How Would YOU Feel?

Now let’s add this up….

You run for your party’s nomination and there are at least a dozen others competing with you.  Every one of the other candidates seems to have you in their bull’s eye, and yet you somehow prevail in the contest to win the nomination.

The media in its entirety and the public at large give you essentially no chance whatsoever to win the election.  Pure and simple, you are a novelty.  You are facing an iconic candidate from the other party who literally has more money than she can spend on the campaign, essentially has the mainstream media as part and parcel of her campaign organization, and is wired into the WDC power structure like no other.

As Election Day approaches and the campaign winds down, it is a foregone conclusion that you will be losing.  You, yourself, have no real expectation that you will prevail.   But lo and behold, Election Day comes and goes and you are elected President.  The nation is stunned.

The party that you represent is not quite sure what to do with you.  You were not supposed to win their nomination and you were not supposed to win the election.  Very, very few of them have supported your campaign and none of them have lined up to be advisors, members of your new Administration, or just generally helpful in navigating this transition from complete political outsider to ultimate political insider.  The other party has been scheming to defeat you for months, the outgoing Administration has been coordinating  in this scheming with the opposition party, and your own party is trying to figure out how to cover their own behind because of the colossal failure they are certain you will be.

Abandoned by your own party and mocked by the opposing party and the mainstream media, you come out of the starting gate with your new Administration stumbling, bumbling, and giving no one any confidence that you have any idea what you have gotten yourself into.  Your arrogance and bluster, perhaps a self defense mechanism or perhaps just a symptom of over-confidence, makes you a delicious target for your critics.

The American people are put off by your chaotic approach to government management, but somehow and someway find your outsider approach to the Presidency refreshing.  Because of this, you get the benefit of a doubt for your shaky start.  But as your Administration forms up and your nominations are filed, there are signs that forces are aligning against you.  Your nominations languish in a Senate that is controlled by your party.  Your executive decisions are met with resistance at best or flat out ignored at worst.  As you attempt to implement the policies you campaigned on, your departmental and agency prerogatives are stymied by rogue liberal judges intent on legislating from the bench.

In spite of all the hurdles placed before you from all sides and above, you somehow manage to obtain a national focus on tax reform and it is miraculously passed by Congress.  Just as you predicted, and quite contrary to your critic’s claims, your tax reform breaks the logjam of a pent-up economy and suddenly…business is booming.  GDP numbers that seemed laughable months ago are now a reality.  Unemployment numbers reach historic lows, job opportunities are on the rise, and we finally and thankfully see real wages begin to grow.  There is basically a job (or jobs) for anyone seeking employment.

Much like your domestic economic policies, your foreign policy initiatives and ideals are met with ridicule.  But, and again, like your tax reform, your no-nonsense approach to foreign affairs meets with remarkably favorable, if turbulent, results.  At least for the time being, your approach to global matters appears to be restoring the United States to a position of strength, influence, and grudging respect in the world.

Your nakedly businesslike approach to international trade is met with cries of pending disaster and snickering.  Just as in economic and foreign matters, your new approach to world trade appears to be meeting with success and breaking down decades-old barriers that many thought were totally ingrained in the global system.  The jury is still out on the success of your approach, but you have certainly earned the opportunity to take a shot with this new effort.  Only time will tell if all those soybeans that were headed to China will now flow instead to our European friends.

Now after you have risen above all of this mockery, disdain, and public ridicule to prove not only that you are up to the job as President but have succeeded beyond even your own expectations, you discover that something hinky has been going on behind the scenes of your government.  An alarming number of patronage appointees from the prior administration have burrowed into their departments and agencies and are exploiting their positions in opposition to your initiatives.

The Attorney General that you appointed with high hopes of restoring order and stability to a dubiously-operating DOJ is out to lunch.  He shocks everyone by recusing himself from the centerpiece charge of the opposition party questioning your legitimacy in office…collusion with the Russians in your campaign for President.   Even worse than this, he hands power and control of this questionable effort to a previous administration holdover that was in bed with many of the characters that have been your harshest critics and most active political opponents.  This new man in charge immediately washes his hands of the whole affair and instead puts one of his legal peers from the prior administration in charge.  Oh, and by the way, this new guy is accountable to no one, has no time limit, and possesses an unlimited budget.  This new chief immediately assembles a team of investigative lawyers for this effort that is basically composed of long-time activists, ideologues, and critics from the opposition party.

Now after this dream team of opposition begins turning over every rock that you, or your friends, have ever stepped over; they also begin expanding their operation to basically look at anything and everything that anyone who you ever knew or did business with ever did.  They even conduct unannounced, break of dawn raids on their homes with armed personnel.  It also becomes very obvious that this team of crack investigators, the ones who are clearly of a different political bent than you, are being enthusiastically cheered on every…step…of…the…way by the mainstream media.

