Hail to the thief: Trump steals the hope of conservatives

The silent coup has apparently succeeded. President Trump has been convinced to abandon his revolutionary program of putting “America First,” and has decided to play footsy with globalists like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

There have been signs since before Trump took office that he was not dedicated to accomplishing the goals he promised — whether that was building the wall, repealing Obamacare, cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood, lowering taxes, leaving NAFTA, or many more. Trump filled his Cabinet and his administration with establishment Republicans and Democrats who could be expected to steer the president back toward the leftist, globalist agenda they supported. Bringing limousine liberals Jared and Ivanka into the West Wing was like inviting Hillary Clinton to share the Lincoln Bedroom, and banishing Steve Bannon was a guarantee that Trump’s nationalist campaign agenda was just a winning premise, not a promise.

The final nail in Trump’s and America’s coffin may be his decision to become the stepfather to President Obama’s illegal executive order establishing Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals.

Trump the candidate had promised the nation that he would send these so-called Dreamers home to the foreign countries where they hold citizenship because he needed to put the dreams of the American people first. But Trump the president has suddenly developed a serious case of weepy-eyed sentimentalism (formal name: Sentimentum Liberalis) and has betrayed his base by going back on his campaign promises (Can you say “One more hack politician”?).

Go ahead, liberals, and say you told me so. I can take it. Sure Trump betrayed his voters, but is that really a good thing? Do we really need one more failed president? And ask yourself: If they could get to Trump, then who is really safe from the tentacles of the crony capitalists and Deep Staters? Do you really want to throw your support behind the Swamp Monsters who run our country regardless of who “We the People” elect? Seems like a “Here today, dead tomorrow” kind of strategy.

There have been other presidents who tried to do revolutionary things and were stopped in their tracks. I am reminded of President Ronald Reagan, who ran as a true conservative, and then governed as a center-right moderate — starting with his choice of the Deep State protector, George H.W. Bush, as his vice president.

Remember, Bush had decried Reagan’s plans to make America great again as “voodoo economics,” and yet Reagan was convinced that he needed to compromise with the Republican left in order to govern effectively. Then, after surviving an assassination attempt just two months into his presidency that nearly elevated Bush eight years early, Reagan developed a cautious respect for the swamp that had nearly swallowed him whole.

Nathaniel Blumberg, a former dean of the University of Montana journalism school who had retired to Bigfork, wrote an entire novel exploring the theory that the Reagan assassination attempt might have been a planned coup d’etat. It certainly changed the direction of the Reagan administration markedly.

Blumberg’s book, “The Afternoon of March 30,” lacked the elegance of the best fiction, but it was chock full of information you could not easily find anywhere else — information which raised questions about the connections between the family of the shooter — John W. Hinckley Jr. — and the family of Vice President (and ex-CIA director) George H.W. Bush. Blumberg’s protagonist was shocked by how deeply the mainstream media (then known simply as the media) could bury the lede.

As Blumberg wrote in promotion of his novel, “Even more dangerous for the future of our country than a conspiracy to assassinate a president is a conspiracy to manipulate and control what the American people are told by the national news media.”

Multiply the mainstream media of the early 1980s by 100 (or maybe 1,000!) and you start to contemplate the power of what Trump has accurately called the “dishonest media” of 2017. Back then, we had the nightly network news, a couple of national newspapers and an upstart Cable News Network known as CNN. There was no social media to amplify the smallest stories into major political disasters, and no competing cable leviathans to sink unsuspecting politicians. It was a kinder, gentler era, but one thing newspeople had going for them is that they were still widely respected — and trusted.

That has changed, but I wonder how many people even today believe, in Blumberg’s words, that there is “a conspiracy to manipulate and control what the American people are told by the national news media.” If they did, then there would be much less interest in the Russia collusion story and much more interest in sytories about the politicization of the IRS and NSC. There would be much less interest in the Confederacy and much more interest in the First Amendment. There would be much less interest in transgender bathrooms and much more interest in religious freedom.

Everything we know (or think we know) is controlled by the Swamp Media and their allies in the Deep State. Political parties are now completely irrelevant, as should be obvious to anyone who has been observing Congress. The national agenda is being set by MSNBC, FOX, CNN and ESPN, after consultation with the New York Times and Washington Post.

Trump knew all this, and spoke openly about it for a year and a half before being elected president, but something happened. It wasn’t an assassination attempt like the one that scared Reagan silent, but whether it was the threat of impeachment, a revelation of personal dirt on him or his family, or just a reminder of how many presidents have been murdered in the last 152 years (14 percent), shot at (28 percent) or just targeted for assassination (59 percent) — something seems to have convinced President Trump that it is better to sacrifice his honor than to mess with the swamp.

How else do you explain the 180 degree turn from Trump on the campaign trail when he swore that he would terminate DACA immediately and the Dreamers were just going to have to go home to last week’s maudlin tweet after he met with Schumer and Pelosi: “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!”

As “Angel Mom” Mary Ann Mendoza — who campaigned vigorously for candidate Trump — complained after hearing about President Trump’s effort to secure amnesty for 800,000 illegal aliens under DACA, he is making her and other victims of illegal alien crime feel “like props.” Mendoza, whose police officer son Brandon Mendoza was murdered by an illegal alien, tweeted back at Trump: “You better not let my son down. You PROMISED a border wall, you PROMISED no amnesty…”

As any politician might answer, “Promises? We don’t keep no stinking promises.”

At this point, all we can do is hope that Edmund Burke was not writing about Trump when he said, “Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.”

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. He can be reached at edit@dailyinterlake.com