Meltdown

Dear political class: A man you loathe broke your rules and beat you, and you're not handling it well

At some point we have to get past this. At some point, Donald Trump and his team are going to get down to the business of governing, and whether they like it or not, the Beltway crowd will have no choice but to discuss the new system in health care, or the budget, or our operations against ISIS, or energy policy. They won’t want to. They only want to carp about how their world is crashing down around them and they don’t like it. But most of the country is already wildly disinterested in this melodrama, and there’s going to come a point when even the most self-absorbed have to acknowledge that no one cares anymore about their problems.

The political class won’t make the transition easily, though. They can’t believe what’s happened to them, and like a 16-year-old who’s just been jilted for the first time, they’re acting out as if their lives are over. It’s tough to be them. The political class has long operated under one very large assumption: No one can really function in Washington without following their rules. No exceptions. Oh, you may advocate some policies they don’t like, and you might even get elected advocating those policies. But certain things are non-negotiable. Everyone has to respect the traditions of the town. Everyone has to accept that certain precedents are set in hard and can never be changed for any reason. Everyone has to refrain from expressing themselves except through established and approved channels. Oh, and if anyone is caught having violated these rules, the only option available is to grovel and beg forgiveness. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be restored. You may not be. But you’ll have no hope whatsoever if you don’t. These are the rules. Everyone has to play by them. No exceptions. And along comes Donald Trump. At first he appears to be a complete buffoon because he seems not to know the rules, or seems incapable of mastering them. He is snickered at, mocked, and yet his every word and every move are covered relentlessly, if only because he came off as such a complete spectacle. Time and again Trump would say something, or tweet something, or do something . . . and the political class would launch into a conniption fit, complete with its absolute and total assurance that Trump had just signed his own death warrant.

Surely, no one could break the rules this many times and survive to live another day. The media would cover his every supposed misstep with the absolute assurance that once the public knew what he had done, they would run from him en masse. Look! He did this! No one can do this! He doesn’t know that you can’t do this! Voters . . . you know what to do! And the voters did know what to do. They elected him president. And the political class reacted as if their beloved puppy had just been taken away. And boy, have they reacted. You’ve got members of Congress refusing to attend the inaugural, while entertainers are pressured not to show up and perform. When people are asked to meet with Trump, and they do, they catch heat for daring to sit down with the man. Black Lives Matter leader hit with restraining order after threatening LA police official This is not because Trump is going to implement conservative policies, although his cabinet choices and his early pronouncements suggest that he will. The left always goes bonkers over that when it happens, but we’ve seen those battles before and we’ll see them again. Our last three Republican presidents drew their ire, but for the most part they adopted the ways of Washington and were content to operate within them, figuring there was no sense upsetting the established order if they could mollify it and still govern.

Trump does all the things no one is supposed to do. He tells journalists their organizaitons are garbage. He gives as good as he gets with critics, and commits the cardinal sin of “punching down” as it were. He calls out those in the government who are failing to do their jobs as they should, knowing full well that they won’t appreciate it but believing it’s more important to hold them accountable before the public. And the more he does this, the more he proves the political class can’t touch him for it. They only ever really had power as long as people feared them, and Trump doesn’t. There’s not a damn thing they can do, and he knows it, and they’re apoplectic about it. They’d better figure things out, and fast. The first thing they need to do is calm down. The rest of the world doesn’t care that they’re upset, and isn’t going to sit around for ever listening to their temper tantrum. The next thing they have to do is realize, maybe for the first time in their lives, that the political institutions they’re a part of exist to serve the nation - not the other way around. A servant has a humble heart. These people think the world revolves around them. If they can’t let go of that mindset, they’re not going to make it in Trump’s Washington. But if they’re determined to spend their days trying to take Trump down, they’re going to turn Washington into the very thing they claim Trump is making it. Third, they have realize that whether they like the new president or not, he’s going to rise and fall on his policy decisions. If they don’t want a part in the policy debate, that’s up to them, but it’s their only chance to remain relevant. Finally, and I know this is going to be very difficult for them to accept, they have to recognize that Trump is a very smart guy - not at all what they’ve made him out to be. If they continue to treat him as though he’s a bumpkin, he’s going to keep p’owning them. I really don’t give a crap about any of these people, and to be honest I’m thoroughly enjoying their plight. But it will be better for the country if at least some of them get a grip. The country’s got a direction whether they like it or not. At some point, mature people deal with reality. Just how many of those do we have in Washington? We’re about to find out. Dan's new novel, BACKSTOP, is a story of spiritual warfare and baseball. Download it from Amazon here



Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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