Donald Trump vs. the World
The biggest game of political chicken is being played. Does anyone win here?
by Melissa Mackenzie
January 31, 2022, 10:32 PM
The 2024 presidential race has begun and Donald Trump comes spoiling for a fight. Trump drew the battle lines when he spoke to over 50,000 Texans for 80 minutes Saturday night at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds outside Conroe, Texas. I was there. It was an intense ride.
A little background before sharing my thoughts on the event: I covered the Tea Party for years all across the country. I traveled to D.C. and covered two marches on the Capitol. I attended the first Tea Party rally in the state of Texas and reported from there. Tea Party rallies are where I met and covered Andrew Breitbart, Sarah Palin, and many other notables.
Tea Partiers basically divided along two lines: There were the small government types who wanted to be left alone. This faction was made up of small business owners. Women started the Tea Party organizations on behalf of the businesses they and their husbands ran. They protested taxes and big bailouts of banks. They thought the bailouts were grossly unfair since small businesses weren’t rescued. They wanted no rescues. They wanted fewer taxes and regulations.
The second part of the Tea Party was folks who hated the big bank bailouts because they felt that if the government was going to help anyone, it should be the individual. These are the populists. They felt Social Security was a right. They often believed in socialized medicine. They were many times socially liberal. I met many abortion-indifferent people of this stripe in the Tea Party. There would be little difference between these folks and Bernie Bros. The only quibble? Potential solutions, but maybe not even that.
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https://spectator.org/donald-trump-v-the-world/
