Trump Doesn’t Deserve A Pass Because He’s “Pissing off the libs”

I’ve grown up as a Yankees fan. My first big league game was in 1977 at Yankee Stadium. I sat in the right field stands with my Dad, behind Reggie Jackson. I have faint memories of the game as well as vague memories of the Yankees World Series wins in 77 and 78. My first real memories of the Yankees at the World Series was 1981. And they lost. It took another 15 years for the Yankees to make it back to the World Series, and I was at Game 6 in 1996 when they won.

Now, I realize for some people that a team having to go 18 years between World Series wins is not all a big deal. But the Yankees had years between 1988 and 1992 when the teams embarrassingly to watch. They never finished higher than 5th in their division. In 1990 they finished with 95 losses, the most the team suffered since 1912. It was awful watching them play.

What does any of this have to do with Donald Trump? When the Yankees were terrible, I didn’t abandon the team. I was going to stick with them, defend them, and watch them even though they stunk.

When it comes to the country and how it’s run, I expect better. After all, baseball is a sport — a kid’s sport played by adult men. If the Yankees trade away Aaron Judge, it won’t have an impact on my life. While the world of politics doesn’t affect us on a daily basis as much as people would have you believe, one still has to stand up for what they believe in, even if that means standing up to those in their party.

It’s no secret I am not a fan of Donald Trump. Having grown up and lived in the NYC area for over 25 years, I was familiar with Trump before he hit the national stage as a reality show host. I didn’t like him when he launched his way onto the national political scene with his birtherism, and I continued to dislike him so much I wrote about conservatives telling him to take a hike back in 2014. I didn’t support him in the primaries, and I didn’t vote for him in the general election (and no I did not vote for Hillary Clinton).

Now that he is President, I am not all that concerned he’s a Republican. I am going to judge him on the merits. What’s interesting is the criticism I (along with many others in the conservative movement) get for doing so. As if holding Trump to higher standards Democrats hold their office-holders is something for which I should be ashamed. I always thought we should be better than them. To be fair, some Republicans and conservatives reflexively harp on Donald Trump because they don’t like him. Streiff wrote about Jennifer Rubin, a Paris agreement critic until Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement. She hasn’t stop railing about since it happened and refuses to acknowledge her flip-flop on the issue. That sort of criticism isn’t helpful because it’s rooted in a knee-jerk mentality.

That said, much of the criticism Trump receives from me other like-minded conservatives is fair. The pushback I often receive strikes me as odd because it doesn’t counter the criticism but instead deflects from the criticism.

For example, I receive emails, Facebook messages, and tweets telling me, “You just want to harm Donald Trump!” or “You just want to see him go down!” The accusation is rubbish. President Trump hurts himself and does so, often. The firing of James Comey is a perfect example of how Trump creates problems for himself. Trump defenders say he had every right to fire Comey as he serves at the pleasure of the president. That’s true. But he handled the situation with the gravitas of Bill O’Reilly did, yelling, “We’ll do it live!” at production staff. Trump’s timing was unfortunate, he concocted a bogus reason for doing so, and after his team had told everybody that reason for nearly two days, he threw them all under the bus by telling Lester Holt he was going to fire Comey regardless of what Rod Rosenstein had to say.

That some were defending Trump for the Comey mess because it made Democrats angry is ridiculous. Democrats freak out about Republican leadership no matter who’s in office. There’s no reason to give them more bullets so they can reload and keep shooting. If your measure of success is how much Trump angers Democrats and liberals, then he’s doing great. But the fact that he’s sitting at 40% job approval should cause people to think through their definition of “success.”

Conservatives should demand a higher bar. “Pissing off the libs” and “He’s better than Hillary” is a bar so low, anybody can reach it. There is a tremendous opportunity for the Republican Party and Donald Trump, and I give him credit when deserved. His nomination of Neil Gorsuch and his withdrawal from the Paris agreement are two examples where I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Unfortunately, his impetuousness, inability to deal with criticism, going off half-cocked on Twitter, and inability to make a cohesive case for his policy decisions is causing damage and he’s losing political capital every day. The clock is ticking and making liberals angry just isn’t good enough.

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