Donald Trump’s presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run…
After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” As Pence entered the theater, a wave of boos swept over the audience. And at the play’s end, the Aaron Burr character, speaking for the cast and the producers, read a statement directed at Pence:
“We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values.”
In March, the casting call that went out for actors for roles in this musical celebration of “American values” read: “Seeking NON-WHITE men and women.”
The arrogance, the assumed posture of moral superiority, the conceit of our cultural elite, on exhibit on that stage Friday night, is what Americans regurgitated when they voted for Donald Trump. Yet the conduct of the “Hamilton” cast puts us on notice. The left neither accepts its defeat nor the legitimacy of Trump’s triumph.
His presidency promises to be embattled from Day One. Already, two anti-Trump demonstrations are being ginned up in D.C., the first on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, by ANSWER, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. A second, scheduled for Jan. 21, is a pro-Hillary Clinton “Million Woman March.”
While the pope this weekend deplored a “virus of polarization,” even inside the church, on issues of nationality, race and religious beliefs, that, unfortunately, is America’s reality. In a new Gallup poll, 77 percent of Americans perceived their country as “Greatly Divided on the Most Important Values,” with seven in eight Democrats concurring.
On the campuses, anti-Trump protests have not ceased and the “crying rooms” remain open. Since Nov. 8, mobs have blocked streets and highways across America in a way that, had the Tea Party people done it, would have brought calls for the 82nd Airborne. In liberal Portland, rioters trashed downtown and battled cops.
Mayors Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Bill de Blasio of New York have declared their cities to be “sanctuary cities,” pledging noncooperation with U.S. authorities seeking to deport those who broke into our country and remain here illegally. Says D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, “I have asserted firmly that we are a sanctuary city.” According to The Washington Post, after the meeting where this declaration had been extracted from Bowser, an activist blurted, “We’re facing a fascist maniac.”
Such declarations of defiance of law have a venerable history in America. In 1956, 19 Democratic Senators from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy, in a “Southern Manifesto,” rejected the Supreme Court’s Brown decision ordering desegregation of the public schools. Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett and Alabama Gov. George Wallace all resisted court orders to integrate. U.S. marshals and troops, ordered in by Ike and JFK, insured the court orders were carried out. To see Rahm and de Blasio in effect invoking John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of interposition and nullification is a beautiful thing to behold.
Among the reasons the hysteria over the Trump election has not abated is that the media continue to stoke it, to seek out and quote the reactions they produce, and then to demand the president-elect give assurances to pacify what the Post says are “the millions of… blacks and Latinos, gays and Lesbians, Muslims and Jews—fearful of what might become of their country.”
Sunday, The New York Times ran a long op-ed by Daniel Duane who said of his fellow Californians, “Nearly everyone I know would vote yes tomorrow if we could secede” from the United States. The major op-ed in Monday’s Post, by editorial editor Fred Hiatt, was titled, “The Fight to Defend Democracy,” implying American democracy is imperiled by a Trump presidency. The Post’s lead editorial, “An un-American Registry,” compares a suggestion of Trump aides to build a registry of Muslim immigrants to “Nazi Germany’s … singling out Jews” and FDR’s wartime internment of 110,000 Japanese, most of them U.S. citizens. The Post did not mention that the Japanese internment was a project of the beatified FDR, pushed by that California fascist, Gov. Earl Warren, and upheld in the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision, written by Roosevelt appointee and loyal Klansman, Justice Hugo Black.
A time for truth. Despite the post-election, bring-us-together talk of unity, this country is hopelessly divided on cultural, moral and political issues, and increasingly along racial and ethnic lines. Many Trump voters believe Hillary Clinton belongs in a minimum-security facility, while Hillary Clinton told her LGBT supporters half of Trump’s voters were racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes and bigots.
Donald Trump’s presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run.
The battle of 2016 is over. The long war of the Trump presidency has only just begun.
Republished with the gracious permission of Mr. Buchanan. Books by Pat Buchanan may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.
It would be interesting to see if certain cities and even states declared that they were now “Sanctuaries” from having to follow pro-abortion or gay marriage laws, operating on the same principle as “Sanctuary cities” deciding that they can ignore immigration laws. Buchanan is right – this is an all out fight, and there’s no reason we can’t use the left wing’s tactics against them.
Refusing to follow Roe or Obergefell is not the same as sanctuary cities. Roe and Obergefell are rights awarded by the constitution not statutory laws.
“Roe and Obergefell are rights awarded by the constitution”
The Constitution had nothing to do with it. These “Rights” were simply invented out of thin air.
“The arrogance, the assumed posture of moral superiority, the conceit of our cultural elite, on exhibit on that stage Friday night”
Again, Buchanan is right. Conservatives have spent too much energy making “Intellectual” arguments against the left wing, and yet their moral arrogance goes on unabated. As I said in an email to Hugh Hewitt a few years ago, moral arguments trump intellectual arguments every time. Conservatives need to stop treating left wing arguments as if they were legitimately debatable and instead confidently assert “You are wrong” and then stand their ground, period.
The casting call for “non-whites” was determined by the theatrical conceit of the show, not by racism.
What is needed at this time is intellectual honesty.
“We’re facing a fascist maniac.”
Actually what many Americans have been facing for some time is a fascist totalitarian doctrine of “government”, even criminality in “government,” wherein many in this country get their way by exhibiting the behavior Mr. Buchanan writes of herein. The essence of fascism is its arbitrariness and “rule” by men rather than by law. So we are to be “governed” (again the word in parentheses because it is illegitimate “law” and “government”) by those that want their every wish and whim satisfied through dictatorial “government” and if you don’t like that then they will brand you as enemies of “democracy” or some other such term. Many in this country are tired of being ruled by the likes of these that take an entertainment show and make it into yet more propaganda for their “values” so that when they speak of “unity” they mean that all will agree with their “values” or be ostracized. These new totalitarians do not allow others any respite from their propaganda akin to Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. It is time then to give no quarter.
I’m in general agreement with all of the above, but suggest, using Buchanan’s term from the past, that we lock and load, then fire the appropriate word INFANTILE at any figure, public or private, who hoves into view deserving that definition.
Leave it to the left, they couldn’t drag a proven mess, Hillary, across the finish line and so we move to Trump who at least respects our precedents and offers stability. So far the actions and results he has taken offer hope, perhaps not perfection but certainly capability and a competence and experience that suggests some better times.
Just as the triumph of Trump can be attributed to those hard working people who had a belly-full of PC and the lies that support it, any continued attempt to bring Trump down should and will act as fuel for those good people to remain engaged in the bully pulpit that our country may recover from the tyranny of thought control that has brought about so much harm to our national character. Our ‘inalienable’ rights helped produce the greatest citizenry the world has ever known and they were a gift from God, in spite of government. Long live the Spirit of ’76.
Having been a “conservative” for 50 years I observe that the most important priority for us is losing, which we are incredibly skilled at. We already see Trump backpedaling shamelessly. The sociological facts on the ground are such that only a radical, Alt Right type of movement is likely to change the conversation and undo some of the accumulated damage.