Thoughts about Trump...

from one of our most conservative activists in North Idaho.

Brent Regan is a force to be reckoned with in North Idaho.  Well versed in local politics he has long held the reputation for clear thinking.

Mr. Regan is an engineer who engineers stuff that I don’t even understand for the aviation and aerospace industries.  He’s counts among his friends well known aerospace engineer Burt Rutan (who now lives in Coeur d’ Alene), and flying enthusiast conservative Bill Whittle.

Even with his very busy life, he has managed to devote thousands of hours to local issues from zoning, land use, and has even served on our local school board.

He posted the following on his Facebook page and has graciously allowed me to re-post it here – and we thank him.

From Brent Regan:

Friends keep asking my thoughts about Trump. Here they are.

I like Ted Cruz, and I also like Trump, but for completely different reasons. In my experience as a manager I have found that if you look for a person’s talents and then find a way to apply them then success will be close at hand. Cruz and Trump have completely different skill sets but they are both very good at what they do.

I had arrived at the conclusion that Trump would win the nomination back in December because I could see Trump’s skill set and how he was applying is to the task. My experience in business allowed me to recognize Trumps marketing and negotiation techniques which caused me to read “The Art of the Deal” and conclude that Trump was approaching the problem in a way that is never (rarely) done in politics. As a consequence his opponents have no effective defense. His victory was assured before the battle was fought, very Sun Tzu.

I told my close friends that Cruz was who I wanted to win but Trump was who I thought would win based on a reasoned analysis of the situation. First you must understand, as Scott Adams points out, that reason is what we think we use to make decisions but emotion is what we actually use most of the time.

Now, here is where I make some people angry. If you are in the “never Trump” camp you have made that decision based on emotion and not reason. You may wrap it in “reason” and call it “principled” but what you are saying is that your mind is made up and there is NOTHING, no new information, that would cause you to reconsider. This is by definition irrational, the inability to make a rational choice based on all information. It is especially egregious when you consider that the information you DO have is deeply flawed and incomplete; carefully filtered by the media for optimal shock value.

If you watched a modern interpretative dance without music or sound you may well conclude the dancer was having some kind of seizure and perhaps suffering some pain or disease to cause such unnatural motions. The truth would be hidden because you lacked all the information. Because Trump was being viewed through a distorted political “lens” HIS actions were equally incomprehensible. In the struggle to explain the situation, many offered ridiculous comparisons; He is Hitler, he is working for Hillary, he’s a bigot, and he hates women, on and on. This was fueled by the media that feeds on controversy while Trump used this need to serve his purposes. He OWNED Fox news. Even Meghan Kelly got a Trump haircut.

Hillary doesn’t stand a chance against Trump because Trump will hollow out all the moderate democrats and men. It isn’t going to be pretty to us conservatives but there is a big blue pile of democrat electoral votes and Trump is going after them so gird your loins, it’s going to be a tough ride.

The good news is that Trump is the asteroid that we needed to kill the political dinosaurs and the smart, successful, productive conservatives will be able to fill the void. It is a long game but it has a happy ending.

A Cruz victory would be a happy beginning but the consequences of 8 years of BO would ultimately come crashing down on “THE CONSERVATIVE”, forever stigmatizing conservativism as the thing we were doing when the crash happened. I cannot imagine the media, the liberals and the establishment not scapegoating conservatives. Better to have Trump in the breach when the wave hits.

Will Trump make a good president? It’s impossible to say with certainty. I do think it is highly likely that a Hillary or Bernie presidency would be VERY bad for our prosperity. Therefore I’ll take my chances with the successful billionaire who is the product of using persuasion in the free market rather that a socialist who uses the lethal force of government and the power of the mob to coerce the people.

Finally, stop heaping all your expectations in one spot. Government is the product of our culture, not the other way around. A president can’t change the morality of a nation, nor should he. Our Republican government requires a moral people and THAT starts with me and you. We don’t get to offload that responsibility to some guy living in a white house.

Of course I could be wrong and, with new information I could change my views.

Brent