by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
In yet another example of liberal outrage, the Rose Garden announcement by Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord has evoked much gnashing of teeth. Now, I consider myself a moderate liberal, but I’m really growing tired of such behavior.
In an extremely well written piece, Esquire writer Charles Pierce summed up liberal outrage stating:
I didn’t think he could top his ghastly American Carnage inaugural address for sheer fact-free and paranoiac mendacity, but he managed to do it on Thursday. By announcing that the United States was withdrawing from the groundbreaking Paris Accords regarding the world climate crisis, the president* wallowed in rank, xenophobic victimhood while basking in the scattered applause of the otherwise unemployable yahoos whose self-respect is sufficiently low that they still work for him. Any doubt that Steve Bannon is running this White House now, either personally or through his finger-puppet, obvious anagram Reince Priebus, now has evaporated. The transformation of the American government into a Breitbart comments thread is complete.
But it’s time to stop getting upset about how Trump is causing America to go to hell in a bucket, and it’s time to start thinking about how you can, on a personal level, do something about it. Just getting upset at yet another horrible thing Trump has done doesn’t help anybody or anything.
I know why this keeps happening. It keeps happening because liberals after eight years of “No Drama Obama” assumed that progress was a given and that it was a fundamental tenet of reality that the liberal worldview was simply to be accepted. Meanwhile, of course, on FOX News’ Bullshit Mountain the residents grew more and more thirsty for blood.
Hence, once someone like Trump was given to them as an option in the primaries, they didn’t really care what he believed as long as he could win. And once he bested 15 other professional politicians, and the choice came down between him and someone they absolutely despised, Hillary Clinton, the decision was easy. And, so the land of Trumplandia with its FOX Americana agenda was born.
FOX Americana as articulated by Trump seems to be completely indifferent to the broader needs of the international community. It’s Darwinian and America First and simply horrible to anyone such as myself who would like there to be some order in the world. If nothing else won’t get you to slip some whisky into your coffee in the morning, let this sink in: pretty much not sense the period between World Wars has there been this chaotic a power vacuum caused by America pulling an Atlas Shrugged and deciding to ignore its responsibility as a world leader.
While I doubt we’ll have any nuclear exchanges anytime soon — though the Indian subcontinent could always flair up — it’s more likely that Russia will simply find it impossible not to make some sort of land grab in Ukraine or the Baltic. Should Putin attack a Baltic nation and one of those nations cry out for help from NATO, invoking Article 5…and the United States just shrugs, that would be significantly more profound than pulling out of the Paris Accord.
That would be the nightmare scenario. Allowing the Russians to take a Baltic nation would completely, fundamentally scramble the post World War II global liberal order. That would be something we could all point to and say that is definitely something Hillary Clinton would not have done. That is why I kept saying during the campaign that while Hillary Clinton was a horrible candidate, at least she wasn’t an existential threat to the Republic like Donald Trump.
And all of this wouldn’t happen in a vacuum. If NATO no longer had American teeth to back it up, any number of other hot spots across the globe would flare up, most notably Korea. I still think it’s likely that Trump would wag the dog with the DPRK and while that happened, Putin would, in turn, attack Ukraine or NATO.
So, in a sense, leaving the Paris Accord is just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to the irrecoverable damage that the Trump Administration can inflict on both the Republic and the globe. But, as I keep saying, we have to stop laughing at stupid tweets, or being outraged at this or that horrible thing Trump does.
If you consider yourself a member of The Resistance, you have to pause for a moment and think how you, on a personal level, can engage. You have to think how you can make a difference, however small, and stymie the seemingly unstoppable progress of the slow moving autocratic “managed-democracy” drive that Trumplandia represents.
I continue to believe that the American spirit is simply too strong. I continue to believe that Americans won’t stand for a Russian-style “managed-democracy” no matter how hard the forces of Trumplandia may attempt to impose it. We have to believe. We have to engage, engage, engage. Our future, and the future of the Republic depends on it.
Shelton Bumgarner is the Editor and Publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.
