(Freedom.news) As most who have been following the presidential primaries know, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush suspended his bid for the GOP nomination on Saturday after finishing fourth in the South Carolina primaries well behind the winner, billionaire Donald Trump.
Bush was humble in acknowledging that his candidacy was not resonating the way he intended, and while he avoided naming names, it was easy to sense his frustration that someone as serious as him could lose out to what we are sure he believes is little more than a circus act.
But the thing is, that circus act (yes, of course Bush is intimating Trump) has led in the polls since the day he announced his candidacy with a rousing (and, frankly, honest) assessment of one of the biggest concerns among Americans these days: Illegal immigration.
Trump followed up that speech with a series of others littered with statements and claims that, in “normal” political times, would have finished off a less shrewd candidate. Trump didn’t seem to get hurt by anything he said or continues to say; in fact, the more candid he is – or appears to be – the higher he has risen in the polls, and the better he has done on primary day.
He led from the beginning, and Trump hasn’t looked back since.
Other than the narrow defeat in Iowa, Trump has sailed to victory in each state since, and while he may find some difficult waters ahead as primaries move out of his Nor’eastern comfort zone to the South and West, on the surface anyway it doesn’t appear that there is much left standing in Trump’s way to the Republican nomination.
The party elders are cringing at this prospect as they have since Trump began making believers out of them – but if there is anyone to “blame” for the Trump phenom in the Republican Party, it is those who are at its helm, both in Washington and in the party hierarchy.
What’s more, they can’t say voters didn’t warn them.
Since 2010 GOP voters in increasing numbers have been sending messages to the GOP establishment that a) there are key policy changes voters would like to see their elected members pursue; and b) those policy priorities were important enough that Republican voters have steadily given the party record- or near-record majorities in Washington, in statehouses across the country and in state legislatures.
However, on the national level at least, the party has not just consistently under-performed and under-delivered, but its elders (and their donors) have either actively pursued policies anathema to the voters who sent them to D.C. to reign in the lawless Obama regime, or have given up key legislative powers to the president which have helped him achieve his objectives – without majority Republicans achieving any of the policy objectives important to GOP voters.
And each time Republican leaders have caved they have justified the surrender with lame excuses and empty promises of returning to “fight another day” – you know, beginning when Bush took office next January.
So much for that.
Voters – Republicans, yes, but also some Democrats and Independents – aren’t buying in anymore. In fact, they have increasingly rejected the GOP establishment (as well as the Democratic establishment) in favor of someone, anyone, who is speaking the voter’s language and pledging to finally, thankfully, take up their banner.
Voters are fed up with the failure of Obamacare; they are tired of seeing Americans lose jobs to immigrants; they are sick of seeing their sovereign borders be a sieve for the world’s underclasses; they have had enough of the cronyism where government picks winners and losers and always at the expense of the people; and what’s more, they are tired of paying for all of it.
Americans everywhere sense a political and economic suppression like most have never felt in their lives, and they see someone like Trump who doesn’t want to rise above it but rather wants to destroy it on his way through the house. It isn’t a question of whether Trump will actually accomplish the feat, but enough Americans certainly believe that he can and, to his credit, he regularly says he will with a simple campaign slogan that is as brilliant in today’s political climate as it is prescient: “Make America Great Again.”
Tens of millions of voters have asked themselves when the last time was they heard a president (or a presidential candidate) say something like that, and they can’t recall it. But they like it because they know instinctively that for the past seven years at least and probably longer, there have been political and economic forces at work to make America not so great anymore. The Establishment of both parties is being blamed (and rightfully so).
Jeb Bush was so emblematic of that ruling establishment class that his candidacy, really, was over before it began. Maybe a sense of entitlement, or hubris, prevented him from seeing that, but then again, those are the same personality traits that doomed him from the get-go because the ruling establishment class embodies both.
Americans are speaking clearly this election cycle, and any career politician that cares to be honest is hearing that message loud and clear and interpreting it correctly: We the People won’t tolerate anymore political and economic abuse and chicanery. We’ve had enough of the lies and the self-serving attitudes. And we’re so tired of the system that has been implemented by the elites that we’re willing to put all our eggs into a candidate’s basket who promises he’s not one of them and who then actually demonstrates it.
There is a ways to go before we know for sure who will win the GOP nomination. But Trump’s rise in and of itself is significant in that it has completely defied political logic and turned the political process on its ear, and that’s exactly what needed to happen for official Washington to get the message that its charges in “flyover country” are not just restless but fed up.
The dispatch of another Bush (and a Kasich and a Christie) ought to convince the establishment once and for all the GOP base isn’t bluffing this time around. Let’s hope they glean the right message from our rejection.
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