IE Business Daily Business news for the Inland Empire.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, Republican Primary voters have spoken. Barring some disastrous, last-minute attempt to steal the Republican nomination at the convention, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for President.
As unpredictable as it has been, with seventeen different Republican candidates including Governors, Senators, a brain surgeon, and a successful businesswoman, the guy nobody in Washington took seriously is going to be the Republican standard bearer. Never in recent history has a candidate for President faced so much criticism or unadulterated viciousness by members of his own party, to include former failed Republican Presidential nominees (who usually have the common sense to keep their mouths shut.)
Trump faced all of that, and a spirited, all-out effort by his last real opponent, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and was still riding polls at over 50 percent of Republican voters in the contested primary nationally. After the Indiana primary, where Cruz desperately needed to win and came up short by double digits, the lamentations from lobbyists, Washington insiders, and some political pundits has been loud and ongoing.
“Principles” they say, we have to stick to our principles! The principles of free trade that have cost Middle America millions of jobs and destroyed this country’s once unmatchable manufacturing capacity? The principles that have amassed a $20 Trillion (yes that is trillion with a “T”) national debt that we will leave to our children, while having accomplished absolutely nothing with those dollars that were frittered away on social programs, failed international wars, and phony green energy projects?
Is it those Principles that have turned a world leader in energy into a net importer of energy from third world dictators and brutal regimes from around the world or the principles that created 94 million working age Americans that are no longer in the work force? Or, is it those principles that have allowed 12 million people to ignore our immigration laws and drive down wages for young, minority and working class Americans, while millions of legal immigrants have been allowed into the country to take good paying jobs while those 94 million unemployed Americans sit at home?
When House Speaker Paul Ryan refers to Republican “principles,” is it those principles he will be speaking about? Or the fact that healthcare costs under Obamacare continue to rise while access to healthcare is diminishing? Or is Ryan referring to the principles that have increased the Federal budget and consolidated federal power in an out-of-control executive branch while Ryan and Republicans fully fund all of the requests of President Obama?
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so disgustingly sad and damaging to our country.
Donald Trump, for all his flaws, is the one candidate that has united America against a common foe, the Washington establishment of both parties embodied by the ultimate insider patrician, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Like it or not, the party that gave us Mitt Romney and John McCain has revolted. The same Republican Party apparatus that originally rejected, and then fought tooth and nail against Ronald Reagan was again defeated. When the primary elections are over, Donald Trump will have received a record number of votes in the Republican Primary, which had 17 candidates at one time. Like him or not, he has energized people and caused record turnouts.
While the Inland Empire has been stuck with local radio talking heads like Ben Shapiro and Elisha Krauss yammering away at Trump and his supporters, average folks are probably tuning back into their favorite rock stations on the way to work. Some so-called conservatives, far too comfortable with their own tiny fiefdoms, are railing away in the IE, whining on social media about supporting the libertarian candidate and gnashing their teeth that “Trump doesn’t share our Republican principles.”
Perhaps it is time for “Republicans” to rediscover just what those “principles” are that they are supposedly referring too?
