The Trumpian Acid Test

By Peter Pavarini

Why Trump?

For nearly three years, I’ve often wondered – why did America get Donald Trump as its president and what does his presidency say about the state of our Republic? I’ve asked such questions not to re-hash the 2016 election nor to anticipate 2020, but to make sense out of what will certainly be remembered as an unprecedented period of polarization and “peak resistance” to a sitting president.

When miners discover a rock formation that potentially contains valuable minerals, they conduct what is commonly called an “acid test” or more properly an “assay”.  Even when something looks like gold or silver to the naked eye, applying a combination of two highly caustic chemicals – nitric acid and hydrochloric acid – is necessary to validate an ore’s composition.[i]

 In the modern political realm, Donald Trump has served as the Nation’s acid test.  His utter disdain for politically correct speech and his impetuous, unfiltered tweets have served as catalytic agents revealing the true nature of the mainstream media, the Deep State and ideologues on both the Left and the Right. Like him or not, Donald Trump has made it much easier to see where people actually stand on the issues.

All but a handful of U.S. presidents have managed to muster the support of a majority of Americans once in office.[ii] Whether elected by a narrow margin or a landslide, a big part of a president’s job has been to unify the country, and generally their political opponents have given them a reasonable chance to do so. For some reason, our current president never received that. Even before he took the oath of office, a very vocal segment of American society was determined to never accept the legitimacy of his presidency.

A Unique Presidency

It’s easy to attribute the poor reception Trump received, particularly by Washington’s entrenched political class, to his lack of governmental experience. The White House has seen its share of outsiders before, but never someone who had pursued his entire career in the private sector. However, it was hhis unique background that made it possible for him to best 16 other candidates in the Republican Primary as well as a Democratic challenger who was said to have had the best resume in history.[iii]  Donald Trump may not have fit the mold other presidents filled, but that’s precisely why he defied all expectations and won.

Does the Trump presidency say more about the American people than it does about the man himself? I think so. He has been an acid test which revealed what really was behind a veil of polls, punditry and prognostication. All he did was shed light on the extremism of the Progressive Left, the hypocrisy of Never-Trump Republicans, and the regressive fears of the New Right.

One of the most telling things about Trump is the way gets the blame for everything and the credit for nothing. If proven true, he would be the first leader in world history to pull off such a feat.  Even Mussolini received credit for getting the Italian trains to run on time. But, in time, such unremitting hatred loses its effectiveness. People of all political and demographic backgrounds will get tired of a simplistic, one-size-fits all explanation for what’s wrong with the world. For example, blaming the death of Jeffrey Epstein on the Russians[iv] certainly gave new meaning to the over-used idiom “jumping the shark”. Likewise, trying to blame Trump for all mass shootings, even those unquestionably tied to supporters of his political adversaries, seems to me like a “bridge too far” – pardon the idiomatic overload.

Reason for Hope

The only thing that provides me with faint hope that Americans will eventually get out of the political and cultural black hole we’re in is to hear someone (who by being a fellow American is entitled to my love and respect) – say “I never thought of it that way”.

Sorry, Uncle Joe, people are neither entitled to their own truth nor to their own facts[v]. If something is true or factual, it must exist completely free of the bias of the one who is conveying it.

 In a country with a Constitution that guarantees freedom of expression, you are entitled to process those facts anyway you choose. You can editorialize freely. You can express your emotions about those facts anyway you wish so long as you don’t physically harm someone (hurt feelings don’t count). But you have no right under heaven or the American legal system to falsify or contort what you know or reasonably should know to be true for the sake of political expediency. If that’s your intent, get off the stage. You have nothing to add to this conversation. Come back, when you do, but until then, you’ve been acid-tested . . . The results are in. You really are “Fool’s Gold”.[vi]

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[i] Definition of “aqua regia”, www.wikipedia.org.

[ii] On September 24, 2001, George W. Bush had a 90% approval rating even though he had won the 2000 election by the narrowest of margins. Source: Gallup Poll. Barack Obama achieved his peak approval rating of 69% just days after his inauguration in 2009, even though he had only won 52.9% of the popular vote two months earlier. www.fec.gov.

[iii] Campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama called her “the most qualified man or woman ever to seek the White House”. Politico, July 5, 2016.

[iv] MSNBC host Joe Scarborough tweeted on August 10, 2019: “A guy who had information that would have destroyed rich and powerful men’s lives ends up dead in his jail cell. How predictably … Russian.”

[v] Referring to the Democratic Party, Joe Biden said at an Iowa rally on August 8, 2019, “we choose truth over facts”.

[vi] “Gold and Fool’s Gold – How to Field Test to Tell the Difference”, www.websitewithnoname.com .