A while back a friend of mine posted two insightful questions about President Trump on his Facebook page. Here is my response.
What is the end game with the [Trump] Russian friendship?
My Friend’s FB Post – Part 1: “I don’t know what you think, but one day we [USA] are going to need allies. The odd part, is at the same time he [President Trump] is dissing our allies, he is cozying up with the worst scum [Russia and Vladimir Putin] the world has to offer. What could be the end game here? Why? Russia wants to take America down. Can someone enlighten me?”
I personally believe this question has a simple answer conflated from three quotes:
- Being a person of the Christian faith, I always take seriously everything Jesus said while he taught us here on earth. Here is one quote that applies directly to the USA and Russia relationship, “…love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” [Just to digress from Russia for a moment, my most favorite quote from Jesus is, “Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus later was asked and answered that neighbor means all human beings on the earth].
- Godfather II quote, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
- President Ronald Reagan, “Trust but verify.”
Wow, what an eclectic group of sources!
Melding these three ideas yields a potent strategy for President Trump to be friendly with a USA enemy, in this case Russia, and simultaneously be super diligent against Russian malfeasance.
If anyone has an interest in confirming whether or not President Trump is nefariously “cozying up” to Vladimir Putin as my friend implies, please take a look at a conservative magazine point of view of how tough President Trump has been on Vladimir Putin and Russia — July 25, 2020, Townhall.com article,
Of course, one who has liberal leanings will likely consider this article to be an example of “massaging the truth,” which I call spin. Spin means conflating sound-bites and other out-of-context information to underpin a tribe’s narrative whether the conflated thought is fact or fiction.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, a significant percentage of politicians today in both major political parties in the USA consider this to be standard operating procedure.
A quote from the link above sums it up nicely by saying, “In all, as a Brookings Institute analysis revealed, the Trump administration has enacted more than 50 sanctions or policy actions on Russia, many being severe, from May 15, 2017 – four months after Trump took office – to the present day. ”
Whether viewed through a liberal or a conservative lens, the 50 sanctions during President Trump’s first term in office are a matter of public record.
Why decimate Obama’s environmental regulations?
My Friend’s FB Post – Part 2: “Trump has decimated [President Obama’s] environmental regulations. What is [President Trump’s] end game here? [Is it] the fossil fuel industry [e.g., Exxon], one of the most profitable businesses the world has ever known, needs more profits?”
I believe for President Trump this question also has a simple answer expressed clearly by the following quote in 1992 from James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
[I don’t like the word stupid and rarely use it, but used in this general sense and not directed at an individual, it effectively drives home the point very well. When James Carville, a colorful character nicknamed the Ragin’ Cajun from Louisiana, coined this phrase in 1992, he was then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign lead strategist. Obviously, he was very good at his job, since President Clinton defeated the incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992, preventing him from serving a second term as president. The reason, although the 8 month recession that started in 1990 had ended in March 1991, unemployment recovery was very sluggish and carried through to the Presidential election in November 1992. GHW Bush lost, with the sluggish economy plummeting the incumbent’s voter approval rating from 89% after winning the Persian Gulf War in 1991 to 46% during the 1992 election year.]
Therefore in my opinion, the answer to my friend’s question is not “the fossil fuel industry…needs more profits” per se, rather, it is that President Trump’s larger than life ego needs bragging rights produced by a “biggest ever” USA Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
At the same time, I do believe Trump thinks a super strong economy provides the best of all worlds for the people of the USA. There is no doubt in my mind that President Trump loves his country and the people in it.
Of course, it would be disingenuous of me to suggest there is no connection to oil, since the Oil sector of the Energy industry is the biggest contributor to the GDP when the direct and indirect effects are combined.
Expanding that thought, all other business Industries/Sectors depend on energy to “fuel” their businesses. Without low-cost energy being available, the operations costs would just be too exorbitant to steadily expand the products and services being provided by these companies.
Without low energy costs, the result is a lower GDP for the USA.
On Trump’s watch, not going to happen without a fight! [Of course, the COVID 19 pandemic has had a debilitating impact on the growth of the USA economy.]
