By DOUG E. IBENDAHL • October 7, 2018
“You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob.” – President Donald J. Trump at Topeka, Kansas rally Saturday night
Use your imagination and let’s say that today we had a President Rubio, Kasich, Low Energy Jeb, or any of the other 16 hapless Republicans vanquished by Donald Trump during the 2016 GOP nominating process.
Granted that takes a vivid imagination because every single one of them likely would have lost to Hillary Clinton, most of them by embarrassing margins. But just for fun let’s assume Trump hadn’t run and one of the others managed to pull off the big win over Hillary.
Brett Kavanaugh might well have been the Supreme Court pick of any of those other Republicans. The incredibly accomplished jurist has been at the top, or near top, of almost every astute Republican’s short list for quite some time.
But does anyone honestly believe any other Republican President would have stood by Kavanaugh in the face of the vicious smear machine we all just witnessed?
I definitely don’t. I think anyone else would have abandoned that good man and his family to the mob.
Until Trump came along, the GOP’s first instinct was to fold to pressure which of course only emboldened the other side, sending the clear signal that character assassination works.
Fortunately for this country, that’s not who Donald Trump is. We’ve witnessed numerous examples now where the man stays doggedly loyal to good people and causes. And as someone who has been on the receiving end of countless lies and smear campaigns himself, this President certainly knows what Brett Kavanaugh and his family were going through.
Our President is a fighter. Not only is “surrender” not in Trump’s lexicon, he clearly actually enjoys wading into the ranks of the looney tunes, spurring them to greater heights of folly. Trump baits the Left to overplay their hand, and the haters fall for it every time.
A perfect example was the rally last week in Mississippi when the President highlighted just a few of the gaping holes and inconsistences in Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony. Trump was merely stating some obvious facts, but of course all the usual suspects piled-on in unison with the condemnation that Trump was “mocking” the Kavanaugh accuser.
As usual the President was at least three moves ahead of his enemies. As he explained on Saturday night after the Kavanaugh victory in an interview with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro: “Well, there were a lot of things happening that weren’t correct, they weren’t true and there were a lot of things that were left unsaid. And I thought I had to even the playing field.”
And level the playing field he did. While most American males were sitting around virtue signaling and playing along with the fantasy that Professor Ford was a credible witness despite the fact every honest person with any intelligence knew she was really not that credible, Trump injected a dose of reality to the debate.
Trump didn’t mock or attack Ford. He did stand up for Kavanaugh while pointing out some major weaknesses in the accuser’s story. It was a job the press should have done, if we had a press that was doing its traditional job in this country.
My state of Illinois is the home base for Republican officials who don’t understand how to do politics, so we’re still largely missing out, but anyone can look around the country and clearly see how this President has already fundamentally transformed the Republican Party for the better.
The GOP isn’t a push-over party anymore. Trump has shown Republicans how to fight.
The clueless are always lazily calling Trump a bully. The President’s enemies love turning the truth on its head. Trump’s not a bully. He stands up to bullies.
Brett Kavanaugh has shown the same courage. Both men stand as a shining example for any decent American who decides enough-is-enough with the indecencies of the leftist mob.
When Senator Lindsey Graham is the star of a very cool ‘Stayin’ Alive’ music video, and also earns resounding applause upon mention of his name at Trump’s rally Saturday night in Topeka, Kansas, you know that Lindsey Graham has come a long way. So has the entire Republican Party.
President Trump is growing the GOP like no one before. He’s even helping Republican candidates who quite frankly don’t deserve his help, people who not only have never stood-up for him, but also officials and candidates who have regularly scurried away on cue at the first squawk from a Trump-hating media.
Illinois is especially full of that particularly irritating species of Republican invertebrate.
But nationwide, more and more Americans are getting it every day. And it’s not just the fact that people like a fighter and they see one in Donald Trump. The crucial point is that in this President Americans finally see someone who is actually fighting for them.
Doug Ibendahl is a Chicago Attorney and a former General Counsel of the Illinois Republican Party.
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