Breaking a Lance in Support of Trump

Look. It’s not too important how I am perceived. I have been named a Trump Lover, a Russian Troll, a QAnon one. I have been called various names identifiable with the extreme anarchists all the way to a fascist Nazi. People don’t get me; I don’t care.

Adding insult to injury I’ll squarely defend Trump now in this article. I’ll hone in on the good things he has done. Lo’ and behold: there are many.

With Trump’s press coverage being 95% negative, I think that approach is needed, necessary and long-overdue.

“I’ve been studying the news media and elections for more than 35 years. Trust me — there’s never been anything like it,” said Rich Noyes, research director for a (conservative) press watchdog.

Here and there you’ll think I’ll give another interpretation just to make Nr. 45 look positive.

If you think this is “misrepresenting facts” as “the orange baboon sure did horrible things”, you should make sure you have that same reaction to all the negative stories published about him. I am here to bring balance and to stop the increasing polarization in society.

Mind that this is one of the longest articles I have written. I tried to make each section readable in and by itself. So: skim over the headlines, pick a topic, read a bit, get upset (because “I defend the orange monster”) and think: what if?

There’s plenty of topics. I selected the following (and might address others if there’s enough interest). These are them:

• Medical Care
• Foreign Interventions
• Tax Cuts
• Lobbying
• “Fake News”
• Immigration
• BLM
• Deportations
• Border Wall
• Trade Wars
• Misogyny
• Environment
• Conceding Elections 2020

Here we go…

The Bulleted List of Trump’s Good Side

Medical care

“Obamacare”, the Affordable Care Act or ACA is often featured in the press as if it were in any way the kind of “universal healthcare” most of Europe has. Yet Trump is right to be insisting on changes to it. ACA has been a boon to insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies. Not so much to the average American.

ACA “offered” the obligation for each and every American to get health insurance with private companies. It is not in any way “affordable” with families paying up to $1.500 a MONTH for quite basic insurance. A single person easily pays $400-$500 for that same Bronze tier coverage. It doesn’t include a lot of common ailments. You can ramp up to Silver, Gold and Platinum tiers eventually paying, as a single person, above $800 a month. As a result, it brought many Americans bankruptcy and homelessness.

If you’d forego enrollment to Obamacare, you would pay an additional 2.5% income tax or an amount which “can’t be more than the price of the bronze plan”. In other words, you would pay either way. Trump abolished this additional tax in the Tax Cut and Jobs Act. Which is to say that Trump didn’t change Obamacare at all, he merely got rid of the fine people would pay if they were not able or willing to subscribe to the health care plan.

Trump doesn’t even stop with trying to address this wrong. He took further action with the aim of reducing health care costs and drug prices. He signed two Executive Orders the past two months alone to order so. Apparently, the second one was needed because the first one had loopholes which were easily found and exploited by big pharma.

Foreign Interventions

Reluctance to Start New Wars

If you mention this lately, mainstream has given the spin that “he started an internal (“BLM”) war” but let’s get back to that later. This is about international, military interventions. Fact is: he didn’t start any. None. Not a single one. Research it and you’ll find that this is the first president doing so since at least World War II. Full stop. End of story and let it sink in. How can you spin this as negative? Unless you are a mainstream presstitude? You might think about Carter but he overlooked the destabilization of the entire Middle-East by supporting getting rid of the (very Western) ally the Shah! Gerald Ford might be the other exception. Still, what Trump is doing here is pretty exceptional and I can’t but think that this refusal to start new wars is praiseworthy.

How is he covered in mainstream then? Let’s look at CNN which is very,very much anti-Trump. He only received praise by veteran CNN reporter Fareed Zakharia when he boasted that “Trump just became president of the United States” only when he launched 59 Tomahawks on Syria each costing $1.8 million a pop.

Or remember the backlash when Trump announced that he’ll pull out the troops from Northern Syria. The press was up in arms writing one story after the other how the Kurdish would get massacred. Did it happen? No. It didn’t. Northern Syria is more peaceful now than it has been in the last 9 (nine!) years of civil war. Go read the headline “In it for the oil” a bit further down the page for more information.

In all, it looks like mainstream likes perpetual war and Trump doesn’t give it. I think we should all appreciate that.

North-Korea

“How can you rub up to a vile dictator,” people rhetorically ask me referring to North-Korea’s Kim Yong-Un.

These persons are often even less aware of international politics than I am. They made up their minds based on the drivel mainstream writes. They forego the single (rhetorical) question they need to ask themselves: “Who are we to say a country, 1000s of miles away of where they live, should organize itself?” The Western world is such a great example then huh?

In all domestic aspects: North-Korea works. It has free education and health care. People have entertainment, culture, bars and restaurants. They laugh, joke, poke each-other. They know life and death as much as “we” do.

