Not one of Donald Trump's supporters has ever assumed that every word that comes out of his mouth is the God's honest truth. They have always known that he is a bloviator, tummler, vaudevillian-in-chief whose stock-in-trade is hyperbole, exaggeration, and plain ol' big whoppers.
They don't care because they look beyond the bombast to the principles that lie beneath - secure borders, control of inflation, free markets, opportunity, energy independence, a muscular foreign policy, and a roll back of the insidious, ridiculous woke programs of the Left.
Of course this man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the streets of New York stretched the truth - of course he inflated his real estate values, but in the give-and-take of the market, buyer and seller sussing each other out and agreeing on a price.
Of course he exaggerates, howls, contests, and shouts 'foul'. Nothing less should be expected from a man who made his millions in a world of intimidation, bluster, and closely-held cards.
Of course Trump, as a son of Hollywood and Las Vegas, a performer, vaudevillian, and big tent revivalist in the old American tradition, doesn’t mean what he says. He says what he means. His is a political circus act with a semiotic foundation. Crazy as a fox and as smart as a whip, he speaks a firestorm but is as rational – more rational in fact – than his opponents who speak in platitudes, shopworn nostrums, and old-fashioned appeals to righteousness.
His principles are clear, unmistakably conservative, and unchanging. His braggadocio, machismo, vaudevillian and Catskills hilarity are just for show. He has always played fast and loose, a survivor in the bloodiest arena ever, New York real estate. Who better to deal with Putin, Xi, Kim, and the ayatollahs?
Standing up to them will not be a matter of friendly negotiation and agreeable compromise, but a defiantly adamant, unshakeable posture of strength and imperturbability; and his take-no-prisoners approach to his Democratic opponents who have tried to string him up, tar and feather him, run him out of town on a rail, castrate him, and toss him in the garbage, is not only expected but looked forward to. Lessons must be learned.
The Left for the ten years that Trump has been on the world stage has not only vilified him, but proclaimed their own received wisdom. Gender alteration, income redistribution, open borders, the sanctity and superiority of the black man, the fungibility of sex, secularization of society, and the glory of Mother Earth are not just adjudicated principles but absolute ones.
There can be no discussion whatsoever that the black man, emerging pure, sentient, aware, and proud from the forests of Africa three centuries ago should be restored to his rightful place atop the human pyramid.
Gender fluidity is not just an option but a given. For millennia Man has labored in a heterosexual gulag, and only now has he been freed to finally and once and for all explore his own personal gender future.
Capitalism is a damned and doomed relic of the Robber Barons of the last century, old predatory, insatiable white men who ran roughshod over the worker, the poor, and the colored. Individualism, a legacy of the Neanderthal shoot-'em-up West is nothing more than an outdated, anti-communitarian idea.
The Earth is not a plaything, a toy to be used once and tossed aside. It is a miracle of magical interrelationships, a sacred thing, a goddess; and its environment, that fragile cloak around her must be protected and preserved. No ignorant, overly-ambitious landlords of her land can be allowed to raise the rent.
All total nonsense of course, part and parcel of the whole idea of received wisdom, an arrogation of right, and assumption of absolute truth. Nothing in life is absolute, all is subject to evolution. Today's values are tomorrow's anathemas. The conservative right understands this - that if there is one irreducible fact in the world it is human nature which can never be denied. Hardwired, it is a matter of ganglia, synapses, strands of DNA, its purpose is survival, propagation, and longevity.
The world in which human beings act out this nature is changeable, mutating every hour; values, principles, convictions change with the direction of the wind. Those who attempt to stop it, to deny evolution, are doomed to failure; and that is precisely what the American progressive Left is trying to do.
The Year Zero, Pol Pot proclaimed as he plunged Cambodia back to the Dark Ages, another political fool trying to deny human nature and the cyclical valuelessness of history. Nietzsche had it right when he said that the expression of pure will was the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world. The Left has never learned that lesson.
So given this philosophical vision, it is not surprising that 'the truth' is finally seen for what it is - a fictional assumption of those with a personal agenda - and that seen within that perspective Trump's distortions, confabulations, wild hyperbole, and excitable claims is quite normal.
There is no more truth in gender assignment than a Henny Youngman joke; as little truth in socialism as in a Grimm's fairy tale; as little salience and relevance to praying at the altar of Mother Earth as tumbling down Alice's rabbit hole. Go ahead and pursue a political agenda. Just don't be so stupid to claim it is forever right.
The Left has never understood this, and has misjudged the intelligence and perceptiveness of the electorate. In fact they derogated, humiliated, scorned, and dismissed the worker, the farmer, the shrimper, the greeter, and the mechanic. How would they know the truth unless told? It is shameless, disreputable, unconscionable arrogance.
The humiliating electoral defeat s incontrovertible hold on truth and reality rejected out of hand is another altogether. It is no wonder that in the aftermath of the election, liberals are a crying, devastated, inconsolable lot. Their very beinto Donald Trump is one thing, to have one's received wisdom, one's absolute conviction of right, one'g was tossed in the gutter like so much street trash. No one comes back from that.
Of course these wounded progressives are trying. The truth is still out there as plain as day, and we must never give up the good fight. La Lucha Continua, they say, hammering on about the renewed plight of the black man, the death of the planet, and the rise of the greedy. It wasn't the fault of the message, they claim, only a few missteps in political judgment.
Bullshit! It was indeed the message that was thrown out, as irrelevant and useless as moldy bread. Liberals can whine and commiserate as much and as long as they want, but they are supernumerary, flotsam and jetsam on the political tide.