Month: March 2019

Monday Steakhouse Blues

The Portly Politico7 Comments

I’m writing today’s post on my phone at one of the few surviving Western Sizzlin’ steakhouses in America. Yep, it’s been that kind of day.

Yesterday’s post marked the 70th consecutive daily post on this blog. That means I’ve posted at least one post a day for ten weeks.

I don’t have much to say today. I’m taking a group of roughly forty student-musicians to a “Solo and Ensemble”-style music festival tomorrow, and today report card grades were due. Without Internet at the house, everything had to get done today in a compressed time.

As such, the only interesting thing I’ve had a chance to hear about today was Tucker Carlson saying a bunch of controversial, awesome stuff on a radio show a decade ago—and, instead of kowtowing to the Left, he invited folks to debate him on his show: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/03/11/tucker-carlson-refuses-to-apologize-over-media-matters-compilation-of-shock-jock-call-ins/

More to come tomorrow and Wednesday. I couldn’t blow a 70-day streak.

Happy Monday!

–TPP

Lazy Sunday III: Historical Moments

The Portly Politico75 Comments

My Internet is out at the house, and the technician won’t be out until Friday, so posting this week may be a bit dicey and inconsistent.  As a result, I’m phoning it once again this Sunday—the perfect way to start (or end, depending on your perspective) the week.

Brace yourself for “Lazy Sunday III:  Historical Moments” (read “Lazy Sunday” and “Lazy Sunday II“).  These posts are derived from a series of short talks I gave to the Florence County (SC) GOP in 2018.  They are presented in chronological order.

1.) “The Formation of the Republican Party” – this post was featured in “Lazy Sunday II:  Lincoln Posts,” as is the second piece in this list (sorry for the redundant recycling).  It’s a quick overview of the origins of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

2.) “Lincoln and Education” – another post from “Lazy Sunday II,” this Historical Moment explores Lincoln’s education, as well as his views on the subject.

3.) “Veterans’ Day 2018, Commemoration of the Great War, and Poppies” – like President George W. Bush, I am not one of the great orators of our time, but when I delivered this Historical Moment, it was probably the most powerful oratorical presentations I’ve ever given.  That is not due in any way to my own speaking abilities (although I do possess a rich, chocolate-y baritone when speaking), but to the emotional power of John McCrae’s “In Flanders Field.”  It was an arresting moment when I delivered the lines of that simple, sweet poem.

4.) “The Influence of Christianity on America’s Founding” – this talk was a longer-form version the usual Historical Moments, which are usually about five minutes long.  I was asked to give a slightly longer speech about the influence of Christianity on the founding of our nation at a joint FCGOP-Darling County GOP Christmas dinner.  It’s a complex topic, but, yes, Christianity was and is key to the American experiment in self-government.

So there you have it—more TPP greatest hits.  Enjoy, and have a restful Sunday!

 

Reblog: Quintus Curtius, “On Living Near the Ocean”

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Blogger Quintus Curtius wrote a beautiful, reflective essay on his blog, Fortress of the Mind, about the effects, both spiritual and physical, of living near the sea.  It’s an excellent example of strong writing; here’s a lengthy quotation:

There is no union with the sea.  There is the sea, and there is you, and this is as it should be.  So we have this cautionary dualism:  there is the ancient, perilous essence of the ocean, this tiger’s heart, and at the same time there is this rejuvenating energy of the sea.  There is this inexplicable allure that calls us to it.  It both provides, and destroys.  There is kindness, and there is cruelty of the most savage sort.  The fire can both sustain and destroy.  And it seems that too much exposure to the ocean has some kind of degenerative effect, as well.  You cannot quite put your finger on it.  But it is there.  You see it with those old mariners.  The grizzled visages of those who have spent too much time with the ocean do not really convey wisdom:  it is rather that the life has been sucked out of them, leaving a desiccated human husk.  There are no places so degenerate as some of these obscure seaside communities.  The odors of decay and ruin hover about them.

The line “it is rather that the life has been sucked out of them, leaving a desiccated human husk” calls to mind H.P Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” a classic of Lovecraft’s genre of weird horror fiction, about a town inhabited by people with an overly closer union with the sea and its horrors.

