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Official Washington is all aTwitter over a remarkable op-ed published by the New York Times, in which an anonymous individual claiming to be a "senior administration official" tells America, basically, that Mr. Trump is a petulant, incompetent child but that secret heroes like himself (or herself):
...have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations...
Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
You'd think this shy boaster would be lauded for his efforts by the massed chorus of the Left, all of whom have likewise vowed to thwart Donald Trump's agenda by fair means or foul. But no! From, of all places, Esquire began a response with a statement that not only can we wholeheartedly echo, we'd be hard put to top:
Nobody elected you, whoever the hell you are. Nobody elected these other anonymous heroes, either. This isn't the way the presidency is supposed to work... Come out of the cupboards, you boys and girls. None of you are heroes.
Words like "tyranny" get bandied around so constantly these days that it's easy to forget they have an actual meaning. Here's one:
Cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control. [emphasis added]
As even the Left admits, we do not live under a cruel tyranny in the sense of opponents of the government being disappeared into concentration camps. Americans are increasingly discovering that we do live in an arbitrary one: consider the dogged investigations into anyone around President Trump who may have set a foot wrong, vs. the gross corruption and national-security malfeasance for which the Clintons will never answer in court. It's plain as day that the same rules don't apply to everyone.
That makes them arbitrary, but by no means random: it's easily predictable that Democrats will never be questioned for the same acts that Republicans, and especially conservatives, get pilloried for. This rank bias extends across the entire top of our nation, from government through education, big business, and of course the mainstream media.
In large part, that is why Donald Trump was elected President: he alone has the guts to defy the mavens of political correctness, the brashness to blast his opinions through the fog of interference, and the wealth to do so without fear of the inevitable retaliation. In a very real way, he does what millions of Americans only wish they could.
Yet we see that, even with him as President, the vast machinery of the bureaucracy continues to grind in the opposite direction from the one in which he was elected to drive us.
Now, you may disagree with him. You may consider him a hopelessly ignorant vulgarian, a retrograde cisgender bigot, an authoritarian nationalist, or any suitable combination of derogatory or imaginary nouns and adjectives.
There are two obvious facts, though, that no one can deny:
1. Mr. Trump was legitimately elected through a vote of American citizens, and
2. He ran on a platform of doing exactly what he is actually doing.
You can hate those truths for being the reality! But in so doing, you're hating the views of at least half the American people, which, as we know all too well, the Left - and large chunks of establishment Republicans - does. Which, once again, is why Mr. Trump was elected.
By secretly substituting their own personal preferences for the
democratically expressed decision of the American people, these
"whistleblowers" and leakers are trying to place themselves in an
undeserved role of
ruler. To them, it doesn't matter what the elected President
wants or what the voters want; what needs to happen is what they
think is best - and they're going to ensure that it does.
The anonymous writer of this Times
article has done what President Trump alone could not do: he has once
and for all proven that, yes, there really is a Fifth Column of "swamp
creatures" who expect to rule this country regardless of the voters
or
their wishes. If there was any doubt before, there can be none
now - the proof is right there in black and white, in the Newspaper of
Record.
Do they imagine that Americans don't realize this? Donald Trump was elected in a last, desperate attempt to rid us of the tyranny of unelected, elitist, unresponsive, arrogant government apparatchiks who are wholly dedicated to doing what we don't want them to do - indeed, to, as Barack Obama so memorably put it, "fundamentally transform" a country that most of us pretty well liked the way it was. What gives them the right?
Nothing - but right or not, it may very well turn out that they have the effective power to thwart the democratically expressed will of the people regardless of who's in office, which makes them tyrants by (secondary) definition.
We've danced around this issue many times, but the election of Donald Trump was clearly intended by the voters to send our elites of both parts an unmistakable message: Get lost! And they won't.
Well, if they won't leave quietly in deference to the ballot box, they are making it inevitable that more forceful measures will be tried. They would do better to listen to their matinee idol, John F. Kennedy:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
That is why we got Mr. Trump. The ruling elites of both parties refused to take our concerns seriously, so we revolted at the ballot box. From their point of view, Mr. Trump is an unacceptable nonconformist, so they're laboring to conform him to their way of doing things by means legal and illegal. Let's hope that they let him address our concerns, or it'll be "Ballots or bullets, take your pick."