Chad Lundquist/Nevada Appeal
I didn’t vote for billionaire businessman Donald Trump, but I’m going to support him on Jan. 20 when he takes the oath of office to become the 45th president of the United States. He deserves our prayers and our support as he assumes the awesome responsibility of becoming our president and the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful armed forces.
President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump, were gracious losers but some leading Democrats were anything but gracious. For example, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who engineered a Democrat sweep in Nevada, sympathized with those “innocent Americans who cry tears of fear” (it rhymes) and said Trump must roll back “the tide of hate he unleashed.”
One question: Are those people who are rioting and burning neighborhood businesses in cities around the country “innocent Americans?” Personally, while I think some of the protesters are sincerely exercising their free speech rights, too many others are anarchists and/or the grubby dregs of the failed Occupy movement — in other words, people who don’t believe in our form of representative democracy.
“Progressive” columnist Bo Statham fears Trump’s victory might “restore the white male dominance of yesteryear.” That’s a somewhat surprising statement from someone who once worked for the late Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss.), a Confederate flag-waving white racist. Not that Statham is a racist — far from it — but he should be careful about branding those who voted for Trump as racists. Being in favor of border control and enforcement of our immigration laws doesn’t mean you’re a racist.
So calm down, Bo. As you wrote, “The constitutional separation of powers protects against unbridled executive actions,” although some might argue President Obama engaged in many unbridled executive actions, most of which Trump will reverse when he takes office in January. In reality, there will be many constraints on our new president, including an outspoken Democrat minority in Congress led by far-left senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and principled GOP conservatives like House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who will defend their conservative ideology against Trump’s rhetorical excesses and more populist tendencies.
My friend and fellow columnist Sam Bauman wrote Trump’s victory resulted from his indomitable will to win. Yes, and because his opponent, Mrs. Clinton, was one of the most unpopular presidential candidates in American political history. Trump was a change candidate while Mrs. Clinton represented the Washington Establishment status quo. Wisely, voters opted for change.
Will Rahn, a political correspondent for mainstream CBS News, spoke for many of us when he wrote “the mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.” He acknowledged the media “missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people” who knew what was really going on in Middle America, including Mrs. Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” who turned out by the millions to vote for Trump.
By looking down their noses at hard-working voters in the Rust Belt (think Michigan and Ohio) and those of us out here in Flyover Country, New York and Washington-based journalists failed to provide fair and balanced coverage of the presidential campaign. That was “symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness,” Rahn wrote. Amen! There were too many political agendas in America’s newsrooms, which backfired and helped to elect Donald Trump as our next president. Many left-leaning journalists have only themselves to blame. We read them in the New York Times and Washington Post and see them on TV every evening.
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal’s senior political columnist.