By G. Murphy Donovan
The author had two tours in Vietnam as a junior officer and
subsequently served as command Intelligence briefer in Hawaii where he
updated CINCPAC, John McCain’s father, on POW matters.
Donald Trump is a piece of work even by New York
standards: tall, white, loud, brash, entrepreneurial, successful, rich,
ruthlessly candid, well-dressed, and fond of heterosexual women. He has
married at least three delicious ladies in fact. Trump has five children and
seven grandchildren. Indeed, his progeny are well above average too, smartly
groomed, photogenic, and successful to boot.
As far as we know, Donald does not have any
tattoos, piercings, unpaid taxes, or under-aged bimbo interns. He is not a
drunk or a junkie either. Trump projects and enterprises probably employ
more folks than the NYC school system -- or the United Nations.
You could say that Trump is living the life, not the
life of Riley, but more like Daddy Warbucks with a comb over. “The Donald,”
as one ex-wife calls him, is not just living the American dream. Trump is
the dream -- and proud of it.
You could do worse than think of Trump as upwardly
mobile blue collar. He is the grandson of immigrants and the product of Long
island, a Queens household, and a Bronx education. The Donald survived the
Jesuits of Fordham University for two years before migrating to finish his
baccalaureate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
When readers of the New York Times , The New Yorker ,
and the New York Review of Books speak of “the city”, they are not talking
about the Queens or the Bronx. Growing and schooling in the blue-collar
boroughs gives Trump a curb level perspective, something seldom found in
Manhattan. Or as any “D” Train alumnus might put it, Trump has “a pretty
good Bravo Sierra detector.”
So what’s not to like about Donald Trump? He doesn’t
just stay in four-star hotels; he builds them. He doesn’t just own luxury
condominiums; he makes them. He doesn’t just own historic buildings; he
restores them. He doesn’t just eat at the best restaurants; he creates them.
He just doesn’t belong to the best country clubs; he builds those, too.
And Donald Trump, unlike the Manhattan/Washington
fantasy Press and every Beltway political pimp, doesn’t just pay lip service
to a bigger and better economy, he creates micro-economies every day.
The only thing we don’t know about Donald Trump is why
he would like to immigrate to the District of Columbia.
In any case, the merits of entrepreneurs like Trump
might best be defined by the character or motives of his critics. Trump
detractors are for the most part “B” list politicians, ambulance chasers,
and a left-leaning Press corps that lionizes the likes of Nina Totenberg,
Dan Rather, Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, and Brian Williams.
If the truth were told, most of Trump’s critics are
jealous, envious of his wealth and they loath his candor. Donald might also
be hated for what he is not. Trump is not a lawyer, nor is he a career
politician who lives on the taxpayer dime. Trump is paying for his own
campaign. Bernie, Barack, McCain, and Kerry could take enterprise lessons
from a chap like Trump.
Unlike most government barnacles, Trump can walk and
chew gum at the same time. He knows how to close a deal and build something.
He is a net creator, not consumer, of a kind of wealth that provides “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for Americans -- real jobs not
feather merchants.
Today, Trump has nothing left to prove. Yet, success
has allowed him the rarest of public privileges, an electoral pulpit and the
courage to speak his mind. Alas, truth is not necessarily a political asset
in a socialized democracy.
Indeed, the erstwhile presidential candidate stepped on
his crank recently by suggesting that Mexico, already exporting dangerous
drugs, cheap tomatoes, and even cheaper labor, was also exporting violent
felons to the US.
Truth hurts! Trump’s rude candor is underwritten by
nearly half a million illegal felons in American jails. Coincidentally,
events have conspired to support Trump’s take on Mexican dystopia with the
El Chapo Guzman jailbreak and the murder of Kathryn Steinle by Francisco
Sanchez.
Senor Sanchez sported a lengthy criminal record and had
been deported on four previous occasions. San Francisco, a "sanctuary" city,
failed to honor existing warrants and released Sanchez from jail just before
he blew Kathy Steinle away.
As serendipity would have it, Trump then went to
Phoenix on 12 July and gave a stem winder to a sell-out crowd on the subject
of illegal immigration. Senator John McCain was not pleased to have The
Donald on Arizona’s front lawn and intemperately called Trump supporters
“crazies.” Trump returned fire saying that McCain was no hero.
