Sometimes you have to eat the spinach before you get your ice cream. For Trump, the ice cream is blowing up the tax system and replacing it with one centered on economic growth and jobs. The spinach is dealing with the mess of the American health care system. As long as he can claim he’s keeping his campaign promises, Trump doesn’t really care what Congress passes and he signs. With this much flexibility I’ve got to believe he can put together 216 votes. Aside from the Church of the Perpetually Pissed Off, and its pastor, Mark Levin, there aren’t that many principled conservatives who are going to abandon him on this issue. The right doesn’t want to admit it, but Obama won. Once he got the benefit passed, and people started relying on it, it wasn’t going to be taken away. That’s a political reality and, eventually, 216 House Republicans are going to have to accept it.
I take no particular pride in saying this, but the more I watch Trump the more I see myself. Since I was in high school, I’ve enjoyed provoking and confronting people. That’s why a lot of people think I’m an asshole, and in some ways I guess I am. I prefer the term provocateur, but I’ve always gotten intense pleasure from confronting phonies and leftists, baiting them. When I graduated from St. Mary’s College High School in 1962 I was offered financial help from St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, but I wanted to go to Cal. I was a hard core Goldwater conservative, and I wanted to confront all those liberals at Berkeley. To that end, I ordered a Goldwater sweatshirt from National Review and wore it to class. I soon acquired a Midshipman’s uniform from the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, and I enjoyed walking around campus in it. There were 27,000 students on campus, but nobody ever took the bait. Maybe everybody thought I was a nut.
I only lasted one semester, and never really had any political discussions with anybody. I was living at home, twenty miles from campus, and didn’t make any friends. Since I liked to speak, and argue, I took a class in Speech. But it didn’t have anything to do with speaking. I never did figure out what this nerdy little Professor was trying to teach. One day he decides he wants to make a point about how little we really know about people, and he uses Barry Goldwater as an example.
“What do we really know about Barry Goldwater?” he asked. “What do we know, for certain? Well, we know he’s the senior Senator from Arizona….” At which point I interrupt him, and say, “No, he’s the junior Senator.” Which I knew he was. This guy didn’t know what to do. He just kind of sputtered for a while. I got a “D” in that class, which helped me to realize I needed some time off from college.
In Santa Cruz last night with Babbie for the awards ceremony for the Santa Cruz County Science Fair. My thirteen year old granddaughter, with help from her stepfather, subjected some seeds to extreme cold, using liquid nitrogen. This was an experiment to see if such seeds could be regenerated after a flight to Mars. She’s a natural at math and science, but she told me she wants to go to law school, because she likes to argue. She’s like a female version of me.
A couple little boys moved in to her neighborhood, a couple hellions that take off their clothes and run around naked. One of them, not quite three years of age, came up and grabbed her in the crotch. When she told me about it she said she got Trumped.
reaganproject.com 