How many times will conservatives need to reiterate that Trump won and deserves a deferential Congress? Are you listening, Mitch McConnell?
Now that we’ve reached December and the Thanksgiving holiday is in the rearview mirror,
conservatives and Republicans are gearing up for the final weeks before president-elect Donald J. Trump makes his way to the capital to take his oath of office. Again.
As a side note, will Trump ride in the same limousine with senile Joe Biden and Dr. Jill that day? Won’t that be awkward? Or are senile Joe and Trump now buddies after their two-hour White House meeting a few weeks ago?
Apart from the entourage at the big marble building on January 20 will be sitting members of Congress, most of whom will already be in place up near the dais, listening to the martial music and basking in the pomp and ceremony of the official festivities. Hundreds of thousands of gleeful Trump backers will witness the program from the viewing areas. It will be grand.
After the traditional inaugural lunch, Trump will head for the Oval Office to begin the task of signing a prepared stack of executive orders, so many that his signing hand will probably get sore. Americans know that Trump seeks to keep his promises. He didn’t just do the campaign work so he could ride around in cool limos and chat with the pilots aboard Air Force One.
The most perplexing mystery, over a month out from the big day, is will Congress help Trump do the things he promised to do, or assume supremacy they don’t rightfully possess and gum up the machine like they did the last time Trump was president? Some/many of the same static barriers are in place. What will their mood be?
In an article titled “Mitch McConnell Did Not Win a Mandate”, the irreplaceable Melissa Mackenzie wrote at The American Spectator recently:
“Heads should roll. Donald Trump and his team need to be selective about this. Choose a couple of utterly corrupt bureaucrats, prosecute them, and send them to prison. Anthony Fauci is a good start. Maybe Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkis. (That Lois Lerner is pulling a plum retirement still galls.) Just a couple. A warning needs to be sent. Otherwise, all energy needs to go to dismantling the levers of power so that it doesn’t matter who is in charge, they cannot do the sort of damage that’s been done again.
“This is what Americans want. They don’t want Mitch McConnell and his clever behind-the-scenes manipulation. They don’t want fat, entitled Senators scheming to undercut the man they elected.”
As would be expected from her, Mackenzie presents a solid case for why Mitch McConnell, in his new unofficial position as regular senator – downgraded from Republican leader for the last hundred years or something like that – should take a dose of realism and keep his bespectacled nose out of the agenda planning for the MAGA nation and stay out of the way of Trump’s governance.
All of the usual arguments for maintaining an “independent” senate/Congress were thrown out the window by the magnitude of Trump’s 2024 election victory. Yeah, the Republicans took the majority in this friendliest of all electoral years (because of the favorable map), but they wouldn’t be there without Trump.
There’s been surprisingly little arrogant “Trump doesn’t have coattails” talk this time around. Republicans have 53 seats and if it weren’t for Trump dragging several victorious senators over the finish line (Pennsylvania, anyone?), there’s a solid chance they’d still be licking Chucky Schumer’s boots for charitable terms in some Democrat big government legislation. Needless to say, if it weren’t for Trump, the new president would have little chance of getting his nominees confirmed. And forget his judicial appointments, etc.
Mackenzie was right on – Trump won; he earned it. Trump blanketed the swing states (and some others, too) like the new fallen snow on the earth weeks before Christmas. The candidate was tireless, outperforming men half his age. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns were remarkable, but 2024 was legendary. Cackling Kamala and senile Joe and Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrat surrogates couldn’t keep up.
Trump’s MAGA agenda and “Make America Great Again” slogan illustrate what Americans want. As much as his legions of followers love Trump, there were still likely a lot of people who proverbially held their nose to vote for him. Trump’s personality isn’t for everyone, but his past success and take-no-prisoners attitude towards making government work was too attractive to pass up.
I’ve posed the question before: is there another Republican politician who could’ve done what Trump did? Nikki Haley? Ron DeSantis? Some unnamed Republican that the pundits were excited about? What was Karl Rove’s choice again? Is Mitt Romney enjoying the holidays knowing he’s going back to Utah (or wherever he lives) for the balance of his days?
There’s too much at stake here for conservatives to tolerate the duplicity and sneering disobedience of Mitch McConnell (or John Thune… same thing) or other lone senators from one state to believe they have the power and authority to deny the totality of America’s citizens what they voted for.
One senate vote could make all the difference between Trump implementing his promise list or complete failure, a la 2017 and beyond. In her piece, Mackenzie detailed how McConnell and John McCain combined to shoot down Trump’s push to repeal the “old” Obamacare and replace it with something that would not only work, it wouldn’t bankrupt the country.
Remember how the terminally ill McCain returned to Congress for one final time to cast his “no” vote on the Republicans’ healthcare reform effort? Well, that’s McCain’s lasting legacy. And his family are now Democrats. And they supported senile Joe Biden just because the two families used to have picnics in the backyard with the Bidens.
Trump is coming back to Washington to take the power away from individual senators. He’ll give the authority to decide their own fates back to the People themselves. The Republican party needs loyalty and discipline like never before. Someone must stand up and put Lisa Murkowski in her place. Susan Collins is from Maine, so she’s kind of on her own.
But Donald Trump should be able to use the mandate he has without interference from self-appointed outcast naysayer senators whose only duty is to “advise” and then “consent”. That’s right, make a speech if you have to, pontificate for all we care about the way things should be, etc. Then cast your vote “yes”. Everyone goes away happy.
To prosecute or not to prosecute? That is the question.
There’s no doubt that one of the reasons why Donald Trump was able to pull off the political comeback of the century was the Democrats’ relentless and unfair witch hunt lawfare prosecutions and trials against him the past few years.
If for nothing else, the Democrats’ obsession with siccing the law on Trump kept his name in the news and made him out to be a sympathetic character for everyone but the most haggish of woke liberal haters who thought Trump was guilty of everything and needed to be held accountable for it – even by being thrown in prison.
There’s a temptation to want to retaliate, and I say go for it, but not at the expense of keeping the nation’s focus on the positive things being accomplished by Trump’s administration and agenda. That’s where the real focus needs to be. Any sensationalized hunting down of Democrats will detract from what Trump was sent to the White House to accomplish.
Where do we want the attention to be directed? All those who are out for blood – no matter how warranted -- should answer the question.
Joe Biden economy
inflation
Biden cognitive decline
gas prices,
Nancy Pelosi
Biden senile
Kamala Harris candidacy
Donald Trump campaign
Harris Trump debates
J.D. Vance
Kamala vice president
Speaker Mike Johnson
Donald Trump assassination
Donald Trump
2024 presidential election
Tim Walz
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