Op-Ed

National Fitness Month Isn’t Until May But The Democrats Are Getting Really Exercised

Getty Images/Bryan Bedder, Getty Images/Alex Wong

Timothy Philen Freelance writer
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The hooded druids of the Democratic Party have finished their Winter Solstice celebrations. And now, in the increasing daylight, they see a metaphor for their increasing chances to take back the House and Senate in the November elections.

Of course, they’ll need a strategy to win over the deplorable scum of the working-class states who handed the last election to a “completely unqualified, narcissistic trash-talking man-child” that the Democrats and their pollsters predicted would be annihilated in the Electoral College tallies.

Now, inexplicably, Democrats believe they’ve found their 2018 strategy in the billion dollar playbook of their disgraced 2016 standard bearer: Forget about policy! Just shriek incessantly about Donald Trump’s illegitimate election and his unfitness to serve as president.

And it’s already working — on Democrats, anyway.

From CNN’s smirking Don Lemon and MSNBC’s snarky Rachel Maddow to the impenetrable Maxine Waters, leftists are so energized by their obsession with the Trump victory, they open nearly every speech, newscast and panel discussion with a warning about the “dangerous” reality that the president is an incompetent and corrupt megalomaniacal agent of the Kremlin in the middle of a mental breakdown.

But now, with the publication of Michael Wolff’s titillating tabloid tales of palace intrigue in the West Wing, they are beyond enraptured. They are approaching the ecstasy of the Oracle of Delphi writhing with the prophetic pneuma of Apollo himself. They believe Wolff’s book is overwhelming proof of their claims about the fitness of this president.

And to be honest, the picture Wolff paints is more than unnerving: the stories of a new administration so chaotic it required a seasoned hand like Republican David Gergen to walk across the aisle and become the “adult in the room,” the blatant nepotism of the president allowing his unelected wife to shape governmental policy, and disturbing accounts of his personal comportment in the White House, including reports of his receiving numerous servicings of oral sex in the Oval Office from a 22-year-old intern, should be ample evidence of his unfitness to serve.

Wait a minute! I’m sorry, those are NOT rumors about Donald Trump.

Those are facts about the administration of Bill Clinton, whose fitness to serve was never questioned by these same jackals who now surround Donald Trump. In their minds, even the most lurid Clinton behaviors in no way diminished his political stature or the stately aura of the presidency.

Now they’re asking the American people to judge Donald Trump — and by extension, all Republicans — by the opposite standard: to focus on Trump’s presidential persona, and not on his policy successes.

And those successes are substantial.

He filled Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat with a reliable conservative, Neil Gorsuch, and has already filled an impressive 12 seats on the U.S. Court of Appeals and six seats on the U.S. district court.

He overturned more than 20 executive orders that President Obama had signed into law and issued 22 more of his own.

He oversaw the most sweeping tax cut legislation in the nation’s history, repealed the unpopular individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act, and enlivened American business by leveling mountains of stifling regulations, helping to double the gross domestic product in the second and third quarters of 2017.

His “get tough” rhetoric alone dramatically slowed illegal immigration along the Southwest border in 2017, and his directives to Immigration and Customs Enforcement resulted in a sharp rise in arrests and convictions of criminal aliens in the United States.

He laid down “America First” markers around the world by rejecting the unfair Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, by beginning to re-negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, and by pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, a lopsided treaty that would have crippled our economy while letting the world’s biggest polluter, China, off the hook for years to come.

And he’s calling the bluff of every terrorist state, from North Korea to Iran — putting them on notice that there’s a new sheriff in town who won’t be suckered into endless talks while nuclear arsenals are secretly built up.

If you didn’t hear much about these achievements, it’s simply because the airwaves have been jammed with non-stop flights of fancy by progressive politicians and pundits dreaming of impeachment or removal of an “incapacitated” President Trump by way of the 25th Amendment — two notions that even a writer for the liberal Huffington Post recently branded as “delusional.”

That seems a bit mean-spirited to me. After all, if you don’t have controlling power in any of the three branches of government, what are you supposed to do all day?

You get exercised, I guess — about issues like Bannon’s badmouthing of Kushner, or Scaramucci’s badmouthing of Bannon, or Trump’s badmouthing of fourth world nations — anything to keep your mind off the grim reality that while you’re screaming about our “idiot” president’s unfiltered style, he and his Republican colleagues are quietly and deliberately remaking America in the spirit of the Constitution and the original intent of the founding fathers.

Of course, if you consider the Constitution an anachronism and the founding fathers racist oppressors and misogynist pigs, that’s probably not a good thing to you.

That’s why I advise my Democrat friends to stay laser focused on the president’s fitness and hope against hope that his controversial personality will somehow affect Senate and House races this fall.

Timothy Philen is the author of Harper&Row/Lippincott’s “You CAN Run Away From It!,” a satirical indictment of American pop psychology.


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.