It has been a while since I last wrote, but I’ve been thinking about this post for quite a while. After the presidential primaries, I kept asking myself how we came to be in a situation where Hillary and Trump were our major party candidates. Ever since Trump was elected, I’ve tried to understand how he won. I honestly did not expect him to win. With the media squarely on her side and not even bothering to pretend otherwise, I thought it was a forgone conclusion. I personally felt like he was the “least terrible” of the choices, but that’s about it. Now that he has taken office, I’ve seen several conversations discussing why he won. It’s usually chalked up to Hillary being female, the FBI, Russians, aliens, or any number of other ridiculous excuses.
So what led us to a point where Trump seemed like the better choice? How could he win a free election when very few people honestly liked him? Sadly, it comes down to anger; an anger that has been simmering and building over the last 8 years as the social fabric of this country has been torn apart. What does that mean? It means that the Obama administration and all of the people that supported him are directly responsible for the election of Donald J. Trump to the office of President.
The so-called Affordable Care Act is a case in point. There was a completely unnecessary rush to pass that bill that completely ignored alternative ideas that were put forward. We end up with a giant bill that not one person read prior to having to vote on it. It got crammed down our throats and now thousands of people that were paying for their own health insurance either can’t afford it or are getting half the benefits for twice the cost. If you supported that, you did this.
The left lost its collective mind when the president of Chick Fil A stated that he supported traditional marriage. He didn’t say that he hated gay people. There was no indication at all of any sort of discrimination toward the company’s employees or customers. But that didn’t matter. Those that do the most yelling about tolerance once again showed that their rhetoric doesn’t apply to themselves. Boycotts and demonstrations were held in an effort to damage his company, never mind that the damage would be felt only by his employees. And don’t forget that many of those employees were getting help paying for college by this hateful company. But that didn’t matter. If you were one of those boycotting Chick Fil A, you did this.
In 2014, 18 year old Michael Brown assaulted a convenience store clerk in Ferguson, Missouri, and stole a handful of cigarillos. As he strolled down the middle of a public road, he was stopped by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Brown chose to ignore the officer’s instructions, then decided to fight him. The result was that Officer Wilson had to shoot Brown, who was killed. As it happens, Brown was black and Wilson was white. Instead of waiting to find out what actually happened, the media immediately assumed that shooting was racially motivated. There was no evidence of that being the case, but it made a good story and they went with it. Their attacks on Wilson and the Ferguson Police Department helped fuel riots that destroyed numerous businesses and led to several nights of violence. Obama called for the nation “to remember this young man through reflection and understanding” and offered sympathy to his family. No such sympathy was offered to Officer Wilson, whose life was destroyed because he did his job. The entire incident was investigated, as it should be, and Wilson was found to have not been at fault. All of this was just a waste.
Sadly, this scenario would become all too familiar in the months to come. Every time an officer, who happened to be white, had a violent confrontation with a criminal, who happened to be not white, it was assumed that the officer was a racist pig and vilified immediately. The media went out of its way to show video out of context to convict the officer in the court of public opinion and this was continuously supported by Obama. This shameful situation has led directly to the deaths of police officers across the country as militant thugs feel justified in attacking those whose job is to protect them. Those of you that supported the unrest in Ferguson and Obama’s handling of that mess, you did this.
Gun owners constitute a major block of voters, and tend to actually do just that. They also tend to be responsible, law-abiding citizens. But if you actually believe anything that was said about gun owners by the Obama administration and his pets in the media, you’d never know that. During his administration, he lost no chance to place the blame for any crime committed with a gun squarely on the estimated 44% of Americans that legally own a firearm and never commit a crime with it. It wasn’t the criminal, terrorist, or maniac. It wasn’t the deplorable state of mental health care. It wasn’t activist judges releasing criminals from jail. No, it was you, the legal gun owner. The only solution ever discussed by his administration was expanded restrictions on ownership. And since very few people actually supported those ideas, he tried backdoor attacks in the form of pressuring banks to illegally deny loans to businesses in the gun industry. His justice department thought it was fine to send guns to Mexican drug lords in some crusade to prove that American gun shops were supplying the guns, which proved to be false and directly resulted in the death of at least one American Border Patrol agent. If you supported any of this madness, you did this.
In 2009, a US Army officer murdered 14 of his fellow soldiers in cold blood at Fort Hood, Texas. As he started shooting, he yelled “allahu akbar”, the favorite battle cry of Islamic terrorists everywhere. It was proven that he had been in contact with Al Queda operatives just prior to his attack. But Obama declared it to be a case of “work place violence”. It was only years later that he finally admitted that it was terrorism. In July 2015, four Marines and one Sailor were murdered in Chattanooga, Tennessee by a young, Islamic devotee of Anwar Awlaki. His attack was obviously carefully planned. It would be months before the administration would finally admit that, yet again, US citizens had died at the hands of radical Islamic terrorists on US soil. Now, it is an absolute fact that the vast majority of American Muslims are peaceful citizens. We all know that. But there are cases where the worst of their faith have influenced others, convincing them that they are somehow doing something righteous by committing murder. But the Obama administration was too busy trying to convince us all that terrorism wasn’t happening here, and if there was, it was somehow our fault. If you think that calling a radical Islamic terrorist a radical Islamic terrorist is somehow intolerant or somehow anyone’s fault but his own, then you did this.
After 8 years of Obama and his cronies, there were a whole lot of us that were tired of it. We were tired of being made the scapegoat for every bad thing that happened while no attention was paid to those that actually caused the problem. It was obvious that Clinton promised only 4 more years of the same. For me personally, I voted for Trump only because I did not think that the best thing for this country was four more years of wedges being driven between us based on race, religion, or economic status. For some, Trump’s angry rhetoric mirrored their own anger at the situation that we find ourselves in, and I understand that, too. So how did Trump get elected? If you supported Obama and his administration and their divisive policies, you did it.