Trump’s CPAC Speech

I listened to some of it, but I really, viscerally hate listening to Trump for long. But Nick Gillespie (!) was impressed:

All in all, it was, in the words of Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, “one of the least-hinged speeches Trump has given in a long time.” It was indeed all over the place but like the weirdly wide-ranging and digressive speech in which he declared a national emergency, it was also an absolute tour de force, laying out every major point of disagreement between Republicans and Democrats (abortion, the Second Amendment, and taxes, among other things) while tagging the latter aggressively as socialists who will not only end the private provision of health care but take over the energy sector too. Those charges take on new life in the wake of the announcement of the GND and comments, however short-lived, by Democrats such as Kamala Harris, who at one point recently called for an end to private health care. And over 100 House Democrats have signed on to a plan that would end private health insurance in two years. For all the biting criticism and dark humor in today’s speech, Trump has mostly ditched the “American Carnage” rhetoric that marked his first Inaugural Address, pushing onto liberals and Democrats all the negativity and anger that used to surround him like the dust cloud surrounds Pigpen in the old Peanuts cartoons. “We have people in Congress right now who hate our country,” he said. “We can name every one of them. Sad, very, very sad.”

At moments, he seemed to be workshopping his themes and slogans for 2020. “We believe in the American Dream, not the socialist nightmare,” he averred at one point. “Now you have a president who finally standing up for America.” The future, he said “does not belong to those who believe in socialism. The future belongs to those who believe in freedom. I’ve said it before and will say it again: America will never be a socialist country.” That’s a line that may not work forever, but it will almost certainly get the job done in 2020.

As previously noted, the media is going to re-elect Trump. Because they still don’t understand how they got Trump.

46 thoughts on “Trump’s CPAC Speech”

  1. Such an exaggeration. Even in Canada there are still private health care providers. Even the most vehemently left wingers in the USA only want to make a state health – insurance – system.

      1. Obama? He did not even make an universal state health insurance system. He just forced people into buying some private health insurance similar to what RomneyCare did or what is done in Switzerland.

      2. Obama would be considered right-wing here in Europe. In fact we’s more right-winged than most of our right-winged parties.

        You guys are so far right in several regards that your concept of left is kinda weird to us.

          1. In case I wasn’t explicit. No he isn’t. He’s not even left wing, let alone vehemently so.

          2. “In case I wasn’t explicit. ”

            You were wordy, polemic and hyperbolic.

            “No he isn’t. He’s not even left wing, let alone vehemently so.”

            ….and you continue to be such.

        1. Left/Right are vastly different in Europe and the USA. Europeans generally have little, if any, understanding of American political ideologies.

      3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland

        Contrast that with the healthcare systems used in most of Europe, or in fact, most of the civilized world.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Service
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_France
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Canada

        Even Russia has universal health care. You would have to go to a third world shithole or a place like China to find a place without some form of comprehensive health care coverage policy.

        1. The NHS is at least as bad as the Canadian systems. Ever heard of ‘The Liverpool Care Pathway’ (aka ‘starving old farts to death’)?

          A couple of years ago I saw a great propaganda video from the 40s or 50s when Labour were trying to sell nationalized healthcare to the proles, and one of the big selling points, you see, was that nationalized healthcare would make everyone so healthy that after a few years very few people would need to go to a doctor or hospital because they’d be super-healthy.

          Of course, in the real world, the NHS is now one of Europe’s largest employers, and is sucking the UK economy dry.

          Oh, and I read the other day that half of the NHS doctors want to retire in the next five years, because they’re tired of working for the government. I’m guessing the rest are probably the female doctors who say they only want to work part-time.

          Better hope medical AI is ready to roll very soon.

          (None of this is to imply that American healthcare isn’t a huge mess. But it’s a huge mess because of government interference in the market; it worked fine until around WWII, when ‘Progress’ really took off.)

          1. Compared to what?

            And the trend of increase in life expectancy in the UK roughly halved when the NHS was founded.

            1891-1951, life expectancy increased by a near-constant 0.395 years per year.
            1951-2011, life expectancy increased by a near-constant 0.188 per year.

            Those are female life expectancies, but male aren’t much different. And the step change may have occurred up to ten years earlier than that, because I can only find decadal figures.