Kim Yong-Un experiments with nuclear weapons, but what choice does he really have? Iraq didn’t have them. Libya didn’t. Syria does not. Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Venezuela… They all do not. You know what happened or happens to them, do you not?

Trump’s rhetoric was strong-worded and strange but he also was the first president since 1953 to have set afoot in the mysterious North-Asian country and relations turned better.

What.Is.The.Alternative? I wonder.

Russia

Surely a contentious topic huh? Ever since Trump’s first campaign he’s been saying he’d mend ties with Russia. Again one wonders what the alternative would be. Increasing tensions to the point to have a war? In all likelihood a very destructive one?

The DNC (the Democratic party) has been touting “Russian Collusion” ever since. One may not disregard the fact that the Obama administration started the negative vibe against the North-Eastern country at the end of 2013. It jacked up the feigned outrage in 2014 around “Ukraine”. Never mind that Hunter Biden was involved with Buresma and was being researched for collusion. Never mind his father, presidential hopeful Joe Biden, demanded from the newly instated president Poroshenko that he’d fire the prosecutor general “before he boarded the plane”. That’s not Fake News of course: Joe Biden is on record saying so during a panel discussion with the Council of Foreign Relations or CFR.

The media – if they’d be here to enlighten us “objectively” [allow me this contradictio interminis] – should be applauding it. They do not. They have been demonizing Trump because of it. They didn’t even usher a word when the White House and the Kremlin issued only their second joint statement back in early May. There was radio silence around it although the message was one of hope as I noted in the article I linked.

I’ll write it again: what’s the alternative to mending ties with Russia? Do you know it? I don’t see any good one.

China

Trump has been all-out on renegotiating China-US trade. He’s right doing so. China’s production prowess at such low cost undermines the United States. It undermines domestic jobs. In fact, Europe should really follow what Trump does against the Eastern mastodon. Workers should be delighted. The international companies on the other hand are not. As they see cheap production replaced with the obligation to invest massively into local production.

In it “For the Oil”

When Trump announced he’d pull back all troops from Syria, he was lambasted for it. Remember that the US, according to ALL international laws, does not have a legal ground to be there. So Trump said he’d pull out. After media backlash he announced he would keep a few battalions. The media were up in arms for the Kurdish “Rojava”-movement. They predicted a massacre; one which, again, didn’t happen as Syria and Russia do not work like that.

After the backlash against his decision Trump changed course and became the first president to admit exactly why he remained. Trump said in his own (lack of) style something like: “Look. We like oil. The US likes oil. I like oil. Oil’s the best.” Do you remember a president this honest? Weren’t we led to believe that the US “exports democracy” and fights for “freedom” and goes “against tyrants”? A US president being frank, direct and honest is not praised by journalists these days; they attack him for it. En masse.

So. What might have happened? Why did he eventually keep “foot on the ground” in Syria? My guess is that he got such amount of hate from powerful forces within his administration that he could not but keep the troops there. If that hypothesis is correct then rest assured that it (eventually) all was explained and coordinated with Assad, Putin and Erdogan. But that may be soil for another article.

Tax Cuts

Regularly repeated in mainstream is the myth that Trump’s tax cuts benefit the rich. It does not. It benefits the working class who have seen their tax bill decrease with thousands of dollars a year. In all reality, it was the DNC who insisted that tax deduction should have a steeper threshold benefiting the already rich. Not the other way around. Furthermore, they want to abolish Trump’s tax relief which, as linked above, would result in the average American loosing $26.000 in a decade.

The DNC, backed by its supporting media, would mostly state that Trump’s tax cuts on corporate profits is testament to him favoring the huge conglomerates and the capitalists but they fail to mention that the reduction of 35% to a one-time rate of 15.5% on cash and 8% on other assets, made companies like Apple bring that cash “back home”, half of the $250 billion parked overseas in Apple’s case! Here’s another take.

Did you read that in mainstream unless you carefully hunted for it like I did?

Lobbying

One of the first Executive Orders Trump signed was about lobbying. He outlawed it and had all his administration sign they could not do so up to five years after finishing their government job. Since lobbyists largely work for big, multinational companies (or their interest “think tank” groups), lobbying can easily created an imbalance to governmental regulation in favor of these huge companies.

This goes against what “democracy” stands for as government officials are and should be representatives of the people.

In other words, creating regulations making it more difficult to lobby, it a good thing for the average American. Did you read this take anywhere on mainstream news? Nope. All silence.

“Fake News”

Almost literally the moment Trump got elected, the term “fake news” skyrocketed as if it were a marketing campaign. Both sides use it now: both “Trump” as well as the DNC backed by their corporate mouthpieces, the media.

