The presidential dilemma – American Thinker

It is beyond ironic that, of all the current wannabes, Donald J. Trump fills the presidential shoes better than any of the others.  He was never before a politician, and he has managed to turn the whole process upside-down.  Why?  How?  Simply because there’s a palpable lack of talent for actually all positions of importance.  Hence the absurd miasma of the Biden presidency.

Mr. Trump has already made his billions, so he could afford to take the pay cut that comes with public service.  Unlike career politicians, Trump had to spend many years actually solving problems — rather than just bloviating about how important they are, especially for “women and minorities.”

Back when our government was originally put together in Philadelphia, our economy was mostly agrarian.  Today’s economy has much greater opportunity for entrepreneurs of all fields, so public service is now more inclined to attract only corrupt careerists rather than generous citizens seeking temporary and benevolent involvement in the affairs of their community.

This process has been accumulating hack functionaries for years, with the obvious decline in public-sector maintenance to show for it.  How else, in this modern age of technological advancement, scientific and medical marvels, and agricultural harvests of unparalleled abundance, can there be vast hordes of useless, drug-addled vagrants squatting all over our landscape?

Then something happened. A media celebrity, real estate tycoon, got elected president.  The status quo was plundered.

Trump did not come from central casting.  For all intents and purposes, he might as well have been from Mars.  He was never supposed to get elected in the first place — and thus, he blindsided the entrenched careerists.  The best they’ve been able to do, thus far, has been to persecute Trump with their courts (not our courts) — all at taxpayer expense.  Being a billionaire, Trump has been able to adequately defend himself — but there still must be a serious wound.

Perhaps because of Trump — but more likely also as a result of American cultural ethos — much of the citizenry has become especially rebellious against stupid authority.  But Trump remains the catalyst.

This phenomenon is not just limited to the presidency.  In California, there is a hotly contested drive for the Senate seat vacated by Dianne Feinstein’s assumption of room temperature.  Former L.A. Dodger star Steve Garvey is the most visible Republican challenger.  There is some kind of ad blitz, on TV and radio, pointing against Garvey for being a Trump-supporter.

There is such a thing as reverse psychology, but I’ve never before seen it applied to a political campaign.  From the beginning, the ads made me like Garvey even more.  Now the ads are running on the right-wing radio station KSFO — sponsored not by any candidate, but rather by a committee — while the TV ads are officially on behalf of Adam Schiff.  This may be pure genius.  It brings to mind Br’er Rabbit’s plea not to be thrown into the briar patch.

Lurking below the surface of all this fuss and bother is a lingering suspicion that having a president at the top of the public-sector hierarchy is an obsolete concept.  Private-sector corporations have CEOs, CFOs, and sometimes COOs in addition to boards of directors.  Since they’re not allowed to print their own money, they have to earn it.  They are subject to Darwinian forces such as competition and environmental limits.  Governments act as if they were immune to such forces, but they are not.  They just get to more easily hide the consequences.

Up until the Civil War, the bulk of executive authority in the U.S. was in the hands of the governors of the several states.  Only in the war’s aftermath did the District of Columbia start to become the power nexus it is today.  Franklin Roosevelt pushed things a lot further with the New Deal’s invention of all the “alphabet soup” agencies, commissions, and whatnot.  Helping this along was the establishment of broadcast networks that brought the nation’s focus onto New York and D.C.  Back during the Civil War, Philadelphia was still the largest city in the nation.

Nowadays, the obvious failure of the Biden presidency has to cause at least some doubts about the future of the office.  Trump is one of a kind.  There’s really no one else in line to fully take his place.  Some are better than others — but, other than Trump, does any of them have the personal deep pockets necessary to withstand the unrelenting legal assault that the swamp rats will reflexively throw?  This in addition to handling verbal assaults with effective bombast rather than sniveling worminess.  Yeah, he’s a tough act to follow.

It is often said that each president is the antithesis of the one who came before.  Trump’s following after Obama can only support this theory, as does Biden’s coming after Trump.  Are we that dissatisfied with our chief executives?  Then maybe we need a better answer.

Image: Public domain.