out” on Christopher Wray.  He says he often gets sound advice from Chris Christie.  He is out to get any unfortunate soul he ever endorsed, however, if they don’t grovel at his feet now.  He cast out his former endorsee, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds simply because she hasn’t endorsed him.  Perhaps she wants to endorse someone she can be sure will be allowed to be on the ballot in 50 states, who knows?  He hates his former endorsee Ron DeSantis because he had the temerity to declare himself a candidate.  Didn’t DeSantis know that that spot was already reserved?   So on his path, cutting a wide swath through the Republican states, slashing and burning as he goes.  What more could Democrats want?

Well, I suppose one thing they would like above all else would be for DeSantis to drop out or not to have run in the first place because it would be fairly easy to put the 4-D chess master in a corner at the rate he’s going.  For such a smart operator it seems he made a lot of sloppy errors - Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, Chris Wray, etc., etc., etc.  So they will have to make do with lame Trumpisms like “Ron DeSanctimonious” and more fat jokes for Chris Christie, whom he plans to make up with “when he returns to the White House”, probably, and maybe pump him for more suggestions about good appointees.

That, however, is not part of the Democrats’ plans for Trump.  It is far more likely that they will continue to suspend Trump in front of crowds, make sure he gets all the headlines, as many schoolyard barbs quoted against better candidates as they can express out of him, hopefully destroying others on his way down and then, when there is no one else left to put on the ticket (they hope) they will drop the hammer.  He will either have to take a plea deal, which he probably will, or pack his toothbrush, as Jim Rockford’s attorney, Beth, would advise in such a situation, and plan on beans and water on the county tab for a few years.  

Now, I have some friends, conservatives, but devoted to Trump, who have vowed to go the whole way down with him, no matter what, out of some kind of revenge motive.  As though Trump will inflict the pain they want Democrats to feel or all of their wrongdoing - presumably the election rigging.  While it is an understandable inclination, it would seem that objective reality should perhaps beat out this craving when we stop to think that the alternative to a conservative Republican victory would be . . . what?  Biden again?  Kamala Harris?  Gavin Newsome?  Maybe you can think of some more likely names. 

Our children’s and grandchildren’s future depends on us not to give in to our weakness for whatever “revenge” our fancy might induce us to think Trump would inflict.  Trump is far less likely to stop a future election fraud than DeSantis.  DeSantis has taken major steps in Florida to secure elections there.  Remember who won there?  Not just DeSantis.  But let’s look at DeSantis’s elections.  The first one, as Trump’s supporter and endorsee, he won by a healthy 6 points.  The second one, the re-election, run after a term of DeSantis’s efforts to stop ballot harvesting and calling to account fraud which utilizes the internet, requiring voter ID.  So if the evil is election fraud, Trump is not your guy - DeSantis is.  What other causes might be hanging out there begging for revenge we needn’t go into here.  If we do we will find, again, that Trump is not the guy you think he is.  

What, exactly, does Trump propose by way of fixing this so fraud does not occur again on this scale?   We have heard nothing from him - well, nothing but name-calling.  What will he do to “drain” the “swamp”? We hear nothing about that either and these are two crucial areas which have put him in jeopardy right now.  We all have a right to be angry, to want some kind of “revenge” for something as heinous as hijacking the people’s election process.  But it is to be hoped that at some point, pretty soon, our better instincts ought to kick in and our desire for constructive solutions which will benefit our children for generations to come might take precedence over our knee-jerk impulse for retribution at any cost.  The cost might just be our hope for the future.  

Comments?  (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) (please put "Dakota Beacon" on your subject line)