President Trump is a businessman first and a politician next. In my opinion, his obsession with the economy-GDP does not mean President Trump has no personal concern for people, the earth’s environment, and the well-being and sustainability of both.
Of course, virtually all Democrats, most disenfranchised Republicans, and the mainstream media believe he has a hard heart toward everyone and everything but himself and his family. Oh! And the USA economy.
I personally think he is better than that, although his “what you see is what you get” answers to the press and tweets rarely reflect it. He obviously is a fighter, no holds barred. This is unfortunate for us who believe absent his style, he is much better than that.
In my opinion, President Trump believes strongly in a combination of President Reagan’s “trickle down economics” and President Kennedy’s “a rising tide lifts all boats.” [President John F. Kennedy used this quote with permission from its author, a regional chamber of commerce, The New England Council in a 1963 speech about the economy.]
Strange at it sounds to my liberal friends, since President Trump’s extemporaneous words generally are at odds with his subsequent and generally thoughtful actions, I really do think he sincerely cares for the people of the USA, especially the working class, no matter their race or ethnicity.
In my opinion, he is just not very good at how he mixes fact and fiction with seriousness, contemplation, subtle humor, and sarcasm in his day-to-day vernacular, i.e., Trump-speak. It drives liberals crazy. Me too, until I learned how to decipher Trump-speak.
Mainstream media and Democrats take an alternative route to dealing with Trump-speak. Their choice is to take snippets out of context, strip them of humor and sarcasm, and use their version of Trump-speak to damage President Trump politically and personally, make fun of him, and call him a liar.
Just days after the Trump inauguration, the Washington Post assigned a sizable team of journalists fulltime to watch President Trump’s every move 24 hours a day and catch him in “false” statements. As a result, by July 2020 this team had counted a cumulative total of what they consider to be 20,000 false statements from President Trump.
What a waste of journalistic resources. I’m certain I can name many politicians, Democrat and Republican, and media commentators if under the same scrutiny would have at least a comparable count of false statements.
Euphemistically, this is called spin, party narrative, or talking points in political circles, which unfortunately, are all acceptable in today’s politics and most communications outlets.
In spite of this extreme attempt to discredit President Trump, President Trump’s solid base of supporters (~1/3rd of registered voters in USA) strongly reflects the fact they care for him.
As to my friend’s reference to Trump’s decimation of Obama’s environment regulations, there is evidence that President Obama’s EPA regulations and tax structure had a dramatic negative impact on USA businesses and needed to be adjusted.
I personally do believe that many of President Obama’s EPA regulations were necessary, but they overreached. I also believe that President Trump’s corrections to those regulations were an overcorrection.
I believe there is now a need to bring the current EPA regulations to more of a balance between these two extremes.
In summary, President Trump’s ego booster has been transformed from his personal wealth and prowess as a businessman in the private sector to the USA economy (GDP) being the best and largest in the world, by far, in all of its history and glory, and in the universe if that can be measured!!!
In the big scheme of things, that is mostly a good thing for all Americans, people of other countries doing business with the USA, immigrants from other countries migrating to the USA, and governments and citizens of other countries of the world receiving support, relief, development, and national security dollars from the USA.
Today, the USA is that “rising tide” in the world that “lifts all boats.” For those who don’t believe that about the USA, I think they are ignoring reality.
From the time of the 2016 election, I have recognized and do still recognize Donald Trump as my President, notwithstanding his style.
If he would just stop his confrontational rudeness and tweets with the Democrats, the media, and those who disagree with him; I believe our country could move forward much more unified, which is what we desperately need.
At the macro level, I do have general agreement with at least 50% of President Trump’s centrist-conservative policies as they relate to all the major societal systems of the USA: social, economic, religious, and political (governance).
That percentage number is just built into an independent centrist’s way of thinking, regardless of which major party is in the US White House.
I pray regularly for the success of President Trump, his VP and cabinet, the US legislative and judicial leaders, our country and its people, and all people and countries of the world.
Center Conservative Opinion 