OPINION:
Some America First-ers, six-packing Joes and philosophical conservatives are sticking with President Trump for the same reason they voted for him eight months ago.
They think he is sticking with what made him stand out among from 16 Republicans and three Democrats who had in their heads visions of the Oval Office but not of America’s future.
Only Mr. Trump offered a broad vision for the nation — an America that bases its greatness on the consent of the governed, on politicians keeping their promises, and on putting the nation’s interests ahead of an imagined global harmony.
It’s his insistence that he and the Republicans in Congress live up to their campaign promises that is a part of what makes him special in the annals of elected Republicans.
The overarching specialness of Mr. Trump was and is that vision of his. The man convinced us he actually had a mental picture of what he wanted for America. We want to believe he is pursuing that vision, to the best of his ability, in the full knowledge that ability without vision is no virtue.
Mr. Trump’s sympathizers nonetheless say privately that his most irksome attribute as president is how he’s barely inching up the learning curve, getting the hang of being president. He’s only learning at snail-neck speed, if at all, how not to stomp on his message or fog up his agenda and most recently how not to emit contradictory signals on keeping his and the GOP’s repeal-Obamacare campaign pledge.
The counter-argument of his new communications director and others serving him in the White House is that such gripes don’t apply to him because he’s unique, and that this uniqueness is what won him the presidency when every poll and analyst predicted he’d lose.
Let’s hope so, but there are some hard facts to be faced by all of us who want him to succeed.
Fact No. 1 at this moment is that he hasn’t learned how not to appear to be a mean, vindictive boss who publicly humiliates the one man in the U.S. Senate who backed him from the beginning.
True, Jeff Sessions did fail to tell the then president-elect about a couple of Kislyak-Sessions sessions during the campaign. And yes, Mr. Sessions did fail to disclose the Russian ambassador encounters at his confirmation hearing.
Never mind whether the meetings or encounters were significant or utterly insignificant in content and intent.
A plausible argument can be made that a senator and former U.S. attorney who fails to disclose those events to his future boss and to former Senate colleagues probably should not be the nation’s top law enforcer in the first place.
But a president who keeps humiliating his own attorney general instead of having the guts to outright fire him and suffer the inevitable over-the-top damnation of Democrats and their dominant left-wing press cronies is not behaving as a role model for other aspiring leaders at home and abroad.
Mr. Trump’s tactic of insulting and belittling his attorney general until he resigns or in anger makes a mistake that is clearly a firing offense is not a tactic that many Trump well-wishers find felicitous … not even remotely.
Trump supporters are relentless and indefatigable but also human. Unremitting heavy lifting in defense of a president whose stated goals are worthy is, like it or not, unsustainable eventually. What his partisans are saying to themselves is, “Put Mr. Sessions out of his misery, Mr. President.”
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