2016 and 2018
Inasmuch as the Republican president with his Republican Congress by Election 2018 had delivered what may be the greatest prosperity and peace since before Vietnam, and inasmuch as the popular approval for Congress since the Democrat capture of the House of Representatives, the last I looked in on it, was drawing near to single digits, I can't but wonder whether the Democrat majority in the House owes in some part to a critical mass of impressionable voters who after two years of investigations and of hysterical reportage on those investigations imagined that their Republican president had somehow "stolen" his election and was somehow an "agent" of a hostile foreign power, and thus demanded countering by a hostile House. I can't but wonder whether, had the special counsel proclaimed Trump exonerated on the fantastical charge against him of conspiracy with Russia, in time for Election Day, Trump's Republican Party might've held the House. I can't but wonder whether the investigation into interference in the election of 2016 -- which concluded that Russia never flipped a vote and Trump and his campaign never touched Russia with a pole -- might itself have interfered in the election of 2018.
2018 and 2020
Counting every heartbreaker -- all those narrow margins decided days and weeks after the vote or decided by those "provisional ballots" so conspicuous in their usefulness to Democrats -- the Democrat majority in the House amounts to 18 seats, and no fewer than 31 of that majority represent districts which voted in 2016 to make a president of Donald Trump. Take as a case-study the fifth of Oklahoma's five Congressional districts, the most metropolitan in OK, taking in most of Oklahoma City and a couple outlying counties. OK-5 flipped on November 6 from R to D, but by 50.7 to 49.3%, 3,500 votes of 239,000. The district had voted Republican for better than four decades, and the balance of OK's delegation is Republican, those Republicans having won between 59 and 74% in their districts, in a "bad year" for House Republicans. So surely it's within the realm of possibility that in a presidential cycle, with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket to draw out that Trump voter and in a state that voted Trump in '16 by 66 to 29%, the turnout and the dynamic will suffice to tip OK-5 back to Republican red. And surely there are more OK-5s than one in this republic of 435 Congressional districts.
There are of course items on Trump's agenda which might on paper pass a Republican Senate and Democrat House, particularly the renewal of American infrastructure and the mitigation of prescription costs, but in light of the first hundred days of the Democrat House and Pelosi speakership it would be no more than objective observation to pronounce that the prospect of constructive, compromise legislation proceeding from the House of Representatives in the coming year-and-a-half before Election 2020, is bleak. Only so much of Trump's first-principles, American-renaissance program may be enacted by executive order or Senate confirmation. And owing to the physics of American politics and government, a re-elected President Trump may hold a Republican House in 2022 but could never expect to hold in '22 what he hadn't won in 2020, on his presidential coattails.
And so it's not enough that Trump win his re-election on November 3 of '20: he must carry with him no fewer than 18 Republicans in House districts represented today by Pelosi Democrats. Trump might appeal in so many words that "If you want me for your president then vote Republican for your Congressman, because so long as Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House there'll be no fixing what's broken," but more substantial would be the joining of Trump's presidential campaign to a nationalized Republican Congressional campaign, along the lines of the Contract with America which delivered both houses to Republicans in 1994 after four decades of frustration.
There is as of today just the one principal vulnerability for Trump and Republicans in 2020, namely healthcare, which is an injustice inasmuch as it's the Democrats alone who decreed the healthcare monstrosity that is Obamacare, but what is not unfair is the expectation of particulars, in a campaign and on healthcare most of all. It's this nobody-with-a-blog's plea that Trump and every Republican standing for Congress, before September of next year, agree to a simplified and nationalized joint platform, covering especially healthcare, as in "President Trump and a Republican Congress will in the next two years enact legislation on healthcare which affirms the guarantees for pre-existing conditions, provides for those truly needy Americans ineligible for Medicare or Medicaid and uncovered by insurance through employers, and for the first time cuts the cost of healthcare in America, by instituting subsidized 'high-risk pools', and by abolishing the prohibition on barebones, emergency-only insurance policies, and by opening insurance to competition from out-of-state." Joining the Trump campaign to a nationalized Republican campaign for Congress, committing president and Congress both to action and to particulars, may well assuage those mostly-female voters swayed in 2018 by the cynical Democrat campaign reduced to "pre-existing conditions", and at the same time make a down-the-line-Republican of the Trump voter, delivering to Trump the presidency and the Congress and the future.
