I’ll never forget watching Trump at a rally in Vegas right before the Nevada caucuses. Cruz was hitting him hard, and to effect, on the issue of the Transfer of Public Lands (TPL). Cruz was making inroads in northern Nevada, which Trump remarked on. He went on to explain, almost apologetically, that he really didn’t know very much about the issue. I was loving it. I had pitched the idea of promoting TPL to the Cruz campaign, and I was very proud of myself. But all of a sudden, Trump switched subjects, and started mocking a protester, and suggested it would be O.K. to punch him.
So Trump’s admission of ignorance on an important Nevada issue was ignored, and everyone focused exclusively on his incendiary comments. It pissed me off. He was going to get away with it. James Hohmann of the WaPo lists a bunch of examples of his successful use of the art of distraction. He’s got it down to a science.
So he’s all pissed off at the Sessions thing, and then he hears Mark Levin come up with a fairly plausible scenario in which you could, if you really stretched it, claim that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. So he tweets it. And all of a sudden nobody was talking about Sessions any more. Mission accomplished.
The media is having a breakdown. He’s wearing them out. This is great theater.
Meanwhile, he’s winning. He just saved the auto industry untold billions by putting off Obama’s newly issued fuel standards. He could, and he should, just repeal all of the so called CAFE standards. Americans should be able to buy whatever car they want. This is music to the ears of the auto industry. Deregulation in general will help them, and getting rid of CAFE would be a windfall. These people owe Trump, and they know how to repay him. Bring jobs back, and sure as hell don’t ship jobs abroad. For Trump, it’s a win win.
The federal government is such an intrusive force in so many aspects of private enterprise, that having a President who actively wants to help relieve this burden is a godsend. Trump’s EPA just withdrew a demand it had made of 15,000 drilling rigs in the United States. Obama’s EPA was going to require a bunch of worthless paperwork from them, and have them perform expensive, and completely unnecessary, methane testing. This reversal of policy will save every one of those 15,000 rigs tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars of unnecessary cost.
Trump’s going to be very kind to the oil and gas industry, and his good will is being repaid. Exxon Mobil just announced a $20 billion investment in the Gulf, over five years. They’ll be processing chemicals and refining oil, and the construction and operational employees, tens of thousands of them, will be well paid, often at $100,000 a year. Win, win.
These stories aren’t widely covered, but they touch people’s lives. And this applies to just about every business enterprise in the U.S. If Trump were to take Silicon Valley’s side in patent reform, he’d save them billions in frivolous lawsuits, and a lot of wasted time and effort. In return, they bring some manufacturing back to the U.S. Win, win.
The thing is, opportunities like this are all over the place, and Trump knows how to sniff them out. They’re deals, kind of. I get the government off your back, you bring jobs into this country. Win, win.
None of this is of interest to the media. Maybe that’s because it’s kind of boring. It’s much better to talk about the desecration of Jewish grave sites. Except these headstones weren’t knocked over. They’ve fallen over, through the years, from erosion. Some dope of a reporter saw a Jewish cemetery with some headstones fallen over, and so he runs off and writes a story about an outbreak of anti-semitism. That’s news.
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