            The NHS was founded in 1948.

            It’s possible this is a coincidence, but it would be quite surprising if there was a step change in the increase of life expectancy right at the time that healthcare was nationalized, which had nothing to do with the radical change in healthcare that occurred at that time.

            And let’s not forget that new treatments are crippled by socialist ‘safety’ organizations like the FDA. Who knows how much life expectancy would have gone up without them?

        2. In another thread, Gojira was claiming US real wage was stagnant or decreased over the past year, when both the Federal Reserve and BLS note real wage buying power increased by 1.6% year over year in the US. So after he was called out as having a bad ability to perceive what’s happening in the US; he’s in this thread spouting other nonsense.

          It would be nice if imperial Europeans would quit telling the rest of the world how we should live like them (20% less income and tiny homes).

          1. The left used to claim that socialism would provide everyone with everything they ever wanted. All we had to do is support The Great Leader and we’d be living in Utopia.

            Now, after socialism has been proven to produce little more than long queues and mass murder, they claim that wanting things is bad, and socialism is better precisely because it can’t produce the things people want.

          2. I didn’t say the time period.

            How novel of a progressive to manipulate data to support an argument that can’t be measured using normally acceptable means. Care to come clean now and admit your point is meaningless as relevant information disproves it?

            you are the empire in case you didn’t notice.

            As Gregg noted in the previous thread, projection is common amongst progressives. I’ll just point out that I’m not visiting an EU based blog, making demonstrably false claims, and then telling the locals how to live their lives. That’s exactly what you are doing here, Gojira.

          3. I’m with Leland! Gojira, Edward M. Grant, and Mike Borgelt, what in particular about this blog made you think your musings from across the Earth would be welcome here?

    1. As far as I’m aware, the only ‘private health care’ we have in this province is one MRI lab which is allowed to take private patients.

      And you can’t just call them up and ask for an MRI, you have to be referred there by a government doctor.

      And, if you do, you have to pay for someone else to have an MRI at the same facility, because the government hospitals have a six month waiting list and need to offload some of the work.

      Otherwise, get in the queue and wait with the other proles.

      Yeah, it’s not a disastrous system, it’s just mediocre, like most government ‘services’. Which is why Canadians who can afford to go over the border to get healthcare.

      Commies, of course, want government healthcare for the same reason they want a cashless society. So they can cut if off for any ‘Deplorable’ at any time.

      1. It probably works great for things that are not important and are easy to treat. Then people go, “Wow, awesome! And I didn’t have to pay anything.” Forgetting that their taxes are paying for it but that the money passes through a lot of hands before it pays for their healthcare.

    2. The problem with the US healthcare is that the medical cartel is a government enforced monopoly. They charge artificially high prices and get away with it (however Martin Shkreli was the only one who got punished for artificially raising the price of Deraprim from $13 to over $700).

      Compare the cost of med cartel treatments (wrist surgery $40,000) vs non-cartel treatments (eye surgery $200 – $2,000).

      1. The problem with the US healthcare is that the medical cartel is a government enforced monopoly.

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    3. No, many Democrats want a government owned and run healthcare system and take incremental steps toward that goal, like Obamacare.

      Obamacare was a fascist take over of the insurance and medical industries where the Democrat party abused the reins of power to control the means of production without owning it.

      Single customer health care is a terrible idea and it is only able to be implemented in in countries that rely on the USA to drive innovation and provide budgetary support.

  2. I also have not seen anyone pushing anything other than state subsidies on renewables. I have not seen anyone proposing to make it state run. Although there have been similar efforts done in that past like, horror, the TVA, which actually worked quite well.

    1. They you must not have seen where Obama stated he was going to price coal out of the market by making the cost of opening a new coal powered plant so problematic and expensive that no business could do it.

      That’s direct government interference with an industry…choosing winners and losers.

      You sound like yet another 12 year old Euro-weenie who thinks they can read a couple of news articles and become an expert on US politics.

      1. Not just picking a loser but abusing the power of the government in order to stop people from engaging in a legal activity.

    2. There are always roles for government but the question is whether or not the role is the best choice or if it is something the government should be doing. The problem is that today, we have a bunch of people who think roads and parks are socialism and then think that because we have roads and parks that government should own and control everything.

