Trump, MAGA and Extreme MAGA
The left has developed a new system of measurement - and it is spectacular in its inaccuracy.
Establishing standard units of anything is simply a way to compare them in weight, dimension, time, or worth.
When we were living in Scotland, we discovered the “stone”. It’s a measure of weight the Brits once commonly used (and still do for personal weight) a unit based on a "stone" - which equals about 14 pounds. If you weigh 12 and a half stone, you weigh 175 pounds (not me, I was a shade over 14 stone when we were over there).
If you follow the global media and US politics, you may have noticed that Donald Trump has become the standard unit of the measure of political identification - much in the way the ounce is the base standard for weight in the US or the gram is in much of the rest of the world.
AP and other international news services have called Geert Wilders, the man in position to become the next Dutch Prime Minister, the “Dutch Donald Trump”.
Reuters called Javier Milei, the winner of the Argentine presidential elections, a “far right libertarian”. NPR called him an “ultraconservative economist” and a “radical libertarian populist”.
Both news outlets couldn’t help but to compare Wilders and Milei to Donald Trump.
You can disagree with me if you like - and no doubt, many will because that is my opinion - but Donald Trump is not a conservative, and most certainly not a libertarian. He has exhibited progressive tendencies in certain situations and issues, but largely those were impulses that never became policies.
He is also not "far right", an authoritarian, a Nazi, or a fascist, all four of which have completely lost their meaning due to misapplication and overuse. He’s not overtly anti-Islamist like Wilders and is certainly not an “anarcho-capitalist”, as Milei describes himself) – not that either of those would be bad things since we are experiencing what it means to import Islamic radicals and the Marxism of Bidenomics sure could use a jolt of Murray Rothbard or Ludwig von Mises right about now.
At best, Trump was/is a moderate Republican who pushed conservative policies because conservative policies are free market capitalist and Constitutional in nature - and above all that, they work.
In any measurement process, we calibrate our tools to a known, well-defined standard. In industry, everything is traceable back to NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology. These guys maintain primary standards for pretty much everything like atomic clocks, which serve as the basis for civilian time in the U.S.; the Kibble balance, which is the basis for all mass measurements, a device known as a Josephson junction which is the standard for the electrical volt, and the measurement standard for the meter, the unit of length, which is actually a beam of light because the meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second in empty space, or vacuum.
Not so in newsrooms around the world.
They measure things in Trump base units, an imagined “standard” that is used to fill the void of malignant ignorance inside newsrooms filled with leftist ideologies.
As of now, a Trump unit is equal to one Trump, ten Trumps equal a MAGA and ten MAGAs equal an “Extreme MAGA”, which is, of course, 1000 times worse that a Trump. The last one is the only unit Hakeem Jefferies knows.
Point being, they have no idea what a conservative or Republican really is, nor do they have an interest in finding out, so they just lump all the nasty characteristics into the Trump base unit they need him to be because if they truly measured him as a moderate Republican, that would expose just how close to Marx their masters in the Democrat Party truly are – and that can’t be allowed to happen.
But look at history – before Trump, everything bad was somehow always Bush’s fault…or Reagan’s and now it was and will be Trump’s. Trump is now so eponymous, so imbedded in opposition to everything progressive proglodytes propose, do, or say (including the media) nothing they can propose, do or say is without referencing President Trump.
I once proposed that such is so pervasive that going forward in history, a “MAGA” may become a unit of measure for the extend of failures of progressivism. The more they mention Trump or MAGA, the farther to left they are.
But they can’t allow you to know how far that really is.
Imagine the leftistists of today trying to understand and use a Goldwater.
Comical... or would be, if it wasn't so true.
And, I completely agree that Trump wasn't much of a conservative, and I'm thankful some of his progressive ideas didn't take hold. Where he was conservative, though, he did great. Justices, for instance.
Sadly, we're seeing some of that same tendency in Congress, with Sen. Hawley, for instance with a bill to cap credit card interest rates.