Ted Cruz says that the people voting for Donald Trump are disengaged and badly informed. Is he right? My readers know that the articles I've written since Donald Trump entered the GOP nominating process have been uniformly critical of Mr. Trump's long con. His aim is to destroy the conservative brand once and for all. He is so far poised to achieve devastating success. It would be foolish for me or any other sincere conservative to trust in any of his promises. He epitomizes the fatal demagoguery America's founders foresaw as the tyrant's path to overthrowing constitutional self-government in the United States.
Naturally, I've received negative reactions from Trump supporters on account of my articles. Some of them have been ad hominem attacks, as full of bully-boy name-calling and verbal anti-personnel ordnance as the diatribes that are typical of the would-be elitist faction tyrant they support. However, many of them come from people who put the lie to Cruz's charge that they are disengaged or ill-informed. Some are people I know and have worked with who have been and are deeply engaged in the fight to secure America's borders, restore respect and enforcement of our immigration laws and end the elitist faction's offensive against the decent heart and character of our nation.
I have even been called on the carpet by people who profess to be pro-life members of the body of Christ. They are supporting Trump because, thanks to what I recently described as his "in your face way of mimicking sincere passion," they are willing to take his statement that he is pro-life at face value. These self-professed Christians (including, I must assume, Jerry Falwell Jr.) are also not disengaged and ill informed. They know all about the unsavory aspects of Trump's moneymaking businesses, especially the various ways in which he has exploited licentious human greed and lust to make his much-touted billions.
Their willingness to be engaged to Trump exactly corresponds to Oscar Wilde's famous description of second marriages as "the triumph of hope over experience." This is obviously and exactly the mindset casino owners like Trump exploit in their gambling houses every day. The self-professed Christians who succumb to it are not ignorant and ill-informed. They have simply abandoned the mind that was in Jesus Christ, the mind that puts all trust, all faith, all hope in the Kingdom of God and his justice, sought according to His command and rule, even when the calculations of experience conclude that the quest is hopeless.
I can't understand how Sen. Cruz sees Trump's supporters as "angry," while ignoring the information, garnered from hard experience, that makes them so. He says they are ill-informed, but their anger was stoked by their experience of the GOP quisling leadership's repeated betrayals on issues involving the fundamental principles for which the GOP is supposed to stand.
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These factual betrayals inform the anger Cruz ascribes to ignorance. The problem isn't that voters driven by their anger to support Donald Trump don't know the facts. Their anger is justified by the facts. The problem is that they their gaze is so transfixed by the burning ruin of their faith in the GOP sham that they forget the underlying passion that energizes their anger, and that tinges it with sorrow and deep regret. That underlying passion is their love for the decent, free republic for which their party was supposed to stand.
It is the love of freedom, rightly used, to which America's founders gave the name of liberty. It is the love of justice, manfully pursued, the founders made the aim of America's governments. It is the love of God, the Lord of nature, humanity and truth, felt faithfully unto death, the love that hallowed the sacrifice of life and fortune in every battle, every crisis, every worthwhile victory of our nation's life, but which the self-idolizing elitists Donald Trump actually represents seek now to rip out by its Christian roots.
Preoccupied, as they are, with the anger voters feel against the treachery of the GOP's quisling establishment, Sen. Cruz neglects what ought to be the first preoccupation of true American statesmanship – for the senator and the voters he disparages are like the people God addresses in the Church in Ephesus (Revelation 2:4) when He says, "Nonetheless I have something against you, because you have left your first love. Remember therefore from whence you are fallen, and respect and do the first works; if not, I am come unto you quickly, and will remove your candlestick out of its place, if you do not repent."
In the stand he took against the injustice of slavery when he debated Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln faced the adverse prejudice of voters angered by assertions of equality between Negroes and whites. But instead of disparaging them for their prejudice, he reminded them of their first love, the love of justice according to God's will, which established the "natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence." Referring to the Negro slave, he said:
"I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects. … But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
Today America's crisis is no longer just about applying the principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is about abandoning them altogether, along with the republican form of government that promises liberty and justice for all.
That form of government includes a Constitution that entrusts the people with the sovereign responsibility to pursue justice for the sake of liberty. Sen. Cruz must do better than to respond to Donald Trump's voters in Donald Trump's way, insulting people he should be rallying to our nation's cause. He should ponder and imitate Lincoln's way – reminding voters of the love they must still feel for God-endowed right and rights, and for the republican opportunity God intends for people who are willing to respect and act upon the terms of that endowment. Instead of railing against those who have fallen prey to Trump's skillfully deceitful exploitation of America's anger, Sen. Cruz should bring that anger into focus on behalf of America's first love – the love of God and the God-revering nation dedicated to implementing His benevolent will for just and rightful liberty for all.
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