Living in South Carolina, the ocean is a large draw for our tourism industry, which is (I believe still) the largest part of our State’s economy.  But there is a certain strangeness that attaches itself to seaside towns, a certain freewheeling sleaziness.

Take Myrtle Beach, a town that is like a slightly scruffier, tackier, and sleazier Branson, Missouri.  Charleston, with—despite its reputation for elegance and charm—is a bustling port city that suffers from the double-edged sword of cosmopolitanism.

Quintus Curtius relates an example of oceanic dualism in an illustration from the Samnite War.  Another ancient allusion came to my mind:  the view of the ancient Israelite people regarding the sea.  They viewed it distrustfully, and I seem to recall that Old Testament references to “the abyss” may have referred to the wine dark Mediterranean.

Standing by the ocean is a humbling experience; like staring at the starry night sky on a crystal clear night, it reminds us of our own smallness in the vastness of the Universe.

Totalitarian Leftism Strikes Back

The Portly Politico13 Comments

Readers versed in the recent skirmishes of the Culture Wars may have heard about the Sad Puppies / Rabid Puppies campaign to win back the Hugo Awards—science-fiction’s biggest literary awards—from entrenched social justice Leftists.  photog at Orion’s Cold Fire has a brief piece up, linking to a piece on The Federalist about the recent controversy.

The quick takeaway is as follows:  having destroyed the Hugo Awards rather than let independent, apolitical authors get a fair shake, SJWs are now targeting a group called 20Booksto50K, an online community dedicated to getting independent authors published.  It’s an organization that is entirely harmless, from what I can tell on the surface, but it’s a threat to the SJW-dominated publishing industry.

The Left is all about dominating the institutions.  If they can’t control an institution, they’ll destroy it.  Independent organizations are a huge threat to the Left’s Cultural Marxism, as the existence of alternatives inevitably loosens the Left’s grip on power.  People aren’t allowed to have alternatives; they must accept and embrace Leftist ideology and goals, whatever they happen to be at the moment.

Not surprisingly, sci-fi writers don’t like that they can only win major awards if their stories don’t involve convoluted, high-tech battles over gender nonconformity or intergalactic diversity training.

The major figure in this field, from the little I know about it, is dissident writer Vox Day, who has created his own publishing house and distribution platform.  Vox Day anticipated deplatforming from Amazon, and was prescient in creating his own means to distribute his work to fans.

The Internet was a bastion of freedom for conservatives and dissidents of all stripes.  Now the tech giants are clamping down on the Right, and even the heretofore apolitical.  Remember:  merely being apolitical is, to the totalitarian Left, the same as being against the Left.

Like the Borg of Star Trek, all will be assimilated into the Left’s Marxist ideology.

TBT: Transformers 2: Conservatives in Disguise?

The Portly Politico2 Comments

For this week’s #TBT feature, I’m digging back, for the second time, to a very old post from 2009.  It’s about—of all things—the second movie in the modern Transformers franchise.  Yeesh.

Anyway, the point of the essay—and its cringe-inducing navel-gazing—is that a government bean-counter does everything he can to wield his meager bureaucratic power like a little dictator, in the process undermining the unsteady alliance between the good Autobots and the US military.

It reminds me of Ghostbusters, when the functionary from the Environmental Protection Agency comes and shuts down the containment unit—the one holding all the captured ghosts—because it’s using too much energy and might represent an environmental threat.

Think about that for a minute, and reflect on how awesome the 1980s were—the Zeitgeist was such that the minor villain was guy who worked for the EPA.  Even left-leaning Hollywood razzed busy-body government employees during the Reagan era.

Regardless, enjoy this blast from the past, an example of a trend in Conservatism, Inc. of reading into films a conservatism message (except I was probably right on this one):

Earlier today I saw Michael Bay‘s highly-anticipated (and critically-panned) Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Prior to seeing the movie, I had no intention of writing a blog about it. Although films are occasional inspirations for my essays (see my article about the lack of strong African-American fathers, which I wrote after seeing Boyz n the Hood), I never imagined that Transformers 2 would be the subject of one of my blog entries because I don’t write straight-up reviews. Honestly, I figured it would be exactly what it is: a steady stream of explosions, robots, and mass destruction.