As if out of nowhere, fact checkers aplenty rose to prominence. They are now seen by many as the guardians of truth. They refuse allowing to have their opinion formed with new information if fact checker Y or Z indicates the concept might be “false”. These fact checkers almost always choose the side of the democrat party; it favors, nay, uniquely selects mainstream narrative as “true” although plenty of questions are left open and unanswered. All of these unaddressed and pushed aside as if the validity of asking them suddenly matters none. It’s all pretty well explained in this article.

Trump too uses the term; he does so to address mainstream bias. I wonder: given that coverage about him is around 95% negative (which is absurd if you ask me), doesn’t he at least have a point? If the famous “shithole countries” used exclusively to demonize him is based on a WaPo article stating “sources who knew persons who attended a meeting where the president allegedly said” is used as unmistakable proof he did say so, my opinion seems to become: Trump has a point.

Or take the recent “bleach injection” as another example. The media wrote that Trump called for people to inject themselves with bleach while, if you run through the complete footage, the observation becomes he really never stated so. I’ll shut up about the whole “Russian Collusion” story which Mueller investigated for three years but turned out to be a dud. Still, the media, to this day, are writing as if it were true. The list of questionable claims in mainstream media is endless. You can wonder about the Skripals, about Navalny, about the White Helmets, about Maidan, about Belarus, about North-Korea and so on.

What Trump could also be trying by repeating “you are fake news” is warning us that mainstream media is to be taken with a grain of salt. Rightfully so, because media coverage is polarizing the entire Western hemisphere to a dangerous extent. It should stop. The media needs to act like the fourth pillar of democracy they are and should be.

BUT, it might all be too late. Back in the 19th century, Mark Twain warned us already about media bias. Gramsci and Freud did so again early 20th century. Orwell has been very vocal about it and so was the former Shah of Iran on occasion, the CIA… All while Hitler wrote a field manual about it.

The question thus becomes: do you think that bias, that use of propagandist language to move public opinion in a certain direction, has been reduced? Has it stayed the same? Has it been tweaked to perfection? My opinion is the latter.

Immigration and “Illegal Aliens”

BLM

Although Afro-Americans have (mostly) been in a difficult situation ever since they were “imported” to the States (pardon the language but bear with me), I wonder why BLM became big and bold almost overnight. George Floyd wasn’t an exception. This abuse of police force has been going on for decades and (mostly) nobody cared before (I did. I addressed it on my wall a couple of times over the past years).

So, with BLM, I started wondering why quite a “standard” (but no less despicable) abuse of force suddenly became the focus of attention for months now. Why did mainstream continue reporting about “peaceful protests” while they literally aired footage of burning buildings at exactly the same time? Looting and arson is not “peaceful” in none of my dictionaries.

Why did the (Democratic) mayors not react in time? Why did they allow a continuation until Trump called it quits? Why did Twitter label a Trump tweet as “inciting violence” while tweets many times more inciting (but “pro-BLM”) were left unchecked?

It wasn’t Trump starting BLM; it was the media campaign. It wasn’t Trump being racist or defending “white supremacy”. He merely did what all president would do: stop the riots! Reflect on how the Yellow Vests were addressed by Macron for example or how the media portrayed these protesting against the murderous covid-measures. Both the Yellow Vests as well as the anti-measure “covidiots” were way more peaceful but praise was far to be found. Why is that?

Trump did more trying to unite Americans than his predecessors. He did more for the Afro-American (and Asian, and Hispanic…) communities than others. Don’t take it from me, but do so from this Afro-American.

In a way, I believe BLM is used as a continuation to portray Trump as a racist. It was not the first time they did so. There’s other examples.

Deportations

Much brouhaha has been made around Trump’s approach to immigrants. The reality is that he didn’t change that much in comparison to previous administrations. The reality is that he deported less “illegal aliens” than his predecessor did. This might come as an entire surprise to many who saw Barack as a representative of minorities which he certainly was not. Obama to all intents and purposes was entirely part of the elite political establishment and it can easily be defended that he was way more “part of the establishment” than Trump is.

Europeans often are confused with the “illegal alien” moniker. Some might think this is a derogatory term but it’s been used, at least, every since Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Immigration and Walls

Trump has been targeted for the wall he’s building and that he’d make “Mexico pay for it”. While the latter explanation is remarkable and strikes strange, the fact of the matter is that it was not him having started building it, but Clinton back in the nineties. Both Bush and Obama continued the effort so Trump, in reality, is just continuing the massive project.

What Trump-haters also seem to turn a blind eye to (helped by mainstream media hardly addressing it) is that walls are built in many places. Turkey has a huge one built over 764km. Gaza is completely surrounded by an Israeli one. Even the EU can be accused of fencing of their outside borders from “illegal aliens” (the EU calling them “immigrants” of course). In other words, why is there such an outrage against Trump doing so when half of the Western world is doing exactly the same thing?

Doesn’t that reek of double standards and hypocrisy? It certainly does so to me.

