Will Trump Be Overthrown?

I know what I am supposed to think.

Obama had class. Trump is a fascist nut. Brexit was stupid. And Merkel is a homophobe for being personally opposed to gay marriage. But sue me - because I don't agree with any of these statements.

I guess I have always had a predilection for thinking about things myself. And to my surprise, I find myself swimming against the current on all of these issues. I liked Obama when he was elected - but, wow, so much hype, so little substance. I think if I were British I would also not want Belgians running my day-to-day life. And I personally don't find anything offensive about liberal heroine, Angela Merkel, saying that she believes in the traditional view of marriage.

And perhaps most shocking of all, I find myself sympathetic to an orange, tasteless, reality TV star.

Yes, the man is crude, offensive, and narcissistic. But, honestly, who cares? George W Bush to me seems like terrific company. I can imagine having a pleasant chat with Bill Clinton or even Jacob Zuma. Yet I find the politics of all three to be pretty abhorrent.

When the rubber hits the road, I think the leaders in charge of the bureaucracies of major nations need to make good policy decisions, not be our global therapists.

In fact, I find Trump's flaws helpful - they should disabuse us of the notion that political leaders require some kind of religious gravitas, when all they have ultimately achieved is success in a grubby popularity contest known as elections. (Just another reason to preserve a monarchy...)

So why do I have a soft spot for Trump the politician?

First of all, he doesn't put every statement he makes through an army of consultants. You can follow his Twitter feed and actually find out something - even if that something is mocking a celebrity's bad face-lift - which is really not that big of a deal, and, no, it is not beneath the dignity of his office, because the office of an elected official doesn't have much dignity. Usually, quite the opposite. (After all, Trump's predecessor, Harry Truman, managed to incinerate two Japanese cities with atomic bombs and still maintains a 'presidential' legacy to this day.)

This is not just to say he is good entertainment. Rather, I think political correctness is one of the scourges of our times, and that Trump does us all a service by bringing it to the surface. And it was his understanding of this that ultimately won him the election.

One of his most visceral critics in the US is a famous blogger by the name of Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is perhaps the most influential blogger of all time, having had the single biggest impact amongst all writers in bringing gay marriage to the mainstream in the US. But as a gay, anti-Trump journalist, even he is appalled at some of the shenanigans of the left-wing, so-called 'antifa' Resistance.

Citing the celebrities musing out loud about killing Trump (Johnny Depp, for one), the assassination of a Trump-like Caesar at a Shakespeare festival, and the media's fixation on "a Russian-collusion fantasy that may eventually be revealed as a vegan nothingburger", Sullivan notes that liberal intolerance simply plays into Trump's hands.

America is now a place where "a lesbian group whose Dyke March in Chicago banned a rainbow flag with the Star of David on it — while hailing Muslim countries where gay people are lucky not to be lynched every day"; a place where "people who have... a visceral reaction to the idea of a [trans-gendered] girl with a [penis] in a high-school girls’ locker room, [are] suddenly hateful bigots"; and a place where an evangelical Christian baker is forced "to write a message on a cake that violates his conscience". And this is the least of it - Sullivan also points out how student mobs regularly chase off speakers who don't tow the politically correct line from their campuses, and even attack them in the process.

Sullivan stuck his neck out for the cause of gay marriage - and even he reckons his side has lost its mind. If he thinks this way, it's really no wonder so many Americans saw voting for Trump as a final desperate attempt to keep Orwellian group-think out of their lives.

Trump and the Pope - why can't they just get along?

Second, Trump is a bulwark against globalisation. Despite not seeing eye to eye with Trump, the Pope actually shares a lot of common ground with him. Francis has decried what he calls the new colonialism of ideology - the forcing of all peripheral countries to adopt postmodern western values in exchange for participation in the global economy.

Trump laughs this off by appointing a conservative guy like Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, by denying any use of US international aid in the cause of abortions, and by shredding the Obama executive order to allow high school students to use whichever bathroom takes their fancy on a given day. How many western leaders are willing to make a stand against the zeitgeist? I could literally predict Obama's take on any issue. Trump at least gives the impression of independent thought.

We'll always have Paris. Or not.

Thirdly, I loved how he called the world of the elites' bluff by pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The shock! The horror! How many of us even know what the Paris Climate Agreement says? Of course nobody has actually read it! But if you did, you would realise there is a reason major pollutant countries like India and China signed on.

Basically, the agreement states that each country can set their own emission reduction goals for themselves. Analysts say China's goals are actually lower than what their reduction in CO2 emissions would be if they did nothing (because of tech innovation etc.). In other words, the Agreement actually gives them leeway to pollute more than they would have done!

So why do western nations sign on then? The answer is that the Agreement becomes a political cudgel in domestic politics - a way of Millenials getting the upper-hand over miners, factory workers, and other rubes in their own countries. And it works - proven by the fact that everybody loves the Paris Agreement without having a clue what it actually says.

Trump, JFK, and the Deep State.

Fourth, Trump has some pretty impressive enemies. It was said before shots rang out in Dallas, that you could judge the quality of JFK's tragically shortened presidency by his enemies. Crazy right-wing military folk, Castro, and perhaps even the CIA.

Since Trump's campaign gathered steam, the media and the so-called 'deep state' of the US has literally been out to get him. Trump resides in a district that opposed him in the election by over 90 percent. These are the people who actually run the government: the military, the media, and the world of academics.

There are whispers emanating from the intelligence community that forces are working behind the scenes to bring him down. Like JFK, they don't like the fact that he sounds pretty peaceful toward Russia. They don't like his talk of 'America First' rather than foreign interventionism, ala Bush, Obama, Clinton. He is not one of them, just like an Irish Catholic, son of a bootlegger, McCarthy ally, JFK, was not one of them.

The startling thing is nobody seems to notice that Trump is actually 100 percent correct when he speaks of being the victim of a witch-hunt. The FBI has been investigating these so-called Russian links for a year now, hanging a cloud over his presidency, and yet the only things they have turned up are obviously false reports about prostitutes urinating in Moscow and other outlandish rubbish.

I am mystified by the fact that nobody seems to care that CNN producers have been caught off-air literally admitting to making stuff up about him - the Russian story "could be bullshit... it's mostly bullshit right now." Or that it is now common knowledge that Obama officials illegally leaked classified info to damage Trump's national security team.

In a certain sense, Trump IS the Paris Climate Agreement - something not to be rationally assessed, but swung as a kind of virtue-signalling totem.

But I'm over thirty years old now. According to the narrator of Fitzgerald's 'Great Gatsby', that's five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour. I can't participate in the insane group-think that has reduced political discourse to a weird moralistic sludge, even if that makes me a persona non grata on Facebook.

Trump is a big tooth-ache for the current global ruling class - and thus I sort of respect the guy.

This might get him assassinated, or toppled in a bloodless scandal... Hopefully neither, because sometimes a tooth-ache is necessary to get rid of the rot.