By Rick Manning
The collective temper tantrum of many in the GOP about Donald Trump’s nomination is culminating in various behind the scenes fights at the Republican National Convention about who gets to vote and are they required to vote for Trump as their state delegate selection rules require.
If Republicans want to lose to Hillary Clinton, all they have to do is take the nomination from Trump through convention chicanery.
Hillary is irretrievably damaged with the scandals of her life clinging to her like dead weights. The simmering suspicion that the entire Democratic Party presidential primary system as a sham designed to deliver her the nomination was confirmed by FBI Director William Comey’s decision that charges should not be filed against her in the classified email scandal, after President Bill met with his boss.
Yet, the #NeverTrump folks continue to demand that Republican primary voters be ignored and the legitimately chosen candidate be denied a place on the ballot to face Hillary out of a purported fear that his outspokenness will cause Trump to lose.
This is nonsense. The real fear is that Trump will upset the apple cart in Washington, D.C. and in New York financial circles, by changing the world economic shell game by challenging the erosion of U.S. sovereignty in the world. By challenging the flatter, less individual nation centric legal and regulatory regime, allowing for easier selling of goods across increasingly indistinct sovereign borders.
The real fear is that many of those who have exerted influence through both personal relationships and hired lobbying guns on administrations of both political parties, don’t carry the same weight with Trump. And what is really scary is they don’t know anyone who does.
The political elites are worried, because Trump, like Andrew Jackson in 1828 represented a rejection of the status quo of Revolutionary War elites or their offspring running the country.
Similar to today, in 1828 the sophisticated notions of currency policy and the debate over the national bank economic policy assumptions were preeminent issues that drove the populist classes to push Jackson to the White House.
There could be no doubt that if he lived in 1828, former Goldman Sachs CEO and Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen would have supported John Quincy Adams, just as he supports Hillary Clinton today.
All the blustering nonsense aside, here is why Paulsen, Jeb Bush and the President Bushes are wrong about Trump.
First and most importantly, you cannot have spent the past eight years (the Bushes and Paulsen were eerily silent) freaking out about the massive expansion of the federal government under Obama, and oppose Trump. Hillary Clinton will lock in and put Obama’s regulatory assault on the free enterprise system on steroids, accelerating our nation’s decline toward third world status.
Hillary Clinton will push the expanded federalization of our nation’s school systems, nationalize police powers, and reform Obamacare to the single payer system that those of her ilk have long desired.
Should Hillary Clinton win the White House, the left will have control over the federal judiciary for the next generation, and through that instrument of power, what remains of the First Amendment freedom of religious expression will be eviscerated, not to mention the end of the individual right to keep and bear arms.
Donald Trump is a wild card. But remember this important fact. Unlike any other nominee in recent history, Donald Trump had to navigate through massive government regulations to build things. He had to figure out how to get the politicians and regulators to act, just so he could do business. While battling the system that is set up to stop things from getting done, Donald Trump figured out how to beat it.
It is this history that makes Donald Trump the most likely presidential candidate in recent history to actually understand how regulatory roadblocks to progress work in the real world, and as a result, he is the most qualified to identify and deconstruct those that are most harmful to economic growth.
Others will attack Trump for working the system, but an honest appraisal can only lead one to believe that it is this exact experience that will make him the most likely person since FDR’s establishment of the massive federal bureaucracy to have the personal experience needed to tear large parts of it out by the roots. While many, including this author, would prefer that Trump take on the regulatory regimes out of a personal limited government philosophy, it is instead his real world experience fighting petty government regulators and their craven political bosses, which will make his first instinct to clear the underbrush that gets in the way of economic growth.
And for those making their fortunes in Washington, D.C. representing companies in the arcane bureaucratic administrative law systems, and those big businesses that benefit from using these laws as weapons against their smaller, less resourced competitors, an attack on the regulatory morass is an attack on their livelihoods and competitive advantages.
If America is going to turn this nation around, it doesn’t need hollow rhetoric, it needs someone not tied to the interests that profit from a declining America. We need an Andrew Jackson, a person who scares everyone with their fingers in the till. To my #NeverTrump friends, it is time to grow up and honestly choose.
It is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It is locking in the status quo decline regardless of who wins Congress, or it is taking a leap to actually try to stop it.
Trump may or may not succeed in making America great again, but we know that Hillary’s election will drive a final nail in the coffin Obama has built for individual liberty. It is a time for choosing, and anyone who chooses Hillary (or her “Libertarian” vote syphon) can no longer claim the mantle of fighting for constitutional governance and individual rights. This is the last stand, and sometimes we don’t get the leaders we want, but the ones we need, and the GOP voters have chosen Donald Trump to carry that banner.
So, #NeverTrumps, get on board, or get out of the way, we have a nation to save.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