What I didn’t count on was that it would only be what I expected 99% of the time. That other 1% is the focus of this essay. Like the first Transformers film, Transformers 2 spent a great deal of time covering the U.S. military and its interactions with and against the various transforming automatons. Generally speaking, the soldiers are characterized as normal and basically decent–they want to do what is best for their country and they want to protect the weak and innocent, but they will follow the civilian authority of the Constitution.
In Transformers 2, however, I noticed a more overt, though still very, very subtle, endorsement of conservative politics–or, at the very least, a critique of modern liberalism. I don’t want to read too much into this (well, actually, I do), but there are several moments during the movie when the misinformed meddler, the entity trying to put the kibosh on the Autobot-military alliance, is a mealy-mouthed government bean-counter who sees the Autobots as an alien menace that constitutes a risk to national security. Now, sure, action movies are overflowing with literal-minded government stooges and opportunistic politicians who are always putting up a wall of red tape that is harder to break than the concrete bunker our hero just crashed through on his motorcycle. The key difference in Transformers 2, however, is that the government stooge in question is acting under direct orders from the president, who is explicitly identified as… Barack Obama (one news report states that “President Obama has been relocated” to a bunker somewhere in the Midwest).
Not evidence enough? At one point, this pencil-pusher makes a point straight out of the Obama foreign policy playbook: let’s try to negotiate with the bad guys. Maybe we can talk out our differences and everyone can live in peace. When the bureaucratic boob said that, I almost fell out of my seat. I don’t know if Michael Bay or the writers of Transformers 2 were intentionally making this point, but for this chubby conservative the implications were loud and clear: Obama and other liberals who demand negotiations before resorting to force against overtly hostile, dangerous opponents are fatally off base and out-of-touch. The president’s puppet makes the point that the United States should not be involved in the civil war of an alien race in the first place, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is anyway. The United States, the filmmakers seem to be suggesting, has a responsibility to aid the Autobots against the new Decepticon menace, whether it likes that obligation or not, and the proposed policies of Obama and other liberals in foreign relations are potentially devastating.
Besides a subtle endorsement of a neoconservative foreign policy–or at least a more realistic approach to foreign threats–Transformers 2 is, as I have mentioned, heavily pro-military. The film depicts soldiers as law- and order-abiding citizens who, even if they don’t like it, abide by civilian authority. This is a refreshing change from the usual Hollywood fare, which casts soldiers in the light of threats to democracy and as right-wing gun nuts who want nothing more than to seize control of the government themselves. While we should have a healthy wariness of the military as a potentially repressive arm of the federal government–a wariness that dates back to colonial America and that is most evident in the writings of Thomas Jefferson—Transformers 2 makes it clear that the U.S. military is a military of dedicated civilian volunteers who value and fight for freedom. They are not professionals who ride roughshod over the freedoms of others, be they Americans or foreigners. In fact, the U.S. military works closely with several Middle Eastern governments in the film, including the Egyptian and Jordanian militaries. In one scene, when a Jordanian helicopter is grounded by a Decepticon, American soldiers aid the fallen foreigners. This is not the unilateral, oppressive, quagmired military we hear so much about in the media; this is a dynamic, humane force made up of regular, freedom-loving Americans.
This brings me to one final point, a point I’ve been mulling over for awhile. We are constantly told that wars are started by the elite and fought by the poor; that wars are little more than opportunistic struggles or, even worse, the effect of some perceived slight or random occurrence; that war is rarely right or even necessary. In different times and in different places, many of these assumptions were true. Wars in the past were started by absolute monarchs or power-hungry tyrants, while they were fought by loyal vassals or downtrodden peasants.
In the United States, however, this is not the case. We live in a society where the people, at least in theory and, cynics aside, very much in practice, have a say in the functioning of government. Whatever slogan-spouting liberals will tell you, their bumper-sticker philosophy is severely flawed and misinformed. If the United States goes to war against a hostile power or terrorist group, it is because the people have given their approval. Foreign policy is, admittedly, concentrated in the executive branch of the government, which means that the president and the Secretary of State have a great deal of influence in deciding its direction. Any president hoping to keep his office, however, is going to be careful in how he deals with foreign policy.
Therefore, the traditional criticisms levelled against war are at best incomplete and at worst obsolete, at least when applied to the United States. There is still a great deal of debate about whether or not the United States should be the world’s police officer; regardless, wars are not foisted on unwitting dupes by a greedy elite in America.
This claim is a bold one, but I stand by it. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would not have been fought and would not have endured so long without significant support from the American people. Now that support is beginning to wane, serious questions are being asked about America’s future role in those countries, but we are seeing a huge amount of popular outpouring for the people of Iran, who are currently struggling against their sham of a government. President Obama’s “let’s-talk-it-out” approach to foreign policy is not enough when facing a regime of authoritarian thugs.

