May 29, 2023
Trump Critics Need to Stop Complaining about 'Baggage'
By Rajan Laad
The criticisms that some conservative critics of President Trump have is that he had too much "baggage."
The "baggage" is Trump's confrontational style, his "mean" social media posts, and the myriad "scandals" during his administration. They complain that Trump's "baggage" makes him impossible to defend. They complain that Trump often invites trouble.
In Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, they think they have their ideal candidate: someone who purportedly stands for the MAGA agenda but is devoid of "baggage."
So does the "baggage" make Trump a target?
The eminent thinker and military historian Victor David Hanson enumerated the "baggage" that President Trump doesn't have but the Democrats do.
1) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by destroying federally subpoenaed emails and devices in order to hide evidence.
2) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by sending classified government communications on her own, through an unsecured home-brewed server.
3) Trump did not violate federal law, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiring a foreign national, who is prohibited from working on presidential campaigns, to compile a dossier to smear her presidential opponent.
4) Trump did not violate federal campaign laws, as did Hillary Clinton, by hiding her payments (as "legal services") to Christopher Steele through bookkeeping deceptions.
5) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, use a crony to search out a high-paying New York job for a paramour in order to influence her testimony before a special counsel.
6) Trump did not, as did Bill Clinton, receive a $500,000 "honorarium" for speaking in Moscow while his wife, our secretary of state, approved a longstanding and lucrative desire of the Kremlin for North American uranium to be sold to a Russian consortium.
7) Trump did not, as did Obama, promise Putin that he would be "flexible" on "missile defense" if during his own reelection bid Putin in return would give him "space". That quid pro quo arrangement led to the U.S. abandonment of key joint missile defense systems with Poland and the Czech Republic, and, reciprocally, less than two years later a Russian invasion, mostly unopposed by the United States, of eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.
8) Trump did not boast publicly, as did Joe Biden, that he used U.S. foreign aid monies as leverage to have the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor who may have been looking into the Biden family's efforts to sell influence to corrupt Ukrainian interests.
9) Trump did not, as the Bidens did, set up a family consortium to leverage monies from Ukraine, Russia, and China, on their shared expectations that he might soon run for and be elected president and become compromised. Trump is not mentioned, as is Joe Biden, in family business communications as a recipient of a 10 percent commission on such payoffs.
10) Trump did not, unlike Biden, remove presidential papers—without any authority to declassify them—and leave them scattered and unsecured in a garage and various residences and offices.
11) Trump did not, as did private citizen and former Secretary of State John Kerry, meet clandestinely while out of the office with Iranian officials to help them resist current U.S. policy toward Iran—or what the Boston Globe characterized as "unusual shadow diplomacy" to "apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside.
12) Trump did not, unlike Biden patronizingly call Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."
13) Trump did not, unlike Biden dismiss two black journalists, respectively with the putdowns "you ain't black" and "junkie."
14) Trump did not, unlike Biden refer to two prominent people of color as "boy."
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/trump_critics_need_to_stop_complaining_about_baggage.html
