Iโd like to talk a day about an irony. Maybe itโs something thatโs a paradox. Have you noticed that there are certain people who are coming out of the woodwork who are diehard Trump opponents and suddenly they say, sorta, โI like Donald Trump,โ or they donโt say it publicly or they donโt write it emphatically?
And hereโs what I mean.
He went to Davos, Switzerland, and I thought, โWow, theyโre going to destroy Don.โ
I donโt mean destroy him effectively, but theyโre going to try to destroy him. And then the questions and answers were amazing. He outlined tax reform, transparency, low interest rates, targeted tariffs, more energy development, more fossil fuels, and closed borders.
I thought, โWow, that is going to drive the Davos people crazy.โ
And then the questions were, โAre you sure you can send us a liquid, not natural gas? We need it in Europeโ or โThis sounds great, but when will it start?โ
And you start to think, these are capitalists and that they want Europe to be returned to its former grandeur. And all of a sudden, this man is saying something that is exactly opposite of the socialism that destroyed their countries and that they bought into. And now they donโt have to do it. And theyโre secretly but more openly even admiring Trump.
The same phenomenon happened when I was on campus, not long on the Stanford campus. A professor whom I know came up to me, and I would say that he is a moderately anti-Trumper, never Trumper maybe, and he whispered, said, โWow, the end of DEI is actually not that bad, is it?โ And what he was saying is, โThereโs no more racial quotas, and maybe I wanted to be a dean.โ Iโm saying, Iโm extrapolating what he was saying. โMaybe I want to be a dean, or maybe I want to get published at University Press and thereโs not going to be any racial quotas anymore or discrimination, and Iโm for that because the DEI is a monstrosity. There wonโt be any czar that calls me up and says your syllabus doesnโt have enough DEI material in it, or Iโve looked at your grading pattern and youโre inordinately giving Cs to people of color. No more commissars.โ
So even they are, you know, happy that Trump is doing this. And then we get into the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and people are really angry at Trump because, in this tragedy of the airline accident, he actually said things that were quite blunt. He said that DEI was maybe at fault, and we now know that theโand I donโt want to get into a critique yet of the crashโbut it seems like the helicopter was too low, and there was culpability, which seems like one of the air traffic controllers was not there. It seems like somebody left early. It seems like there was a mistake on giving directions about the proper elevations.
But we do know this, and Trump brought it up, and that was that the FAA consistently under Joe Biden had racial quotas, and they abolished programs and universities that encouraged people who had either expertise through the curriculum or prior military experience who would do well on meritocratic exams to try to join the FAA, and they were rejected because of their race. That is a fact, and in fact, there have been several lawsuits challenging the FAA and the first nomination to the FAA. Of course, the candidate that Biden picked didnโt even know the fundamentals of aviation. He came from the Denver airport, but he didnโt have any knowledge of the actual mechanics of how airports worked, it seemed.
My point is that when he did that, everybody in the media thought it was awful. But then people who probably didnโt even vote for him said, โWait a minute. I want to be safe. I want my daughter to be safe. I want my husband to be safe. You mean there are people in these control towers that were selected for criteria other than merit?โ
And while it might have been illiberal or maybe inconvenient, Trump told the truth. What Iโm getting at is this. This country has moved so far to the left on energy, on DEI, on transgenderism, on crime, and on the border that people even who supported it, whether theyโre the people in LA that lost their homes or the people who voted for Adam Schiffโand we saw what he did at the nominationโthey want a return.
And this man is the only person, Trump, with the guts and the backbone to not just make a transition, not to the far right, back to the center or the center traditional right that secretly, at least for now, they are happy that itโs going on because they feel that they and most Americans will be the beneficiaries. And you know whatโs correct? Theyโre absolutely right.