Hump Day Hoax

The Portly Politico18 Comments

It’s that point in the semester where everything is coming to a head all at once, so today’s post is about 12-14 hours late to the party.  Indeed, it was only about fifteen minutes before writing this post that I stumbled upon an article with a local flavor.

It seems the mayor of my adopted hometown, Lamar, South Carolina, believes that a racial hate crime was committed against her.  Her vehicle was covered in a sticky yellow substance that resembled spray paint, she claimed.

After a brief investigation—it probably involved running a finger across the hood of the car—the Darlington County sheriff’s deputy determined the mystery substance was—GASP!—pollen.

You can read the full story here: http://www.gopusa.com/hate-crime-against-darnell-mcpherson-s-c-mayor-turns-out-to-be-pollen/

I’ve met Lamar’s mayor—my mayor—before, and Mayor McPherson is a pleasant and welcoming lady.  I met her when I went to town hall to setup garbage and sewage service at my home.

Lamar is a very small town—the population, according to the 2010 census, was slightly less than 1000—and it still functions on a timetable that is even slower than the rest of the South.  In true, old-school Southern tradition, local government offices shut down on Wednesday (as do some local businesses, if I’m not mistaken), and many folks get their mail at the Post Office, rather than a mailbox (my mail wasn’t delivered for about two weeks, until a neighbor told me I had to move the box across the street, otherwise our rural route carrier wasn’t going to stop).

Needless to say, it runs on a small staff, so Mayor McPherson was in there with the town’s two administrative assistants, processing water bills and the like.  I appreciated her dedication and friendliness, and she encouraged me to get involved in the community.

As such, it’s disappointing to see this kind of hysteria from her.  From the tone of the article, she sounds like she sincerely believes some misdeed was done against her—although I’m probably being overly generous.  The Jussie Smollett hoax was clearly too ludicrous to be true; maybe the Case of the Hooded Pollinator is the same situation.

Academic Leftism’s Sour Grapes

The Portly Politico13 Comments

I received the following piece from a colleague at one of the schools where I teach.  The piece, entitled “The Academy is Unstable and Degrading. Historians Should Take over the Government Instead,” is indicative of how utterly clueless Leftist intellectuals are to their own dominance of not only academia, but the culture and government as well.

The author, Dr. Daniel Bessner, is an assistant professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington, and, as he makes clear from the piece, an avowed socialist.  Indeed, the crux of the op-ed is as follows:  the academy is crumbling, as tenure-track jobs disappear (and, presumably, as Americans are wising up to its intense Leftist slant and poor track record in re: the job market), meaning Leftist “public intellectuals” need to find new worlds to conquer.  Dr. Bessner proposes the government.

In his diagnosis of the academy’s ills, he argues that the Left has focused too much on taking over the English Department (it’s at least refreshing to read a Leftist acknowledge that it was a self-conscious, deliberate march through the institutions), and not enough taking over the State Department, as it were.

He then proceeds to detail how libertarians moved from the fringes of political opinion to their relative ubiquity today, discussing the influence of Murray Rothbard and the Left’s favorite billionaire boogiemen, the Koch Brothers.

What’s rich about all this hand-wringing is the utter lack of self-awareness.  What about the legions of left-leaning banksters and billionaires pouring money into progressive organizations and schemes?  George Soros is our “boogieman” of the Left, but consider the entire entertainment, corporate (especially “Big Tech“), and academic apparatuses that are arrayed in favor of progressivism’s cause du jour.

The Left has dominated the culture from multiple perches for decades.  If the academy is falling into ruinous disrepair, it’s because Leftists have been running it since the 1960s.  They have only themselves to blame for the drying up of tenure-track gigs, rising tuition, and useless “assistant vice deans of diversity, inclusions, and LGBTQ2+MMORPG acceptance” positions.

