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An elegy for Donald Trump
By Kent R. Kroeger (November 6, 2020)
I am a Bernie Sanders-supporting registered Democrat (check the voter databases in Iowa and New Jersey); yet, I never hated Donald Trump, even as everyone around me did. My wife and I stopped talking politics on the morning of November 9, 2016 and my mother-in-law to this day only refers to him as “Number 45” or “Turdface.”
But I see beyond his fake tan and broken syntax and recognize some of the good things Trump did over the past four years: He reset some bad trade agreements. Told our European allies it was time they chipped in their share for mutual defense. Oversaw an unprecedented surge in small business growth. And, most importantly, helped expose the falsehood of the Washington, D.C. trope that large, ceaseless federal budget deficits are inflationary and need to be dealt with through deep cuts in entitlement and discretionary spending. If there is one thing Donald Trump is good at, it is running up debt and still being rich.
Finally, I always knew Trump wasn’t a Russian tool (as that whole three-year, media-fueled hullabaloo was the Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘fake news’). The Washington establishment wanted to discredit Trump from the moment he was elected and the Russiagate story was the perfect pulp fiction to do it.
