Donald Trump addressed the nation (for those who watched) on Tuesday night from the Oval Office. While there was originally some talk of the network stations not carrying the short speech, all of the major networks covered it.
A speech to the American public was long overdue for Donald Trump. Unfortunately, he picked the wrong topic.
Maybe I say this just because I don’t feel that strongly about the immigration issue. It is a tough issue for libertarians to deal with because we live in a world of massive government and government-owned land. If we didn’t have a welfare state at home and a warfare state abroad, then I think that would resolve at least 90% of the issue. Most people wouldn’t be coming to the U.S. to hurt people (which they mostly don’t anyway) or to look for handouts. The only handouts immigrants would be able to get would be from voluntary charity.
Trump has become obsessed with his wall. It was a major campaign issue of his in 2015/ 2016, so you could say that he is just trying to fulfill his campaign promises. I have my doubts that a wall would be that effective in keeping people out, and as Ron Paul used to say, it could eventually be used to keep people in.
I think the whole partial government shutdown standoff is due to Ann Coulter, and perhaps a few other conservative voices. Coulter always throws her support behind the latest bold conservative. She had a political love affair with Chris Christie at one time. Then she realizes that the person is more talk than action. She thought Trump was different when she supported him. So when it looked like the wall was quietly being dropped from his agenda, she attacked him on it.
If Trump were really serious about the wall, then he wouldn’t have waited until the end of 2018 with an incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. Why wasn’t Trump doing this a year or more ago with Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House?
Now Trump is stuck. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer won’t budge. Those two are terribly annoying people, but I have a feeling they are going to win this round of the political battle.
Most of the government has not shut down (unfortunately). In particular, the wars overseas never end during a government shutdown. Most of the IRS has closed for business with the latest shutdown, so that seems reason enough to keep it going. But I don’t think Trump is going to be able to get his way on this. The Democrats know what they are doing. They don’t care about $5 billion. It is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the well over $4 trillion annual budget. Pelosi and Schumer just don’t want to fund any part of a wall because they don’t want any symbolic victories for Trump.
Trump’s only option to get his wall is to declare a national emergency and go ahead without Congressional approval. I think this would be a great mistake, and it would set a bad precedent for the future. It took Marco Rubio to point out that the Democrats might use this power in the future to declare a national emergency with so-called climate change.
The Real Issues
I have been preaching for a while now that Trump should address the nation in primetime, but not on immigration. He should address the deep state that opposes him at nearly every turn. He should address the spy agencies and the intelligence agencies that operate with virtually no Congressional oversight. He should address foreign policy and explain his commitment to withdrawing troops out of Syria and other wars in the Middle East.
Most of all – and this is related to the other points about the deep state and the secretive agencies – Trump should address the allegations of colluding with Russia and Russian interference in the election. These false and unsubstantiated allegations are just continually thrown out there by the talking heads in Washington DC and in the establishment media. They have no credibility.
It is weapons of mass destruction all over again. In this case, they make accusations against Trump and Russia in order to kill several birds with one stone. It increases tension with Russia and stops any sustainable talk of peace and friendship. It provides a reason on why Hillary Clinton somehow lost to Trump in the election. And it threatens Trump’s presidency with distractions and the possibility that he could even be prosecuted.
I don’t think Trump will go to jail for any of the made up stuff. Maybe his lawyer really did pay off women to not talk, but I don’t think this qualifies as any kind of crime. Of course, with federal law, they can make anything a crime.
If anything, they would use the threat of prosecution to get Trump to step down as president. They wouldn’t actually try to send him to jail or otherwise you would see a version of Trump that would make any previous version look tame. He can obviously be a fighter, and if he thought he might go to jail, he would go down swinging. He would try to take the deep state down with him.
Make no mistake about this. Mueller and all of the other “investigators” are part of the criminal gang. They are the ones who should be on trial. They are liars and much worse. They are the thugs of society who happen to dress up in suits.
I still have no idea how much Trump understands in all of this. He obviously knows that a lot of people are out to get him. I don’t know if he understands the depth (for lack of a better word) of the deep state. I don’t know if certain people have gone to him directly and made threats to him.
I expect Trump will run for re-election in 2020, but nothing is certain right now. A lot can change when you have a whole swarm of corrupt actors trying to take you down.
Trump is far from being a libertarian, but he can do a great service for liberty by helping to expose the stench of Washington DC. He has already done that to a certain extent, but he could do so much more.
When Trump expends his political capital on a fight for a wall at the Mexican border, it doesn’t expand liberty. We can only hope that he will start expending even more energy on exposing the criminality of the deep state that is trying to take him down.