One final note:  if President Trump were the dictator these Leftists soy boys make him out to be, they wouldn’t be identifying openly as socialists, nor would they be espousing a socialist agenda—as Dr. Bessner does in this piece—openly online.  That Dr. Bessner does so also demonstrates how successful his comrades have been at normalizing a fundamentally ruinous ideology in the United States (see also:  crazy-eyed Congressbabe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, poster-child for over-credentialed, arrogant college grads who base their entire lives off what they learned in an English 101 survey course from an angry, radical adjunct).

God help us all if Dr. Bessner and his ilk insinuate themselves further into the government.  Drain the Swamp, President Trump!

Sanctimonious Leftism

The Portly Politico13 Comments

We’re all familiar with the lunacy of the Progressive Left, and its tendency toward insane and downright evil positions.  Issues like abortion (now, apparently, including babies that survive attempted murder against them) highlight the fundamentally different philosophical foundations of Progressivism and traditionalism.

That said, one of the more annoying aspects of modern Leftism is its sanctimonious virtue-signalling, which is part of the appeal of Progressivism:  you get “virtue” on the cheap, without any real sacrifice.

Case in point:  a letter to The Virginia Pilot about the Ralph Northam non-troversy.  Readers will know that I don’t much care about what costume Governor Northam wore three decades ago, but I do care that he advocates for infanticide both in and out of the womb.

But the letter in question is a prime of example of Leftist sanctimony in action, full of broad, vapory statements about how Northam can work towards reconciliation.  The letter is from Rich Harwood, who runs a policy think-tank of some kind called The Harwood Institute.

I only know about the Harwood Institute because, somehow, one of my e-mail addresses for one of the schools where I teach has ended up on their mailing list.  For about a year I thought it was the “Hardwood Institute,” and they were trying to sell me lumber.

Regardless, Rich Harwood, the namesake founder of this fairly bland, center-Left organization wrote a letter entitled “A suggested path toward reconciliation,” and blasted an abbreviated version out to the Harwood Institute’s e-mail list.

The entire letter is an exercise if blathering sanctimony.  He recommends five steps for Governor Northam, and how he can become, chillingly, an “instrument for society.”  One of those steps is—no joke—to “[m]ake room for deep sorrow.”

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.

Here is an extended excerpt to give you the full flavor of Harwood’s virtue-signalling:

[Governor Northam] faces a fundamental choice: Is his reconciliation tour about his own political survival, or can he become an instrument of society? 

Choosing the latter requires him to exercise a ruthless humility, where he recognizes his own role is limited. Racial reconciliation cannot be led by a single leader, nor orchestrated by an elected official. It will come through a whole host of big and small actions, emerging over time, that include overlapping conversations, popular culture and music, the writing of new books and the illumination of painful history. 

So the governor must ask: What is my contribution in this moment? What can I do? What does it mean for me to be an instrument of society? ….

There may be those who say that Northam has made it past the worst of this crisis and that he should just hunker down and ride out the last of it. Perhaps that’s possible. But, for him, is that good enough? Can he live with that? Will that help him fulfill his personal calling, and more importantly gain a sense of redemption from Virginians? 

I urge Northam to choose the path of becoming an instrument of society.

Amid all of this feel-good crap is this phrase “instrument of society.”  That’s a terrifying concept, and one that is indicative of the totalitarian Left.  No one can just be—every individual must subsume himself into the mass.

Northam may have been an idiot thirty years ago; now, he’s a useful tool for the Left, except that the Left cannot forgive what may have been acceptable under yesterday’s morality.  For the Left, there IS no yesterday.  Everything that is bad now has always been bad, which is why their positions shift so constantly (remember when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were opposed to gay marriage and supported border control?).

Harwood, too, is a useless tool for the Left, and he probably doesn’t even realize it.  He’s no-doubt marinated his entire life in a cloistered, East Coast liberalism that arrogantly believes it holds all the answers—if only we can get those rubes in flyover country to come to heel.

Racial issues in America are overblown and tiresome.  Civil rights have been secured for virtually every race and deviant lifestyle choice conceivable.  Instead of focusing on these silly side issues, let’s try to stop the mass slaughter of innocents.  That’s an area where we can—and should—make “room for deep sorrow.”

