I thought this piece by Irwin Steltzer was good. It reflects how I feel:
On international matters Trump is asserting America's interests. An asshole but our asshole.
Domestically he is asserting for the commercial interest of what has always been a commercial republic. In both cases he is promoting Good Things that for many years but particularly the last 8, have been subordinated to other Noble but in the end, questionable goals.
Balanced against this is his driving out the last little bit of fiscal sanity remaining at the Federal level - I suspect an inevitability so long as we are ruled by a massive central state. And so long as the magic money machine continues to work.
And of course he is a crude, boorish, lying, asshole. But I found BHO to be a smooth, manipulative, lying asshole - plus ça change.
The other thing Trump has unwittingly done: By causing an enraged allergic reaction, he has illuminated the corruption at the heart of the Federal Superstate: its self dealing, its partisanship, its towering self regard and most of all, its abuse of the rules that it holds the rest of us to.
It still shocks me that after 8 years anyone could have argued that the Obama administration was the most ethical and scandal free ever. Or that anyone thought putting the Clintons back in power would be anything but a chaotic catastrophe. At least by being a different kind of ugly, Trump has shaken the complacency of Washington to its core. Which is helpful.
But the question is this: If the excesses of Obama and the Clinton's begat Trump, what will Trump's excesses beget? You can't weave a bloated, corrupt super state wildly left and right. It begins to lose structural integrity. Absent an agreed to philosophy to unify the two parties' conflict around, it gives the super state's minions the opportunity to create their own faction to serve their interests that may end up more powerful than both the squabbling national parties combined.
And with a diffuse system filled with ways to block things, this is leading to chaos and stagnation that will bleed our nation dry.
Break it up, break it all up. Before it breaks us.
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