Дональд Трамп - Triggered

In recent years, the left has come together and decided that words are violence, which, in the minds of its members, makes it perfectly acceptable to use violence against people with whom they disagree.

They have decided that there are some things you just shouldn’t say anymore, and when you say one of those things, you become the enemy.

But words aren’t violence. They’re just words.

3.

CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION

I WAS ONLY FOUR or five years out of college when I undertook my first major project as a VP at The Trump Organization. I had already learned a great deal about the business on a few smaller projects in New York City, but this was much different. Ninety-eight stories high, the Trump International Hotel & Tower now stands on the banks of the Chicago River. Luckily, I was alongside some of the most talented men and women in the business. We worked day and night on the project for close to five years. Because of the team’s commitment to the company, we brought the whole thing in on time and under budget.

By the time we had our soft opening in 2008, I was almost thirty years old and fifty times more experienced than I’d been at the start. The lessons I learned on that job stay with me to this day. Maybe the most fundamental lesson was this:

You need a strong foundation.

Hidden from view, foundations transfer the weight of the entire building to the earth. As any good architect knows, a few centimeters of misalignment in the concrete subfloor can cause the structure to tilt or sink. If you don’t believe me, look at the Millennium Tower in San Francisco. Finished in 2009, the fifty-eight-story tower has sunk seventeen inches and tilted a foot. Today, they call it the “leaning tower of San Francisco,” and estimates are that it’ll take more than $100 million to fix—not the best news for people who bought condos in the building, which have depreciated in value $400,000 on average. Like most things in life, tall buildings need a solid foundation. Without one, as they say in the trade, you’re screwed.

I’m reminded of faulty foundations when I look at the modern Democrat Party. It built a political party on a foundation of Jim Crow–style racism, support of the KKK and slavery, and stark opposition to Abraham Lincoln. Every few decades it added a floor to that foundation. Those floors included a widespread welfare state, hindrance of businesses both big and small, and finally political correctness, Soviet-style socialism, and Antifa. They are the party of dependence. Without that, they have nothing.

It’s a miracle that the party is still standing.

It’s not as if it hasn’t had several opportunities over the years to tear down and rebuild. After my father crushed Hillary in 2016, exposing an obvious flaw in the Democrats’ way of looking at the world, they could have regrouped and figured out a way to become less radical.

But they didn’t.

Instead of becoming more sensible after the 2016 presidential election, they shifted even further to the left, bringing the craziest fringe figures to the forefront of the party. In recent years, the Democrats have almost completely abandoned the principles of capitalism and democracy. Instead, they’ve begun embracing some of the worst ideas in the history of mankind: socialism, collectivism, class warfare, and the politics of fear and resentment. Some of their most recent proposals sound as though they came right out of The Communist Manifesto . They saw the 2016 election results, and they did exactly the opposite of what most reasonable people would have done.

Did you ever think you would live in a country where the president of the United States would have to stand up during his State of the Union address and declare that we “would never become a socialist country”? But here we are.

For my maternal grandmother, who lives with us for a few months every year, that line came as an incredible relief. For her, it was personal. She and my grandfather grew up in Czechoslovakia during the very worst of communism. Unlike most of these new-age Starbucks-chugging socialists in Brooklyn, they knew the horrors that can come from a state-run economy, and the scars of socialism are seared in her memory. I vividly remember speaking with her during the lead-up to the 2016 election, when she was watching neo-socialists such as Bernie Sanders on CNN almost every day. (We’re working on getting her off the CNN train, by the way. But back in the Czech Republic, you pick up CNN early, like a drug addiction. Soon she’ll be watching Fox with the rest of the sane people in the world.)

“Don, don’t these people understand?” she asked, her voice quavering, tears coming to her eyes. This is a woman who hid from Nazis in the basement of her farmhouse as a child and lived under Communist occupation for decades. At ninety-three, she’s still stronger and tougher than most. But she feared that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren might go through some of the same things she went through, and the thought of that had scared the hell out of her.

“They don’t know how bad it can be. Please do something. Don’t they know this is all lies?”

The truth is that most people probably don’t know. They don’t know that socialism—especially this new, hip version of it that’s being pushed by the Democrats—is all just a bunch of nice-sounding lies. They’re happy to buy the rosy picture that the current Democrat Party is pushing. When Democrats tell them that what they’re proposing isn’t “real socialism,” they’re happy to go along with that, too. But socialism has been lurking on the left of the US political system for decades, spreading like a crack in the foundation a few inches every election cycle.

In the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s presidency and assassination, something called the New Left emerged in American politics. Much like Bernie’s following, the new left found its strength on college campuses across the United States. Organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) populated the movement.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Lyndon Baines Johnson, perhaps to provide cover for his failing war in Vietnam, tried to appease the New Left by ushering through a socialist agenda. Among the programs he supported were food stamps in 1964, Medicaid in 1965, and the Gun Control Act of 1968. By the early 1970s, the hippies of the New Left had traded their peace signs for raised fists and terrorist organizations. Among them was the Weather Underground, which was responsible for more than two thousand domestic bombings. The Weather Underground’s manifesto, called Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-imperialism , is dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin. Then there was the Black Liberation Army, which murdered seventeen American police officers in the 1970s, including six in New York City alone. There was the Symbionese Liberation Army, of Patty Hearst kidnapping fame. On the other side of the spectrum was the United States Christian Posse Association, a precursor of Aryan Nations, which preached violent white supremacy. It was domestic terror groups such as these that led the assault on the United States. In one poll taken at the time, more than 3 million Americans favored a revolution.

The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 and the strength of capitalism brought an end to the socialist insanity that marked the prior decades. Even Bill Clinton tried to ride the prevailing winds. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act he signed in 1996 sought to combat the cycle of poverty by putting limits on welfare. Still, under the surface, the cracks in the Democrats’ foundation spread and deepened.

Out of those cracks, hidden socialists crawled.