Trump’s platform for 2020.

Posted by Pointman on June 22, 2019 · 15 Comments 

Anyone running for re-election to a high office has three broad strategies to choose from, or a judicious mixture of them. The first is highlighting their achievements while already in office, hopefully some, the second is announcing a list of initiatives that will appeal to the electorate to make them vote for them and the third option is pointing out the failings of whoever is your challenger. Let’s take them in that order, because the early signs are that Trump’s going to use all three.

The big one of course is the American economy, which is booming. There’s not many American workers who don’t think times have got a lot better under Trump, especially when compared to the industrial decline and economic stagnation of the Obama years. Economic growth is running at over 3%, unemployment is at its lowest in half a century, over 6 million new jobs have been created and real wage growth is running at 3%. As usual, fake news is ignoring the numbers or bending over backwards to find an angle to make it seem like an economic disaster.

Factor in that black and Hispanic unemployment levels are both at never before seen lows, while female unemployment is running at a 25 year low, and it’s easy to see why the bulk of the workforce think he’s doing a good job for them. It’s the people at the lower-middle and bottom of the economic scale who’ve done particularly well under Trump’s stewardship of the economy, and they know it too. He waved that magic wand Obama sneered at and said didn’t exist, to create millions of jobs and halt the industrial decline. They’ve also had a meaty tax cut.

On the macro-economic front, job killing regulations have been severely culled together with the agencies like the EPA that seemingly existed just to craft ever more Kafkaesque rules and restrictions to kill off various out of fashion industries in order to save the planet. The ruinous trade agreements like NAFTA have all been scrapped and the massively unbalanced trade relations with foreign countries that were destroying industrial infrastructure have been adjusted back to some sort of fairness for America. It’s still a work in progress area, but all the quickie moves have been made. Industries like coal are coming back from a trade war with Washington and new factories are actually opening.

On the foreign relations front, America is definitely back in pole position. To quote Trump’s judgment of the Obama era – “the eight year apology tour is over.” Once he let the military off the leash, they destroyed ISIS in six months flat. An ever prudent Putin has decided not to even think of fucking over Trump the way he did with Obama and his red lines, and China’s pushy island hopping expansion strategy has gone into a holding loop. He’s pinned down Iran so hard, it’s basically two steps away from a liberalising revolution, and by ganging up with China, N. Korea looks to have been defanged.

There’s a lot of real bragging rights in that lot, but the big thing is that he’s restored pride in America and being an American. In a strikingly similar fashion, Ronald Reagan did exactly the same in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, the post-Watergate disillusionment with Washington and the appallingly weak presidency of Jimmy Carter. A recent poll came back with the result that 70% of voters approved of an America first policy. He’s either driving that tectonic shift in public opinion or he reads popular sentiment well enough to be riding it from the front as its spokesman. Personally, I think it’s the latter.

Moving on to the second category – promises to make to secure votes – I don’t think there’s much he needs to do there. Sure, there are problems such as completing the wall and rescuing the average worker from the disaster Obamacare has turned out to be, but it’s fairly obvious to the ordinary person that he’s been hindered at every turn by not owning the House and the Democrats playing the most negative congressional politics in living memory.

An obvious move on his part is to appeal to the electorate to vote for him so he can regain the House and thereby break the legislative logjam there by the Democrats. In curing that problem, there’s another beneficial process occurring. A lot of the RINOs in his own party are not seeking reelection because they know their history of not supporting his policies, if not downright sabotaging of them, means they’ll get punished by their own local electorates in their state primaries.

The remaining saboteurs who’re running for election again are gambling that Trump, for reasons of party unity, won’t turn up at their primaries and endorse their competition. Given the amount of loyalty they’ve shown him, and Trump’s well-known taste for cold dishes, I’m not too sure that’s a good bet – just ask Obama. After all, if he couldn’t rely on you in his first term, it would be more politic to have you replaced, and if that doesn’t succeed, what’s been lost?

Illegal immigration, like security, is high up the list of his supporters’ concerns. Illegal immigration produces illegal cheap labour, which effectively excludes blue-collar and unskilled American workers from lower paid jobs. This is either not recognised by the Democrats or simply not a consideration from their doctrinal viewpoint, which reinforces the perception by the electorate that the party cares more about illegal aliens than ordinary Americans, and there’s a lot more of the latter holding down jobs than the kings of the keyboard SJWs on social media who seem to be the sole focus of approval by the Dems.

Trump has already been seen to tackle this problem with for instance threatening tariffs on S.American countries waving caravans of illegal immigrants northwards, which, wonder of wonders, got a curative response within 24 hours rather than the usual kick the can down the road those countries had been doing for years. An easy promise to make is to increase massively fines on businesses caught employing illegal aliens and paying sub-minimal cash under the counter wages.

