The Trump Presidency - When Excellence Is Punished
There was a girl in my high school who was excellence personified. She was tall, beautiful, modest, honest and a very nice person. She was a straight-A student and would help anyone in need. But she sat alone in the cafeteria, walked the halls alone, had no friends, was never invited to parties and never had a date.
When time came to vote for “Senior Queen,” a teacher who recognized the girl’s excellence nominated her as a candidate. She was everything a Senior Queen should be — but she only received five votes out of 900 students.
Her problem was she was too excellent, in every way, and the other girls hated her for it. She was better than any one of them in every way. This angered the other girls and they wanted to punish her for it. Not only did they shun her but warned every boy in the school that if any of them “cozied up” to her, they could forget about ever “getting lucky” with any girl in the school and it worked as intended.
President Donald Trump is very much like this girl. In a short period of time, he has shown the country he is better at getting things done and making the United States safer, more prosperous, more respected, happier, and more hopeful than it has been in a long time. He is much better at being president than any president in modern history, and maybe even before.
Trump is not afraid to undertake the difficult tasks that other presidents promised to do but never did. And he successfully solved them. He has succeeded in areas where other presidents failed. Most Americans love him, are happy for him, and pray for his continued success.
With all his accomplishments in making the United a far better place than he had found it, everyone should be happy. Why wouldn’t they be?
In what is clearly counterintuitive, almost half the country hates him.
If someone came to America right now, knowing nothing about it, he would look around and see that nearly everyone had a job, people are becoming more affluent, they feel safe from hostile foreign powers, they are proud of their country, and they are happy and hopeful.
If he were to ask, “Has it always been like this in America?” he would be told, “No, it has not always been this way.”
It would be explained to him that for quite a while things were actually very bad in the country.
People couldn’t find jobs or had to work several part-time jobs just to pay the bills. The country was viewed as weak in the world and other countries felt free to do as they pleased, regardless of the U.S. position. The past president would talk tough to other countries and warn them not to cross his line, then do nothing when they did. It had become embarrassing to be an American.
The stranger would likely respond that everyone must love the new president.
And the answer would be, “You would think so, but half the people — those known as “the left” — hate him.”
The stranger would be baffled and would likely say, “That makes no sense.”
And the people would simply shrug and shake their heads.
This stranger would eventually come to learn that the people who hate the current president have personally benefitted from his presidency in many ways, from increased 401Ks to better and cheaper health care.
Regardless, they still hate him because they were a member of the party that controlled the government before the new president. The new president took away their power and they hate him for it.
They want their party back in power — even if it meant all the good done for the country by the new president would vanish and the country would return to the terrible conditions of the previous presidency.
Just like, “all the other girls” in my high school, the left has warned other members of their party — that if they dare “cozy-up” to the new president, they will be made to regret it.
Just ask Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who came to the new president’s defense when the left overreacted to Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, claiming he and the president both violated a minor and murky campaign election law.
The left claimed this was “high crimes and misdemeanors” and clearly an impeachable offense while Dershowitz called their reaction “nonsense.”
Dershowitz had always been one of the left’s darlings and during his traditional summers at Martha’s Vineyard, he would be greeted with open arms, welcomed in every left-wing home, invited to all the left’s parties, and asked to be an honored speaker at their academic seminars.
As punishment for “cozying up” to Trump, instead of treating him as one of their darlings, the left shunned Dershowitz and he quickly went from a darling to a pariah.
All the members of the left took notice of this public shunning and even more than before carefully minded their political “P’s and Q’s” to avoid this same terrible fate.
My grandmother would have described this strange and ironic behavior of the left this way: “They’re cutting off their nose to spite their face.”
But such is the depth of the American political divide. The left would rather starve than take food from the hand of Donald Trump. It is eerily similar to those who set themselves on fire to protest what they hate.
Thus, as a nation, we have arrived at a place where almost half the country feels presidential success and excellence is worthy of nothing but scorn and punishment.
Not only is this bizarre, it is also sad and disheartening.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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