While Donald Trump has been largely a disaster in following his predecessors, he has done some good things too.  He has certainly shaken the establishment.  Although much of his policies have been in line with the establishment, the powers-that-be fear Trump because he is viewed as something of a loose cannon.

Just as there were a few good things Obama did in an overall terrible presidency, Trump has had a few decent moments in his first year and a half.  I think his harshest critics are hypocritical, and their criticisms of him are mostly shallow.  They will go nuts over a mean Tweet that he sends out, but then they will be silent (or sometimes even a little praiseful) when he bombs Syria.  If you say something mean and hurt someone’s feelings, then that is just unacceptable behavior.  But if you kill innocent foreigners, then that is presidential.

With all of that said, Trump did a good thing recently in meeting with Kim Kardashian West and ultimately commuting the sentence of Alice Johnson, who had been sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking.  Sure, as a libertarian, I would like for Trump to pardon all non-violent drug offenders who are in federal prison due to the crazy war on drugs.  But at least Trump took this one first step in acknowledging that the drug war and its sentencing guidelines may not be all that fair.  You could rape and kill someone and get the same sentence, or maybe even less.

We should hope that Trump spends all of his time looking at individual cases and trying to right the injustices to the degree that he can.  There are hundreds of thousands of people who are in prison who should not be there.  While I would rather him just end the federal war on drugs, it would be a great step if he starts looking at each individual case on its own merits.  He can get the rest of his staff to help out.  Any time spent on freeing innocent people from jail is time not spent on bombing another country, or at least that can be our hope.

I would also like to pay a little credit to Kim Kardashian West.  She recently denied accusations that she was just used as Trump’s pawn. Meanwhile, those criticizing her have done nothing to advance the cause of liberty or to help make a more just society.  Most of those criticizing her are likely opponents of liberty when you get down to it.

It is obviously easy to criticize Kardashian.  Her husband can be a bit obnoxious at times, and he has a big ego (similar to Trump).  Kardashian has gained great fame in being a sex symbol and a television reality star.  Sometimes she doesn’t sound that bright, but I can assure you that she has much greater business acumen than most.  She may act stupid at times, but she definitely has some intelligence.

But aside from the question of her intelligence, I really give credit to Kim Kardashian for not being a goat in the herd.  Hollywood is very anti-Trump, and it is not good business these days to stand beside Trump.  If you are a country singer in Nashville, then you might get away with saying nice things about Trump.  But most celebrities will go out of their way to criticize Trump because it is the easy and popular thing to do, at least as seen by the establishment media.

Kardashian may have posed for a photo with Trump, but she wasn’t really building him up, or at least that doesn’t seem to be her motivation.  She saw an injustice in the world, and she did something about it. She has a platform as a celebrity, and she used it.  She met with the one person who could do something about this injustice, and she made it happen.  And she did it likely knowing that she would be on the receiving end of criticism for even daring to talk to Trump in a civilized manner.

The Hollywood celebrities don’t need to praise Trump, but they could take a lesson from Kardashian if they really cared about justice and making a better world.  They could lobby Trump to take on a less interventionist foreign policy.  They could lobby Trump to be a stronger proponent of civil liberties.  Unfortunately, most of them don’t really care about these issues, or they don’t care enough about them to stop criticizing Trump for his mean comments on Twitter.