Another issue he’ll definitely use is abortion, and specifically late and full-term abortion. Unless he wins really big, there’s not much he can promise on the legislative side, but in the light of the excesses being commonly proposed by the Democrats, it’s become a red-hot issue to most voters, with even 50% of Democrats under 40 becoming pro-life. The political split in the country and in public opinion couldn’t be more stark.

You have brutalities where a state governor says a baby who’d survived an abortion could be killed, usually termed infanticide. You have Democrats vetoing a bill to protect such survivours. At the same time, you have Alabama passing legislation banning abortions unless the mother’s life is in danger. Vermont and New York state have effectively legalised anything up to full-term and post-birth abortion. The fake newsbots have waded in with great human beings like Christine Quinn of CNN contributing – “When a woman is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her.”

The various Democrat positions on abortion have become so extreme, they’re actually starting to become viscerally repulsive to not only the average unaligned father or mother, but even to their own grassroots supporters. Trump will use the issue because he’s a family man and I feel more than sympathetic to the pro-life position. He’s been married three times, but unusually has great relationships with both his ex-wives and their children, the latter of whom appear to adore him.

It’s pretty inevitable that at some point he’ll address the issue of big tech censorship of conservative viewpoints. Just as fake news went into 2016 thinking they could somehow information manage a presidential election, big tech have now taken over the mantle of a totally discredited fake news and also think they can manipulate the election result. Again, Trump destroyed fake news because he simply articulated what everybody on the Right already knew – it was an untrustworthy source of information, and it’ll probably never recover from that disaster. Everybody knows big tech are deplatforming even the mildest conservative voices.

The public scorning of, threats to investigate, regulate or break up big tech will become big vote winners, and it will be at the cost of their bottom line. There’s a widget on the RHS of every page on this blog called “Hollywood vs Trump” which lists ordinarily sane business concerns who decided for reasons known only to God to mix politics with their bread and butter earning stream and got a consumer backlash from Hell. Big tech will be no different.

Moving to the third skein – attacking the opposition – it’s a target rich environment. I recently wrote a small series on the Democrat contenders vying for their party’s nomination to run against Trump in 2020. It leaned more towards considering their worth as candidates rather than any policies they were espousing, simply because they didn’t have any policies to speak of other than promising nice things they thought people wanted to have and would therefore vote for them. Obviously, a radical and innovative move in politics.

There are so many candidates for the party ticket, there’s a desperate effort amongst them to differentiate themselves from the others by proposing increasingly extreme policies. Understandable of course since they’re a fairly bland bunch, but the resultant optics paint the Dems as an extremist party, and when things are generally going well for the average person, they’ll be averse to rocking the boat by voting for a party advocating a radical change of course into uncharted waters when it doesn’t appear to be needed.

In essence, they are playing to social media and the holier than thou fake news machine, whose actual influence as we found out in 2016 might not be as strong as people inside that elevated strata believe it to be. It actually feels at times as if the fake news response to the latest tentative promise by a candidate is steering them in fake news approved directions. They’re that weak and spineless. Welcome to life inside the fake news bubble and outside of reality. It lost them the 2016 election and it’ll do the same in 2020.

Contrast that with Trump who’s been under constant attack by the fake news machine for coming up three years and he’s never in any substantial sense given an inch to them. By standing up to them, all that’s happened is he’s grown stronger and they’ve become irrelevant in terms of any meaningful political influence, since nobody believes them any more. If you’ve any doubts about that, consider that CNN’s viewing numbers have dropped 33% in the last year.

To quote the Trumpie Monster – “Democrats are the party of high taxes, open borders, late-term abortion, crime, hoaxes, and delusions.” He’ll touch on all those themes, especially the emotive ones and use them as attack points. Abortion for sure, but also the general perception of the Dems being anti-family values.

Being a pan-sexual whatever certainly plays well to social media, but not to a mum and dad with three kiddies in tow who have deep reservations about gender free toilets, drag queen story times to their children without their consent and homosexual adults in a bar flicking folded up ten dollar bills at a nine year old child prancing and posturing in a provocative sexual manner while fully made up in glitter and dressed in drag. Quite frankly, a party not seeing anything wrong about any of that is repulsive to most ordinary people.

In summary, he’s much too large a choice of targets in the negative campaigning area, not least of which looks to be his presidential contender who’s very hands on when it comes to children and loves sniffing their hair. The DNC are realistic enough to know 2020 is going to be a big loss, but why they’re pushing a candidate like that whom even a mediocrity like Obama refuses to endorse passeth all belief. Against him, Trump is laughing all the way to the bank.

Anyway, they’re his cards to play against a player whom he knows is weak on trumps, if you’ll excuse the pun.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

People are pissed off.

How to turn around a failing economy.

Hollywood.

Blowback? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The power of dreams and the power of nightmares.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with 2020, abortion