Every other day some self-important personality claims that a future President Trump will arrest him or her. Theirs is a fantasy disconnected from reality.
It seems like a day cannot go by without someone in the sphere of Hollywood or the news claiming that should Donald Trump be reelected, he will throw that person into jail. Not surprisingly, some of these same people promised to leave the US if Trump had been elected the first time around and never left. Some examples:
*Rachel Maddow and Joy Behar warn that a re-elected Trump would take their respective leftwing echo chambers off of the air.
*AOC said that she is worried that Donald Trump would throw her in jail if he returns to the White House.
*MSNBC regurgitator Nicolle Wallace opined that if Trump wins, there may not be a free press any longer.
The amount of hubris expressed by these people and their ilk is breathtaking. If one looks back to the first Trump administration and the prior Obama presidency, he would note that Donald Trump took no steps against the press or anyone in Hollywood. Obama, on the other hand, made it his business to get phone records of AP reporters and a search warrant for a Fox News on-air personality. Donald Trump took no step against the media or Silicon Valley social media companies, the same ones—like Google and Facebook—that actively worked to prevent his reelection in 2020. While Trump might be tempted to investigate Joe Biden for corruption, he has never suggested that he would go after media figures or non-politicians. He may have called them fat, ugly, or liars, but he has never said “lock her up” for anyone other than Hillary Clinton, who destroyed governmental communication devices and permanently deleted 30,000 emails under Congressional subpoena.
So why do our leftwing media and social figures claim that a big bad orange man will throw them in jail? It is a fantasy of their own self-importance. They see themselves as the vanguard of the intellectual left, the same one that has destroyed the southern border, encouraged irreversible surgeries on young children, and weakened the economy and US foreign deterrence. They so much believe in their self-importance that it is beyond obvious to them that Trump and his brownshirts will do what their beloved FBI has been doing to Trump and his supporters in practice: knocking down doors with guns drawn at 6 in the morning. The sad truth is that nobody cares about them or their shows that are bleeding viewers. They could only wish that they would be dragged off in cuffs so that they could validate their own self-importance. The reality is that Trump and his supporters will continue to do what they have always done: ignore them.
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The real threat is not their arrest but rather their loss of influence. It is no coincidence that Joe Biden just attended a star-studded fundraiser in Hollywood that netted his campaign $30 million. The people at the event know that their access to the White House, their ability to affect policy, get invited to a state dinner, and give their two cents on subjects of importance in national affairs are all dependent on Joe Biden or another Democrat being president. If Donald Trump returns to Washington, there are no more visits to the West Wing, no more policy discussions on climate change or whatever pet issues they have. Their vast fortunes will no longer buy them access, influence, and attention. Their money will be useless in influencing a Trump administration. And that fact terrifies them because they already went through such a trauma between 2017 and 2020. Trump will not arrest them; he and his millions of supporters will simply ignore them. And one who is accustomed to fame and attention cannot live without the applause and public fawning. Trump is a big middle finger to the important people that they think they are. And thus, they go into martyr mode in which Trump shuts down their lousy shows or drags them off to some new gulag in North Dakota. As I said, it is their fantasy that it should happen.
All of those who promised to leave the US in the event that Trump won stayed put. It’s easy to make a promise but it’s hard to give up on all of the wonderful and amazing aspects of life in the US. The beauty, the shopping (even if expensive is still cheaper than in Europe), the freedom of expression (which was banned in Canada and England during Covid)--there are myriad reasons to stay in the US. I personally would be happy to take these people to the airport for their one-way flights, but I know that they will never give up the good life. They talk a good game but that's about it.
One football Saturday decades ago at Harvard, my best friend and I returned to Leverett House only to find a couple guys from the Socialist Student Association handing out their free newspaper. “Smash Capitalism!” “Workers Unite!” We asked the fools that if the US was so terrible, why don’t they move to the Soviet Union. “We’d be killed the moment we arrived. We are Trotskyists”. My friend and I could not stop laughing. They would not be killed; they would be ridiculed for giving up the good life for the gray existence of the USSR. Like our media friends today, their inflated self-importance knew no bounds.
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