COLUMN: Trump vs. the machine: Three hu-u-ge stories

Despite Time magazine missing the story (surprise!), Donald Trump was the man/person/celebrity/politician/comedian/revolutionary of the year for 2015.

In honor of his six-month crusade to topple the pillars of power and political correctness in these corrupt United States of America, I am making note of the three stories about Trump that best illustrate the hypocrisy, obfuscation and lies of the mainstream media and GOP establishment as they tried to derail his one-man wrecking crew.

1) The Incredible Shrinking GOP Loyalty Pledge

You remember the outrage when Donald Trump refused to raise his hand at the first GOP presidential debate in August, right? The candidates were asked if they would promise to support the eventual nominee of the Republican Party, whoever it was. Everyone else on stage raised his or her hand like good little marionettes, but Trump said he couldn’t do it. He said he wanted to be treated fairly, and if that happened, he could support any nominee who beat him.

The mainstream media seized on this issue, and claimed it ought to cost Trump his place on the stage for the next debate. Indeed, the outrage kept growing as Trump’s lead ballooned that summer, but after a meeting with GOP Chairman Reince Priebus on Sept. 3, Trump said he was being treated fairly and signed the party’s loyalty oath. So did all the other candidates — more than a dozen of them.

Of course, if you thought that was the end of the issue you were mistaken. By September, it was becoming clear that Trump’s loyalty wasn’t the problem; it was his failure to gracefully commit political seppuku and make way for Jeb Bush. Indeed, as it became clear that Trump wouldn’t not disembowel himself, it became obvious that the GOP establishment had their own knives out and were preparing to surround Trump like those fine Roman senators on the Ides of March with their daggers concealed and their smug superiority exposed as they assassinated Julius Caesar.

By the end of the year, Jeb Bush and John Kasich were saying that the pledge they signed was worth exactly the same as a basketful of promises from congressional Republicans — bupkis. But once it became clear that Bush and Kasich were the third-party threats, not Trump, suddenly no one in the media remembered that the pledge existed.

2) The Amazing Invisible Reagan Democrats

For the past 25 years, political analysts and cable TV’s talking heads have bemusedly announced that the problem with contemporary GOP candidates is that they are too far right — you know, compared to Ronald Reagan!

This is wrong in so many ways that it’s hard to know how to respond. One of the proofs of Reagan’s supposed centrism is that he won the presidency in two landslide elections thanks to the support of crossover Democrat votes. Those voters came to be called Reagan Democrats, and seemed almost mythical for the past few years, as the Mainstream Media promoted the idea that Republicans were way too crazy to attract votes from any Democrats.

Then along came Trump, who of course is considered by the Mainstream Media to be the craziest hombre to come along in many a year. But lo and behold, the reason he is invincible is because he’s attracting Democrats back to the Republican Party. Crazy may be just what the political doctor ordered.

Turns out that Reagan Democrats are blue-collar workers who are sick and tired of losing earning power. They aren’t college educated, but they are smart enough to know that they don’t want to send their children to college to be indoctrinated in politically correct hogwash. They are smart enough to know that 20 million illegal immigrants in the country means 10 million fewer jobs for them. They are smart enough to know that while not all Muslims are terrorists, almost every terrorist worth his salt is a Muslim.

And the only person talking TO these blue-collar Democrats, instead of down to them, is the billionaire Donald Trump. That’s bad enough, but even worse is that a lot of the new crop of Reagan Democrats (or is that Trump Democrats?) aren’t just white anymore. Imagine how scary it is for the Mainstream Media to see Trump on stage with a dozen black preachers! (“How do we call him racist now!”)

A recent poll even revealed that among the Republican candidates, Trump is actually winning the lion’s share of black and Hispanic votes. No wonder Trump was dead even with Hillary Clinton in a poll last week. But what’s really fascinating is that while Clinton claimed 7 percent of the Republican votes, Trump was winning 12 percent of the Democrat votes.

It’s enough to make heads spin in the headquarters of both branches of the Uni-Party.

3) The Dog Ate My Constitution

If there was any one thing that turned the Mainstream Media and GOP Establishment into a united front against Donald Trump, it was his announcement following the San Bernardino attack that he would stop all Muslim immigration to the United States.

“How horrible! How primitive! How unconstitutional!” all the poobahs and pundits declared. “This will surely end the Trump disease, er, candidacy, once and for all!”

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who came to fame as the United States attorney for the southern district of New York, proved that a legal education at the New York University School of Law is worthless when he declared that Trump’s proposed ban would be an “absolute violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution.” Apparently reading the First Amendment was not required in becoming an expert on it at NYU.

Just for the record, let’s take a look at the elusive amendment and see what it actually says about religion. Here it is:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Clearly, the first two clauses of the amendment are the only ones relevant to religion, and neither applies in the immediate instance of Trump’s ban on immigration. He did not say he was establishing an official state religion, and he did not say he was banning the practice of the Islamic religion. What he said was that because of the danger to the citizens of the United States from Islamic terrorism, he would not allow immigration by non-citizen Muslims. By long-established precedent, non-citizens who reside outside the country have no right to enter the country, and they have no constitutional rights, period.

Rudy was merely parroting politically correct nonsense, and assuming no one would notice. The Mainstream Media certainly didn’t. The Associated Press and other media outlets wrote numerous stories condemning Trump. In addition to citing the First Amendment, these so-called experts also referred to Article VI of the Constitution and said Trump’s ban would violate the “no religious test” clause. I suppose that  line of argument works on people who have never read the Constitution, but it only takes a few seconds of work to look it up and find out that the clause only applies to holding a political office or position of public trust, not to immigration!

Doesn’t seem to matter what the facts are. Apparently, the last refuge of scoundrels isn’t patriotism; it is the Constitution.