The Swamp fears Donald Trump, With Good Reason

As we all know, Democrats and the Swamp hate Donald Trump.  They probably hate him more than any president ever.  Those elites, including celebrities, journalists and politicians used to love Trump, with thousands of them smiling and taking pictures of him over the years. But not anymore.

All of that changed in 2015 when he decided to run for president.  It wasn't that he was running for president that made him enemy number one, but rather because he was running for president as a Republican.

But of course being a Republican wasn’t always the polarizing factor that it became in 2015 and beyond.  Sure, the media disliked Bush and McCain and Romney, but they were OK because they were all within the acceptable limits of what could be tolerated and controlled.  Trump was and is something altogether different. 

To understand why he was and is different, look at the people at the heart of the Swamp, the government.

Nancy Pelosi, is 84 years old with 47 years in politics & government, a Political Science major with no experience in the private sector.

Chuck Schumer, 74 years old, 49 years in government, a lawyer with no private sector experience.

Hakeem Jeffries, 54 years old, 17 years in govt. A lawyer with no private sector experience.

Joe Biden, 82 years old, 50 years in government, a lawyer with zero private sector experience.

Bernie Sanders, 83 years old, 53 of which were in politics and government, a Political Science major who held a smattering of odd jobs prior to joining government.

Adam Schiff, a 64 year old lawyer who’s spent 38 years in government with zero private sector experience.

Pete Buttigieg, 42 years old, 12 years in government, a Political Science major who spent 3 years working for consulting giant McKinsey & Co. mostly working with NGOs and corporations.  He was in the Navy and did a stint in Afghanistan.

AOC is a 35 year old Econ and International Relations major who’s spent 8 years in government and whose private sector experience is that of a bartender.

Gavin Newsom, a 57 year old Political Science major who’s spent 27 years in government and who in 1992 was brought in by his friend, Gordon Getty, as the co-founder of PlumpJack Winery in Napa, California.   

Elizabeth Warren, a 75 year old lawyer who’s spent 30 years in government and has zero private sector experience.

And it’s not just Democrats…

Mitch McConnell is an 82 year old lawyer who’s spent 50 years in government and never held a private sector job.

Kevin McCarthy is a 59 year old MBA who worked in government for 37 years and sold sandwiches out of his uncle’s yogurt shop while in college.

Paul Ryan is a 54 year old Political Science and Economics graduate who spent 28 years in government before retiring to become a lobbyist in 2019.  He was a waiter and fitness trainer in college.

So there you have it, of the dozen or so most powerful people in American government & politics, only one has any real experience in running a business (Newsom) and that business was funded by one of the richest men in the world at the time.  But somehow they’re the ones making the laws that increasingly impact the businesses that employ every American, and indeed the lives and communities of every single American.   

For these people, government is virtually everything in life.  For most of them, they know nothing about the private sector, the thing that powers America.  They know nothing about running a business, creating jobs, meeting payroll, and perhaps most importantly, doing all of those things while risking everything and while trying to abide by a stultifying labyrinth of ever changing government regulations from an endless array of agencies. 

None of them, aside from Newsom, has built anything of any consequence.  They have no experience of what it’s like to be in business, where 86% of employed Americans work, run a business or be an entrepreneur, the economic fount of America. For most of their adult lives none of them had to worry about the solvency of their next paycheck. Their healthcare plans and those of their families and their employee’s families weren’t resting on their success.  They’ve not had to worry about selling enough products or services in order to keep the lights on, the employees’ paid and fresh product on the shelves or services in the pipeline.  Worrying about and conquering those pressures are what created America’s prosperity. Those are the things that fund the paychecks Americans pay taxes out of that the government turns around and redistributes.  Those are the things that make most Americans’ lives better than those of almost every person in human history. It’s those things, not government…and the people arrayed against Donald Trump have virtually no experience with any of it.

But Trump, he has it in spades.  He’s built giant hotels in the midst of economic turmoil.  He’s done so having to deal with unions, mafia, government regulators, contractors, competitors, bankers and more.  He’s built hotels, golf courses, casinos, apartment buildings, communities and more around the world.  He owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.  He was a founding member of the USFL, a competitor to the NFL.  He was the star and producer of the Apprentice, the business focused reality show that averaged 14 million viewers per episode for its first six years.  Sure, Trump’s had failures, bankruptcies and lots of lawsuits, but you don’t accomplish anything without risking those outcomes.  He’s failed plenty of times, but he’s succeeded far more often.  He’s created companies that have made millions of paycheck deadlines, that have fed tens of thousands of families and have generated billions of dollars in revenue. 

Donald Trump accomplishes things.  Not only without government, but usually in spite of government.  Maybe the best example of this is his renovation of Wollman Rink, a project that had languished for six years in the hands of the NYC government, who wasted $13 million working unsuccessfully on the project.  Trump completed it in a matter of months, and under budget. And that’s what scares them the most. The Swamp cannot afford to let Donald Trump, on the world’s biggest stage, show Americans that they don’t need government to succeed, that problems can be solved without government “help” and to demonstrate that many times, government is actually the problem. If you’re in the government business, that’s a bad thing because as anyone who’s ever picked up a history book knows, Americans, when unshackled from government regulation, can do extraordinary things. And once they’re reminded of that, all bets are off. 

The last time Trump was president he said he was going to drain the Swamp.  He didn’t. The truth is, he had no idea how deep or wide the Swamp was and is. Most of us didn’t.  Now he does and now we do.  This time he’ll be under no illusions about what he’s up against, and ideally, will act accordingly.  The Swamp knows that. They see the writing on the wall. And it terrifies them.