Trade Wars (China)

The Trump’s administration is taking a tough stand on China and the Western press does not know how to react to it. It can’t defend China too much, nor does it want to support Trump (on anything).

Now here’s the deal. China has been used for the last couple of decades as one big factory by companies both big and small. Doing so, it has been undermining local endeavors, local production and local employment. China’s rise on the back of it has been astounding while the Western world has been lagging. Furthermore, production know-how has been lost to the Eastern giant and production secrets have been willfully handed over to the Chinese.

It’s now clear that the Western world in and by itself is unable to manufacture many of the goods having been built in China for decades. It has become wholly dependent on Chinese acumen.

In a way, Trump is right to address that imbalance as much as he does. When he got elected on the campaign tagline to “Make America Great Again”, it’s this very project which helps him do so. Not only is he bringing production back to the US which results in tens of thousands of new jobs, he also is making sure that the US will be able to manufacture necessary products itself.

Funnily, when domestic production is up and running again, he’ll also have done a lot environment-wise. Hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo will not need to be shipped anymore from half a world away by ocean giants.

The initiative is praiseworthy and the EU would do well to follow Trump’s lead taking a more aggressive stance on Chinese goods flooding its markets.

Misogyny

When I discuss Trump with women with me “defending” him more than what many expect, one of the first topics always is his “grabbing by the pussy”-statement. Many, if not all, believe it’s his adagio while it really is only a reflection of reality. The context which this is said in is important to understand why that is so.

Back in 2005, Trump was tailed by a reporter during an evening. One of the stops was a reception. Getting back from it and into the limo, the reporter, Billy Bush, asked Trump: “Incredible. The moment you arrived the prettiest of ladies flocked to you. How do you do it?” Trump’s answer was in line with: “You can not imagine what money and power do to some women. They offer themselves almost completely. It’s as if you can just ‘grab them by the pussy’”.

That is not a motto he broadcast like mainstream has us believe; it’s a reflection of our world. Some women are willing to give up their bodies in return for wealth. If that were not so, then the complete concepts of “gold diggers” and “sugar daddies” are untrue.

Trump is not a misogynist. He’s a man of the world. You could argue that his words were ill-chosen for a president but that’s disregarding they were said in a one-on-one between two adults, as an answer to a direct question and, obviously, years before he thought about running for president or at least, a decade before he did so.

Environment

Much has been said about Trump’s alleged anti-environmental stance. Often, it is immediately followed by the reference to his withdrawal from the Paris Accord of 2016. In reality, the Paris Accord was an empty vessel. The US staying or not staying in it will not make a difference. The complete accord, hailed as being a huge step forward by all mainstream outlets, is worth as much as the paper it’s printed on.

There’s more to Trump’s environmentalism. Remember how he wants to “make America great again”? In part he’s doing so by getting multinationals to invest into production factories back in America.

GM invests $1 billion for example. So does Apple. Toyota even goes for $16 billion. Foxconn, a Chinese company, is building a display manufacturing plant and will pay $10 billion for it. Taiwan’s TMSC $12 billion and so on.

All a boon for America’s employment and know-how of course, but I am writing this under the “environment” topic. The logic is as follows: with all these corporations bringing manufacturing back to the US, quite some container ship traffic will (eventually) be taken out of the equation. Trump does so by deploying the trade war with China which leaves these multinational companies without any recluse.

Trump’s latest initiative is to enroll in the World Economic Forum’s “One Trillion Trees” initiative. He signed the Executive Order last week.

This is to say and I am not even addressing pipelines, fracking, gas plants etcetera that there’s another side to Trump concerning environmentalism as well. Is he The Greenest President? Probably not. The question was who was; I believe – although he has that name – Obama wasn’t either.

Election 2020 and Conceding It

Mainstream has been rife with stories how Trump will not concede elections. The opposite is true: it’s the Democrats saying so. Trump, when he approaches the subject, does so because he believes the mail-in ballots are prone to fraud. He’s right. Both Pennsylvania as well as Ohio are already reporting issues with it (and that’s, according to my gut feeling so take it with a large dose of salt, just the tip of the iceberg).

Then we have Hillary Clinton – who never really conceded losing the election in the last four years! – stating that Biden “should not concede election under any circumstance”, that he [Biden] “should not give in an inch”. That comes after Harris, the nominated VP under candidate Biden, is on record supporting (often violent) protests “not now, not even after election day”.

And that is while Trump says the exact opposite with the sole exception being the case of election fraud.

Other Topics Left Unaddressed

Other topics which I could address are his response to Covid, to Venezuela, to Ukraine, Iran, to his tax returns, to his position on Ukraine, the UK, the EU, his nomination for the Supreme Court etc but the article is long already as it is. Given enough feedback I’ll certainly consider it. Hit the comments!