We’ve been hearing lately that civil war is coming to America. It’s not coming. It’s here.
It’s not a war of extreme violence like the American Civil War, but a full-fledged ideological war where the stakes of winning or losing are just as high.
In the heat of battle, accidental friendly fire is part and parcel of war. But when friendly fire is deliberate – with weapons aimed at the commander’s head – it would be no shock if howitzers suddenly shifted to the “friendly” shooter.
Is Ann Coulter one those “friendly shooters” in the ideological war? I hope not.
Coulter wrote in her “Trump By The Numbers” piece this week that since we have “zero” wall, “zero” executive orders that end the “anchor baby scam,” zero this, and zero that on promised immigration reforms, she’s forced to conclude that the “president has no intention of ever doing anything we wanted on immigration.”
She wrote that Trump talks a good game like a waiter who compliments you for ordering hamburger “but keeps bringing us fish.” She marginalized the “(diminishing) percentage of his base” who criticized her for pointing out Trump’s shortcomings – and as a Don Lemon-type might say – she wrote that these are supporters who “think that the moment something comes out of Trump’s mouth, IT HAS HAPPENED.”
After she was done with the editorializing, invectives and opinions, Coulter laid out the facts, as she put it, with “No editorializing. No invectives. No opinions.”
“It was one thing, the promise he made every single day at every single speech,” Coulter said during a radio interview after President Trump declared a national emergency at the border. “Forget the fact that he’s digging his own grave. The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”
She also tweeted: “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as the President of the United States.”
OK, well, at least no one can accuse Republicans of being the Pied Piper Party, blindly following their leaders off an ideological cliff as Dems do.
Ease up off the trigger, Ann. Save your ammo for the people creating all the friction in the first place; then fire at will!
While Coulter deserves no scorn for honestly begging to differ with Trump, I have no clue what political landscape she’s looking at. The one I see is an extremely ugly, ferocious battlefield, where one side – unprincipled Democrat agitators – is aggressively trying to break every sacred bond that holds this fragile republic together. With demonic-like energy, they pop up everywhere like whack-a-moles to defy the rule of law and pick unnecessary fights over imaginary problems.
Coulter is dead wrong when she reduces the maniacal opposition against Trump to “excuses.” That’s delusional. The opposition that Trump faces every day, all day is at biblical proportions, and is creating gargantuan friction against what can reasonably get done, and when.
Two concepts of war apply to this political battlefield:
- Friction is a fact of war, and very formidable. It puts an incredible drag on how hard it can be to do the easiest things.
- Fight with who you have. Ideal people, circumstances and outcomes do not exist. Never make what’s ideal the enemy of the good.
Carl von Clausewitz, the great military thinker and strategist, described friction as “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” Because we’re not fighting against inanimate objects but thinking human beings who make countermoves to your every move, friction resists all action, saps your energy and, as the Marine Corps’ Warfighting Manual describes it, “… makes the simple difficult and the difficult seemingly impossible.”
The objective is to fight effectively despite the presence of friction and to raise your opponent’s level of friction in a way that weakens his ability to fight. That’s harder to do when you’re too busy ducking friendly fire.
For Trump, friction comes from every conceivable source: From ill-willed Democrats who have no compunction about hitting below the belt; from progressives, socialists, Leftists, Republicans, conservative pundits, activist media, activist courts, envious billionaires, influential celebrities, government bureaucrats, an extremely corrupt intelligence service – even kids – and from large swaths of the electorate who fall helplessly under the spell of celebrity.
Here’s what I see: Think of an ambulance speeding to a burning building with lights flashing and sirens screaming. Imagine that, along the way, cars refuse to pull over, forcing the distracted ambulance driver to slow down and weave around heavy traffic.
Now imagine a bunch of crazed drivers getting out of their cars to deliberately stop the ambulance by erecting barriers and laying heavy barbed wire all along the street to the emergency. Imagine them driving ahead to every intersection to deliberately sabotage the progress of the ambulance with heavy traffic, accidents (collateral damage) and debris.
That’s what Trump’s going through.
Now imagine friends of the paramedics – people who desperately want to see the fire put out – bombard them with criticism because they’re taking too long to get to the blaze.
That’s what Ann Coulter is doing.
If Coulter fires wild buck shots at the one man who’s crazy enough to get things done in today’s deranged political environment, then who does she believe would do a better job? Romney? Another Bush? Nikki Haley? Who?
Trump’s got a lot of warts – we all know that – but they pale in comparison with the cancerous flaws of liberals and Leftists who break explicit federal laws to incentivize foreigners – likely a half million by year’s end – to cross the border illegally.
The political, commercial and social walls built up over decades of excusing illegal immigration are turning out to be more formidable than the ones Trump’s been working to build for the past two years.
I’ve always admired Coulter’s courage for taking a pie in the face for her principles. But her unapologetic rhetorical gunpowder would better serve the “war effort” if she keeps her sights aimed at the real “wacky nut jobs” who are blocking roads on route to fixing our border emergency.
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