Lazy Sunday II: Lincoln Posts

The Portly Politico74 Comments

I’ve been out of town all weekend—thus yesterday’s very belated post—and it’s getting to the point in the academic year where all the craziness hits at once.  That being the case, I’m posting another one of these “compilation” reference posts to give you, my insatiable readers, the illusion of new content.  It’s like when a classic television show does a clip show episode:  you relive your favorite moments from the series (or, in this case, the arbitrary theming I foist upon you).

Today’s “Lazy Sunday” readings look back at my posts that pertain to President Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator (read the first “Lazy Sunday” compilation).  I noticed that I’ve been writing more about Lincoln over the past week (perhaps my quiet homage to the recently-completed Black History Month?), so I decided to compile, in one place, all of my Abraham Lincoln posts (at least, the ones I could find on this blog).

Without further ado, here are The Portly Politico‘s Lincoln Posts (in chronological order):

  • “TBT: Happy Birthday, America!” – a reblog from the old TPP site, this post largely lets Lincoln speak for himself, as it features a full transcript of the Gettysburg Address.  Always good for patriotic goosebumps.
  • “Historical Moment – The Formation of the Republican Party” – this short post was adapted from a brief talk I gave to the Florence County Republican Party.  The purpose of the meeting, I recall, was to focus Republicans on who we are as a Party and what we believe, so I thought it would be useful to give a brief introduction to the formation of the GOP.  As the first Republican President (although not the first Republican presidential candidate—that honor goes to John Charles Fremont of California, who ran in 1856), Lincoln obviously exercised huge influence on the young party.
  • “Lincoln on Education” – another “Historical Moment” adaptation (I’m all about recycling material), I was supposed to deliver this moment before a forum of candidates for the Florence School District 1 race in autumn 2018.  I was all set to deliver it, but the FCGOP Chairman (accidentally?) skipped over me in the agenda, so I saved it until the following month’s meeting (again, why let good copy go to waste?).
  • “Lincoln’s Favorability” – here’s one of TWO posts from last week about Abraham Lincoln.  I’m going to give Lincoln a rest after tonight—he worked hard enough during the Civil War—but this piece looked at an interesting Rasmussen poll, that shows Lincoln is massively beloved by the American people.
  • “Reblog: Lincoln and Civil Liberties” – this post is a reblog from Practically Historical, the blog of SheafferHistorianAZ.  Sheaffer—a fellow high school history teacher—wrote a post detailing how Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeus corpus was, indeed, constitutional.

Happy Sunday!

–TPP

Americans Support America First Agenda

The Portly Politico5 Comments

A quick Saturday night post:  a Harvard/Harris Poll (PDF), according to Breitbart, suggests there is substantial support for an “America First” agenda.  Such an agenda places the government’s priority as protecting American citizens first and foremost, and includes enforcing immigration laws, pushing for fairer trade via tariffs, and ending open-ended foreign wars.

I’ve written about the rise in economic nationalism before, including a detailed case study from Breitbart.  Tucker Carlson’s 3 January 2019 monologue is probably the best defense of an “American First” agenda I’ve ever heard.

Economic nationalism dovetails with immigration in that enforcing immigration laws—and deporting illegal immigrants—would drive up wages for workers domestically.  I would also argue that a moratorium on most legal immigration for at least a decade would probably be prudent, to facilitate assimilation.

And, as painful as they would be, mass deportations of any illegal alien, regardless of criminal record, would do much to remove the un-assimilated, and to dissuade further incidences of border hopping.

It seems a good portion of Americans agree with at least some of these assessments.  Here is a quotation from the Breitbart piece on the poll:

Across racial lines, the vast majority of white Americans, 79 percent, and black Americans, 75 percent, said they would support a candidate who said they wanted an immigration system that benefited American citizens, rather than foreign nationals.

Similarly, more than 6-in-10 voters said they would be more likely to support a candidate in an election that spoke of the national “emergency with the savage MS-13 gang” that has been largely due to the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration system that has been supported by Republicans, Democrats, the open borders lobby, Wall Street executives, and corporate interests.

It’s encouraging to see solid support for an America First agenda, even if that doesn’t always translate to love for President Trump himself.  It does suggest, however, that if he sticks to his original campaign promises—as he has largely done—he is poised to do well in 2020.