A word on afros
Afros are outlandish and surely they can only be impractical -- 45 minutes every morning in the mirror -- and history teaches us that impractical styles are fleeting, and that outlandish styles look the most dated and comic to posterity.
Inasmuch as the Republican president with his Republican Congress by Election 2018 had delivered what may be the greatest prosperity and peace since before Vietnam, and inasmuch as the popular approval for Congress since the Democrat capture of the House of Representatives, the last I looked in on it, was drawing near to single digits, I can't but wonder whether the Democrat majority in the House owes in some part to a critical mass of impressionable voters who after two years of investigations and of hysterical reportage on those investigations imagined that their Republican president had somehow "stolen" his election and was somehow an "agent" of a hostile foreign power, and thus demanded countering by a hostile House. I can't but wonder whether, had the special counsel proclaimed Trump exonerated on the fantastical charge against him of conspiracy with Russia, in time for Election Day, Trump's Republican Party might've held the House. I can't but wonder whether the investigation into interference in the election of 2016 -- which concluded that Russia never flipped a vote and Trump and his campaign never touched Russia with a pole -- might itself have interfered in the election of 2018.
2018 and 2020
Counting every heartbreaker -- all those narrow margins decided days and weeks after the vote or decided by those "provisional ballots" so conspicuous in their usefulness to Democrats -- the Democrat majority in the House amounts to 18 seats, and no fewer than 31 of that majority represent districts which voted in 2016 to make a president of Donald Trump. Take as a case-study the fifth of Oklahoma's five Congressional districts, the most metropolitan in OK, taking in most of Oklahoma City and a couple outlying counties. OK-5 flipped on November 6 from R to D, but by 50.7 to 49.3%, 3,500 votes of 239,000. The district had voted Republican for better than four decades, and the balance of OK's delegation is Republican, those Republicans having won between 59 and 74% in their districts, in a "bad year" for House Republicans. So surely it's within the realm of possibility that in a presidential cycle, with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket to draw out that Trump voter and in a state that voted Trump in '16 by 66 to 29%, the turnout and the dynamic will suffice to tip OK-5 back to Republican red. And surely there are more OK-5s than one in this republic of 435 Congressional districts.
And so it's not enough that Trump win his re-election on November 3 of '20: he must carry with him no fewer than 18 Republicans in House districts represented today by Pelosi Democrats. Trump might appeal in so many words that "If you want me for your president then vote Republican for your Congressman, because so long as Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House there'll be no fixing what's broken," but more substantial would be the joining of Trump's presidential campaign to a nationalized Republican Congressional campaign, along the lines of the Contract with America which delivered both houses to Republicans in 1994 after four decades of frustration.
There is as of today just the one principal vulnerability for Trump and Republicans in 2020, namely healthcare, which is an injustice inasmuch as it's the Democrats alone who decreed the healthcare monstrosity that is Obamacare, but what is not unfair is the expectation of particulars, in a campaign and on healthcare most of all. It's this nobody-with-a-blog's plea that Trump and every Republican standing for Congress, before September of next year, agree to a simplified and nationalized joint platform, covering especially healthcare, as in "President Trump and a Republican Congress will in the next two years enact legislation on healthcare which affirms the guarantees for pre-existing conditions, provides for those truly needy Americans ineligible for Medicare or Medicaid and uncovered by insurance through employers, and for the first time cuts the cost of healthcare in America, by instituting subsidized 'high-risk pools', and by abolishing the prohibition on barebones, emergency-only insurance policies, and by opening insurance to competition from out-of-state." Joining the Trump campaign to a nationalized Republican campaign for Congress, committing president and Congress both to action and to particulars, may well assuage those mostly-female voters swayed in 2018 by the cynical Democrat campaign reduced to "pre-existing conditions", and at the same time make a down-the-line-Republican of the Trump voter, delivering to Trump the presidency and the Congress and the future.
A word on afros
Afros are outlandish and surely they can only be impractical -- 45 minutes every morning in the mirror -- and history teaches us that impractical styles are fleeting, and that outlandish styles look the most dated and comic to posterity.
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