While this constant drumbeat of special counsel business seeps into every facet of your new Administration and infects every single policy initiative you come up with, the Investigator General of the DOJ issues a report that discloses…what???...that the previous administration, and some of its holdovers in the DOJ, had begun meddling into your political and personal affairs even before you were elected President.  And of course, that effort is now running full blast a year and a half into your new Administration.

As the onion begins to unwrap, it becomes increasingly clear that the prior administration’s DOJ had been up to some pretty shady monkey business with their investigation into your affairs.  They likely planted, or attempted to plant, informants into your Presidential campaign and even used the FISA program, a program designed to prevent terrorism, to surveille some of your campaign personnel.  Imagine that…while the whole country is obsessed with the unsubstantiated tale of you colluding with the Russians to win the White House, there is very real evidence that your Presidential opponent actually did collude with the Russians.  And on top of that, the efforts by the Russians (whoever they were) to meddle in our 2016 elections were bipartisan in nature, beneficiaries of paltry funding, and operated at the effectiveness level of junior high school political students.  The 2016 elections were rigged, but they were rigged against your opponent’s primary opponent and YOU.   You were outspent by multiples, you were spied upon by the opposition party, you were constantly besieged by the press, and even your own party never really took you seriously.   The Administration of the prior president literally weaponized the Department of Justice for political purposes in an attempt to predetermine the next President of the United States.  This bunch of scoundrels make Nixon and his clown club of burglars look amateurish at best. 

As a side note…

…there is of course the fact that the prior Administration, through the hands of the President, both publicly and privately meddled in Israeli elections.  No doubt, prior Administrations of both parties have done the same.  Election meddling is nothing new; stirring up stuff that helps create chaos for opponent governments is nothing new. What is new is how this is done.  Ultimately, the obligation to preserve the integrity of our elections is OUR responsibility; and in America, OUR means local government, the states and the counties.  We need to be very careful that we do not overreact to this Russian election meddling affair and cede too much authority to our central government in WDC for election administration.  If history has taught us anything at all, it is that the closer government is located to the people; the more transparent it is.  Based on all the corruption we have seen in our federal government over the last two or three decades, who in their right mind would want to place our election process in their greedy, power-hungry, self-serving hands?  Of course, there must be broad federal laws for elections that insure some degree of uniformity, fairness, and validity.  And the federal government can also provide resources not available at the local levels in areas such as cyber security and analytics.  But the “hands on” administration of elections should absolutely remain the domain of the states and the counties.

Back to the issue at hand…

So here you are, one and a half years into your first term as President.  You have an impressive list of accomplishments to your credit.  You have an ambitious list of policy initiatives that you are pursuing.  You have a beautiful woman as First Lady who exemplifies the terms dignity and grace and your children are actively working to further positive directions for your new Administration.  In spite of a dysfunctional Congress that is controlled by your own party, you have managed to achieve several legislative wins.  You have placed a supremely-qualified nominee on the SCOTUS and are on the verge of following that one up with an equally-impressive nominee.  In spite of all this, all you ever hear is the…whining, bitching, and moaning of the opposition party and their cheerleaders in the mainstream media.  You can do nothing right.  Everything, every…single…thing that you do is openly and aggressively challenged with the pre-drawn conclusion that it is stupid, corrupted, or illegal.  There are still a significant number in your own party who openly oppose your policies and the hysterical and irrational level of the opposition party resistance to your presidency is unprecedented. 

Now comes the cherry on top of the soda.  You find out that your fix-it attorney has been secretly recording your conversations.  Not only that, but he has given these secretly recorded, private and privileged conversations to your harshest media critic; who has joyously put them immediately on cable news for public consumption.   We do not all have fix-it attorneys, but who amongst us would like to have our most private and privileged conversations publicly aired?  We are not all devils, but we are certainly not all saints.  And if the privacy between an individual and their attorney is open game for exploitation, what remains that is sacred?

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If this was your life and career, do you think that you might be just a little bit frustrated?  Do you think that you might be a little peeved at various people who don’t seem to understand fully what you have had to deal with since you came into office?  Do you think that on occasion, you might misspeak or say (or tweet) something in the heat of the moment that you later regret?  Do you think that you probably realize (somewhere deep inside yourself) that despite your best efforts to do your job and tune out the static, you find yourself sinking and sliding into the mud pit with your irrational critics and hitting back on their terms ever time they swing at you?  And most important of all, do you find yourself dwelling on that old saying that you increasingly find applicable to your personal situation…the one that goes “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”?   I would venture to say that you would not have to look very far to find sufficient motivation to do the job the way you think it needs to be done; all the so-called experts and critics be damned.