Trump throughout his life has been quite successful in dealing with his enemies, and he has had legions of them. However, one enemy has usually been able to defeat Trump regularly, himself.
His Worst Enemy
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
He’s been through hell, but there’s No excuse for this.
Best of hope/healing is to share the same with anyone you know who suffers from TDS…. “No excuse for this.”
For a man that doesn’t drink a post like this puzzling. He is showing signs of Trumptoxication. Not pretty.
Humility is not found in his quiver.
Too bad.
Btw…..
My quiver doesn’t hold many humility arrows either.
To remedy that I call upon Cardinal Merry de Val;
https://www.ourcatholicprayers.com/litany-of-humility.html
Many on the left erupted with glee at the murder of Charlie Kirk. Now some on the right including Trump being nasty about the death of Rob Reiner and his wife. We need to remember and internalize what was written so long ago:
Meditations 6:6
Marcus Aurelius
Ἄριστος τρόπος τοῦ ἀμύνεσθαι τὸ μὴ ἐξομοιοῦσθαι.
The best way of avenging yourself is not to become likewise.
If it were me I would have said just this: “I am greatly saddened by the tragic deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife. His acting and movie credits speak for themselves and brought joy to many. That they died at the hands of their own son is yet more evidence of the devastation the drug trade has wreaked on our country. May they rest in peace” and left it at that. No need to bring up his politics.
Now there are some on other conservative forums (*cough* Instapundit *cough*) who insist that there is nothing wrong with conservatives figuratively dancing on the Reiners’ grave because “he wanted people like us dead”. And from his frequent rants about Trump and MAGA, it sounded that way. However, it’s not uncommon for people to hate faceless groups of people in an abstract sense (“liberals”, “MAGA”, Blacks, Whites, Jews, Muslims, gays/lesbians, etc.) without necessarily being hostile toward individual members of those groups. Note that at the time of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Reiner made very gracious public statements and praised Erica Kirk for her statements at the memorial service.
It is a paradox that one of The Screwtape Letters addresses, in which Screwtape and Wormwood discuss whether they should encourage Wormwood’s “patient”, a young man living in England during the Blitz, to hate the Germans. Screwtape, surprisingly, says no because “the results of this sort of hatred are disappointing”, and in this respect the English “are the most deplorable milk-sops…. the kind who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door.”
A couple thoughts. So I’ve seen the media erupting over this and have seen multiple stories in local and national news. In all cases they are comparing it to Trump and Conservatives’ condemnation of those who ‘criticized’ Kirk after his murder. First, all who rushed out to trash Kirk immediately did nothing other than what Trump did here. You then had people say Kirk deserved to be murdered, they were glad he was murdered, he should have been murdered, and on and on. Those were the ones who lost their positions, often professional positions, for saying their political opponents should die. A big difference between either Trump or those who merely trashed Kirk after his murder.
Second, those who point out that obviously if they found a civilization on Mars, Trump would make it all about himself. But is that worse than those who saw a man murdered and immediately made it all about their politics? We all wish Trump would have higher standards, but it’s one thing to want higher standards from our leaders, it’s another to want higher standards from our leaders so we don’t have to have them ourselves.
Yes, this was completely unnecessary. Always take the high road.
If you have a clear understanding of what the high road is. What’s called the ‘high road’ is often simply an exercise in vapidity.
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Trump’s Id is too much on display. Unfortunately, one’s vices and virtues are commonly symbiotic.
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About Kirk, in the mixed forum in which I participate, I didn’t encounter anyone ‘celebrating’ his murder. I did encounter from every single blue participant the same mentality: that Mr. Kirk was asking for it for having the audacity to take exception to regime ideology on college campuses. (Street-level Democrats refer to dissent such as uttered by CK as ‘hate’).
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In September of 2020, an obituary appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The obituary runs on for about 900 words, so I’m guessing it was written by the subject’s daughter or daughter-in-law. It included this passage: Though the list of things AJ did not care for was far shorter it was no less absolute. This list included broccoli, for which her father’s overabundant WWII Victory Garden claims responsibility; committee meetings … and Donald Trump, whom she loathed with an active and fiery passion until the day she died. No clue why you would put that in an obituary. Also no clue why during your last years on this Earth you would devote rent-free space in your head to ‘loathing’ with an ‘active and fiery passion’ a man completely unknown to you before you reached age 50 and who before you reached age 80 was simply a part of the celebrity and business media chatter to which you pay scant attention. (The subject’s daughter served a misbegotten term as Mayor of Minneapolis). This is the world we live in today.
Art, the ones who celebrated or rejoiced or in other ways made it clear they were happy Kirk was murdered were typically the ones who lost their positions. There were legions of people who rushed out the day Kirk was murdered to hash and trash him over his views and beliefs. Those usually weren’t the ones who got in trouble, though that isn’t much different than what Trump did, other than Trump doing it in his usual ‘Trump as the center of all things’ take on things. But it was the ones who did make it clear they were happy Kirk was murdered, or worse, who typically lost their positions, and often positions that were professional – medical, law, government, education.
An ugly display.
However, we are shocked by it because conservatives expect their leaders to be (or try to be) morally good. The left merely expects their leaders to “get results.”
As such, we are (correctly) dismayed when our chosen leaders stray off into the rumble strips. The lefty politicians go off road so often that no one is at all shocked until they plow through a house.
Trump has many excellent ideas, although he is very clumsy and unduly confrontational in implementing them. Apart from that, even his candid supporters must admit that he is an uncouth thug with a very ugly personal life.