The Bible Predicted Donald Trump

If you listen to the Establishment intelligentsia, the ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States is a mystery, a shock, a surprise.  I get they don't like it, but how could they be surprised by it?  This surprise must be the first clue that "the best and the brightest" among us are just not that bright.

Who am I to judge my betters?  I share your skepticism.  But, here is the thing:  I saw Trump coming a mile away, and they did not see him at all.  Oh, alright, I did not see Trump, exactly, but I absolutely did see the Trump phenomenon coming.  Of course, I did not know that it would be specifically Donald Trump, and I did not know it would happen exactly in 2016.   But, since November 2008, I was completely sure that somebody just like Donald Trump, or worse, would arrive on the political scene sooner than later.  Frankly, I am surprised it took this long.

How could the intelligentsia be so far off the mark?  Here is David Remnick of the "New Yorker", on the night of November 8,

On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit.

Now, let me tell you what I saw.  First, I don't give a fig about Barack Obama's personal qualities (or Donald Trump's, for that matter, or George W's).  This is not about being friends with the guy, golfing with him;  my son will not marry one of his daughters, he will not write a recommendation to law school for my niece, or anything like that.  And anybody who turns the political into the personal should be instantly disqualified from ever voting again.  Or writing for the "New Yorker".

As I write this essay, one week after the 2016 election, the Left is firing all their ordnance against Trump, criticizing him from the dandruff in his hair to the corns on his toes.  But, as an objective fact, Trump brings much more to the presidency than Barack ever did.

Whether he has done well or ill, and he seems to have done a whole lot of both, Donald Trump has done things.  He ran businesses, he built buildings, he hired and fired people, etc.  Donald Trump is an executive officer of one kind looking to turn himself into an executive officer of another kind.

In the elegant locution of the elegant Fouad Ajami, on the other hand, Barack Obama spent his life "unmaking and remaking the world in words."  He brought nothing to the presidency.  Not only did Barack never meet a payroll or lead men in battle, but as a legislator, both in Illinois state government and in the federal government, he brings to mind the Yiddish definition of a nebbish as the kind of nobody who, when he gets out of bed in the morning, doesn't even leave the sheets wrinkled.

In the history of the Harvard Law Review, Barack was the only editor to ever not write an article of his own.  As a professor of law, he published no papers.  His single accomlpishement before assuming the presidency, seems to be the unusual achievement of having written not one, but two autobiographies before the age of 50, and before he accomplished anything of social significance.  Even in the world of words, this is odd.

So, exactly what did Barack have that made the Left swoon after him?  Good ol' "Uncle Joe" Biden tells us,

I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.  I mean, that's a storybook, man.

In other words, Barack had nothing but the color of his skin.  And from his long ties with the notorious "Acorn" (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), he had a been a race hustler.  He was, in other words, the quintessential race candidate.

I am convinced that very many people, Black and White, voted for Barack because he was the "Outside" candidate.  But he was a candidate at all because the opinion makers of the political Left promoted him as a candidate.  They promoted him with manic energy, and they did if for one reason and one reason only---the only attribute he had---the color of his skin.

Barack Obama was never the "post racial" president that the intelligentsia thought him to be.  Quite to the contrary.  And I knew that Barack, as an ol' timey race hustler of the Alinsky mold, would do as president the only thing he knew how to do:  rub raw the resentments of the people.  And that he did, in spades.

The backlash was coming just as sure as night follows day.

From start to finish, the intelligentsia saw none of this.  Well, why not?  I think, for precisely the reason Matthew gives in chapter 7, verse 4,

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

The Left is blind to their own racism, and Donald Trump is president-elect.