  3. Euroweenies are just disgusting, state smothered serfs.
    Australia has a state provided medical care system for all. Really great as long as you don’t mind waiting. Even the private system seems to have rationing for health care for those over 70. You REALLY need to be pro-active and pushy to get it even though you are paying for it in your premiums and gap coverage..

  4. From the outside, Donald Trump appears to me to be the last defender of western civilization. What was that about how “the citizens sleep undisturbed because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”?
    DJT is merely sometimes a little uncouth. Boo hoo. It is usually justified against communist scum.

    1. Uncouth when dealing with people who have never been civil or treated anyone with civility.

      Trump was mean to a reporter? The same reporter who called him a NAZI and ran articles about Russian collusion based on propaganda spoon fed them illicitly by the Democrats?

      Trump was mean to a politician? The same politician whose party organized violent mobs to try and shut down the inauguration?

      Trump’s behavior is much like the climate of violence in the country. Trump would be nice, just like there would be no violence, if Democrats acted like adults rather than a bag of d***s all the time.

      It is nice to have someone stand up and fight back because regular people have been getting the same treatment Trump gets for decades now.

  5. IIRC the Duke of Wellington had something to say about the ‘brutal and licentious soldiery”. Also “I don’t know if they frighten the enemy but by God, they frighten me.”
    Kipling too: “For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! ”
    But it’s ” Saviour of ‘is country ” when the guns begin to shoot; “

  6. –Gojira
    March 3, 2019 At 5:56 PM
    I didn’t say the time period.
    And you are the empire in case you didn’t notice–

    Hmm. Let us count the empires. The United States as it’s name indicates is an empire. Of course so is the EU.
    But one could say US is part of other empires- NATO being a military alliance. And being leading Member of UN. Pax America [Pax Americana, wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana ].
    But we counting empires- Iran was and is empire [within it bordered country- not to give get it’s effort to build back it’s empire]. China is likewise, plus it’s take over of Tibet, and etc.
    You have African Union- which is in process establishing itself -and looks promising.
    British commonwealth of nations- that, one could say, a fairly old hobby or habit of the British Monarchy. And in terms religious type things, the Vatican Catholic priests [particularly significant in terms of Latin America and Africa].
    Likewise, Islamic- Shia and Sunni. And that is complicated, but could limit it in terms of efforts to build and maintain mosques globally, and this regard, Saudi Arabia is central player in this.
    I don’t know if could count India, itself as empire, or the non aligned countries that India is a member of as a empire. And have Pacific Island group and such things. Mormons, Protestants, or Comic Con
    might likewise be counted.

          1. So US is not an empire, but rather it has destroyed empires.
            How many empires can we say that the US has at least played a role in ending?

  7. The last President I could stand to listen to for more than two minutes at a time was Reagan. Since then, if I’m interested in a speech, I read the transcript.

    1. I made it to W’s 2003 SOTU. Haven’t listened to any speech of any length since then. People misconstrue the speech and actions matter more anyway.

      I don’t know if I ever even read a transcript coming from CPAC. I repeat myself, actions matter.

      1. People also seem to think that Presidential speeches were written by the President rather than by writers. It is very easy to produce something in advance that appeals to people but much harder to do the actions. Often times, speeches are meant to distract from the actions, so it is always more important to look at what is actually happening and not what was said.

    2. With Trump, you are better off listening as his manner of speech is very conversational and doesn’t translate very well into text.

      Trump gives speeches similar to Obama though, where parts of them sound good but lack structure and points don’t always support each other.

  8. I was highly amused a couple of years ago when the EU leaders were bragging that Europeans had finally become taller, on average, than Americans, pointing out that American heights had dropped because of our private insurance system and boasting that their own increased height over the same period proved the superiority of various European nationalized health care systems.

    The tallest group of Americans are blacks, so by the EU’s statement blacks must have better health care than whites. I’m glad we solved that!

    As an aside, American height dropped because our new average included tens of millions of Indians and Mestizos from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, who are genetically quite short. I’d venture that millions of Syrians and Afghanistanis will be dragging the European average down, too.

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