Karl Marx is alive and well in 2024 America

Marxism was easily the most destructive political theory to ever be put into practice.  Over the course of the 20th century it was responsible for the purposeful killing of well over 100 million people.  To put that evil into context, the slave trade into the United States was 400,000 people, the number of Congolese dead during the reign of King Leopold II of Belgium is estimated as high as 10 million and the total number of deaths during WWII was 73 million.  But Communism beats them all, combined.  And the vast majority of those numbers came from governments killing their own citizens!  I mention all of this is because the father of Communism, Karl Marx, has been on my mind lately. 

Marx was a despicable human being.  It’s often said that he never had a job in his life.  That’s not technically true. Although he had a doctorate, his radicalism kept most universities from hiring him.  He was a writer and editor for a number of publications, most of which went bankrupt because no one was reading them, or were shuttered by governments seeking to quell what they saw as sedition. He was a writer for the New-York Daily Tribune for a decade and later for the New York Sun. None of these jobs paid particularly well or consistently (other than the Tribune) and what they did pay Marx often spent on alcohol and tobacco. 

Marx’s family lived in poverty and debt his entire life and often they went hungry and were evicted a number of times.  This, despite Marx having received substantial inheritances from his parents and his taking numerous “loans” from friends. He fathered at least seven children with his wife, but only three survived to adulthood, in part due to the family’s poverty and its consequent malnutrition. But Marx never once took a job that would economically support his family and give them sufficient sustenance.  In reality, Marx spent most of his adult life supported by his friend, co-author and defacto vassal, Friedrich Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer. Aside from being a hypocrite, arrogant, condescending, violent with words and sometimes deeds, Marx was also a slovenly man.  He drank to excess, smoked and almost never bathed.  A German spy, after visiting Marx, reported “[Marx] leads the existence of a Bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he is often drunk.” And he was a racist and an antisemite as well, despite his father having converted to Christianity for political and economic reasons. 

Marx spent virtually his entire adult life decrying the inequality and “failures” of Capitalism and proffering the replacement of Capitalism & democracy with Communism as outlined in he and Engels in The Communist Manifesto.  But the thing is, Marx had no direct connection to actual Capitalism other than taking the money produced by it to support him and his family.  He had no experience starting a business, building a business, managing payroll, insurance, suppliers, customers, employees, unions or anything else.  No, he learned everything he knew about business and economics from reading. 

Not that it’s impossible to learn about economics from reading. I’ve read Thomas Sowell’s books and feel better informed for it.  But unlike Marx, Sowell actually worked in the government and observed in real life the consequences of government programs. In addition, he directly ties his work to specific data from a wide variety of real-world sources. He cites specific companies, government programs, economic measures and studies when he writes.  Marx does none of that.  Most of the information Marx gathered during his career was that of various philosophers, political, economic and otherwise.  These included among others Adam Smith, James Mill, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and of course Friedrich Hegel. But he never visited a factory, a mill, a mine or interacted with the proletariat he championed.  He did interact with one virtual slave, however, his lifelong family maid who he never paid, and with whom he fathered a child he refused to acknowledge. 

Engels on the other hand did have experience, in his family’s manufacturing business, his German father sending him to Manchester, England in 1842 to get the impressionable lad away from the radical politics infecting Prussia. Too late however as Engels was already radicalized and headed on the path that would define his legacy.  Engels would visit the most downtrodden slums of England and would share his observations with Marx. He would leave the company in 1844 and would not return until 1850, two years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto.  Much of what Engels would write however was either embellished, taken out of context or an outright lie, a characteristic he and Marx shared.

Although Engels had limited experience with the proletariat, Marx had none and wanted none.  He demurred when Engels invited him to visit factories with him, nor would he query his merchant uncle about business other than on a single family matter.  But lack of actual evidence or experience with anything outside of reading didn’t stop Marx from writing about the destruction of the entirety of western civilization.  Individual liberty and private property would be gone while the government would control the means of communication, transportation and production and simultaneously undermining the family and dictating where citizens would live. He proffered a world of Communism with no understanding of how the world actually works, ignoring the lessons from New Harmony, Indiana, Robert Owen’s failed attempt to build a socialist nirvana in America, about which Marx would most certainly have known. His means of accomplishing this was not via democracy, but rather violence, writing in 1848 “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

Which brings me to why Marx has been on my mind.  Does any of the above sound familiar?  A vile, self-centered and arrogant individual with poor hygiene, highly educated, with little or no experience doing anything resembling productive and spending his time railing against society and advocating for its violent overthrow?  It should, because we’ seeing thousands of individuals – many highly educated (including lawyers!) and most with no experience in producing anything in the real world – violently demonstrating for the overthrow the United States as we know it. From Portland to New York to Atlanta to Tampa every time we get the mugshots and reports from the police of the arrestees, they look exactly like you would expect, unkempt, modern day wannabe Karl Marxs. A majority of them are professional agitators, going from place to place causing trouble. 

While Marx had a vision (albeit an absurd and impossible one) with which he wanted to replace democracy and Capitalism, today’s agitators are nihilists with no plan beyond destroying America. They, like Marx, are parasites who do nothing productive for society.  They have no idea how the world actually works, how to build anything productive, nor an idea how to do anything but throw fists, stones and Molotov Cocktails while complaining about the society that nourishes them. But then that’s the beauty of the left, there never needs to be a connection between ideas and reality.  It’s enough to criticize, theorize and legislate, no proof necessary, then let the chips fall where they may. With Marx humanity paid a terrible toll for such folly.  You’d think Americans would have learned something from that history. Sadly however, looking at the support the Democrat party maintains – and make no mistake, the Democrat party of today is a modern incarnation of Marx’s theory – many apparently haven’t.