Here again Trump cut to the quick, pointing out that no
one qualifies as a hero because he was shot down or captured. Indeed, being
a hostage in North Vietnam is not necessarily heroic either. McCain is
thought by some to be a heroic because he refused to accept an early
release.
In fact, the Hanoi parole offer was a ruse, a Hobson’s
choice, designed to embarrass McCain and his father at CINCPAC.
If McCain took the parole and abandoned his fellow
POWs, he would have shamed his father and been ostracized by shipmates.
Indeed, had John McCain not been the son and grandson of famous no
victorious, Pacific Command flag officers, no one would have noticed him
then or now.
Few of the demagogues who have come to John McCain’s
defense could name any of the 600 Vietnam-era POWs other than McCain. McCain
is famous today because he, like John Kerry, has parlayed a very average
Vietnam military service into a three-decade political sinecure.
We know of 50,000 Vietnam veterans that might be more
deserving than John McCain. Unfortunately, they died in a war that generals
couldn’t win and politicians couldn’t abide. A body bag seldom gets to play
the “hero.”
McCain is no political hero either.
He is famously ambiguous on domestic issues like
immigration. He is also a Johnny-come-lately to Veterans Administration rot,
which has metastasized as long as McCain has been in office. On foreign
policy, McCain is a Victoria Nuland era crackpot, supporting East European
coups, playing cold warrior, and posturing with neo-Nazis in Kiev. McCain
pecks at Putin too because the Senate, like the Obama crew, hasn’t a clue
about genuine threats like the ISIS jihad or the latest Islam bomb.
To date, Trump has run a clever campaign. He is
chumming, throwing red meat and blood into campaign waters and all the usual
suspects are in a feeding frenzy. McCain, the Press, the Left, and the
Republican establishment all have something to say about “the Donald.” It is
truly amazing how cleverly Trump manages to manipulate the establishment.
If you are trying to sell an idea or a candidacy,
there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Who knows where the Trump campaign goes? For the
moment, he has scored direct hits on Mexico and McCain. With El Capo on the
loose again, every time a toilet flushes in Sinaloa, Mexican garbage is
likely spill out in Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco, Portland, or
Seattle. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the Left Coast could survive
without cheap labor, pistileros , meth, coke, heroin, or weed. Necrotic
immigration and its byproducts are ready made targets for a gunslinger like
Trump.
Trump is no bigot. He probably employs more Latinos and
Blacks than Enrique Peña Nieto or Barack Obama. In his own way, Donald Trump
is both immigrant and POW, a refugee from Queens and still a prisoner of
Wharton. The Donald is The Dude, the guy with babes and a roll of Benjamins
that would choke a shark. He is the wildly successful capitalist that some
of us love to hate.
Before democratic socialism, success and effectiveness
were measures of merit. It doesn’t take much insight to compare Trump’s
various enterprises with federal programs. Public education, banking
oversight, public housing slums, poverty doles, veterans fiascos, Internal
Revenue hijinks, and even some Defense Department procurement programs are
consensus failures. The F-35 “Lightning” fighter is an illustration,
arguably the most expensive single DOD boondoggle in history. Pentagon
progressives seldom win a catfight these days, but they still spend like
sailors.
If and when Trump fails, he is out of business.
In Trump’s world, failure has consequences. In
contrast, Washington rewards failure with better funding. Indeed,
generational program failure is now a kind of perverse incentive for Beltway
politicians and apparatchiks to throw good money after failed programs.
The difference between Trump and McCain should be
obvious to any fair observer; Trump has done something with his talents.
McCain, in contrast, is coasting on a military myth and resting on the
laurels of Senatorial tenure.
Any way you look at it, Donald Trump is good for
national politics, good for democracy, good for America, and especially good
for candor. If nothing else, The Donald may help Republicans to pull their
heads out of that place where the sun seldom shines.
The author had two tours in Vietnam as a junior officer
and subsequently served as command Intelligence briefer in Hawaii where he
updated CINCPAC, John McCain’s father, on POW matters.