There’s an odd and unbecoming silence, like that of Sherlock Holmes’ dog who didn’t bark, among Colorado Republicans these days about our own party’s president, Donald Trump.
Amid all the desperate attacks on Trump from the left and all the promise of his anti-left agenda, you don’t hear the right rising to the embattled president's defense — which ensures defeat if we don’t bestir ourselves. Wake up or fold up, people.
At three major events this month where conservatives and the GOP faithful gathered in high spirits, Trump’s name was scarcely mentioned. If was as if there was no difference in whether he or Clinton had won last fall; whether D’s or R’s now controlled the White House; whether Americans’ 2016 mandate for change is fulfilled in 2017 or canceled by a media-progressive lynch mob. Unbelievable.
That lynch mob wants you to believe that President Trump is, at worst, Vladimir Putin’s puppet and, at best, the cause of his own woes: out of his depth; surrounded with hacks and grifters; unsavory, undisciplined, unstable, untrustworthy, unfit for high office. None of it is true. None.
As a member of Richard Nixon’s staff in 1970-73 during Watergate, I saw crooked campaigning and impeachable conduct close up. That’s not remotely what we have here.
What we’re witnessing now is a threatened establishment’s all-out drive to annul the election results and salvage for itself the power we the people voted to strip from them.
Inventing wild charges, pursuing character assassination, abusing investigative powers and intelligence agencies, trashing journalistic ethics — and yes, breaking the law — is all in a day’s work for these self-appointed elites and cynical careerists if that’s what it takes to destroy the elected tribune of American greatness, Donald Trump.
Why is Trump really under fire? It’s not because he and his associates are lawbreakers or racists or fascists or Russian pawns. All that is just flimflam.
No it’s because he convinced a fed-up nation that taking a chance on an outsider in the presidency was their best hope — after years of bipartisan bait and switch by DC insiders — for relief from a stagnant economy, suffocating taxes, ridiculous regulations, unchecked illegal immigration, sucker trade deals, nauseating political correctness, unaffordable health care, failing schools, Marxist campuses, Islamist atrocities, free-riding defense allies, and humiliating no-win wars.
Every item in that litany of a dozen ways in which the status quo insults us as a free people (and it could be longer) has stakeholders and beneficiaries who are deeply invested in it and — sad to say — who like things just the way they are.
The change Donald Trump was elected to drive is a threat to their pride, their power, and their pocketbook. They want him stopped at all costs and removed if possible.
And he will be if you and I and the rest of the silent majority don’t start doing our part — which means break our silence, raise our voices, and let Washington know we meant what we said last November 8 when we rejected Hillary, repudiated the Democrats, and bet the ranch on a Republican maverick named Trump.
Is it a sure bet? Of course not. Finding our way forward in freedom never is, and this bet is riskier than most. But it’s the bet we made and the best bet under the circumstances for this land we love. You can’t unring a bell, and you can’t unelect the Donald, much as the left wants us to.
Whether my unexpressive fellow countrymen on the right, here in Colorado and across the country, are distracted, disspirited, complacent, or feeling buyer’s remorse, I don’t know. I just know we can’t afford passivity at this hour of decision.
It’s make some noise, a lot of it, or witness a bloodless coup that will wound America terribly. We’ve arrived once more, in Reagan’s immortal words, at a time for choosing. How will you choose, neighbor?