But then the Emperor God gave a magnificent speech in Arizona Tuesday night. Curiously, when he talks to voters—as opposed to his Cabinet and White House staff—there's very little about sending more U.S. troops to die in the human meat-grinder of Afghanistan.
Trump got thunderous applause from his 30,000-person focus group for the wall, stepped-up deportations and Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio—recently convicted of contempt for "racially profiling" Hispanics. But you could hear a pin drop when he mentioned Afghanistan, Nikki Haley and Gen. John Kelly. (At least he had the good sense not to bring up Goldman Sachs' Gary Cohn again.)
There were long faces all over cable news after Trump's speech, which surely triggers the reward center in his brain, like giving a mouse cheese.
What was so refreshingly different about the Trump campaign was that the candidate didn't use any of the idiotic, consultant-written bromides offered by every other GOP presidential candidate for at least the past 30 years. Instead, he looked around the country, saw what the problems were and said he'd fix them.
Here are the highlights from every speech by any Non-Trump candidate for the past several decades:
"I listened to the American people."
"People are frustrated."
"This election is about the future!"
It may not seem like it at first, but another one of those head-scratching cliches is: "Peace through strength." During the campaign, this was a staple of knuckleheads like Jeb!, but I'm sorry to report that our hero used it on the Arizona crowd, referring to his decision to send more troops to die in Afghanistan for no earthly purpose. The Swamp is sticky.
When Reagan said, "peace through strength," it meant something. But 30 years after Reagan won the Cold War, anyone who uses this expression conveys only that he has no understanding of the current war.
During the Cold War, America was facing an aggressively imperialistic, nuclear-armed Soviet Union. By contrast, the main threat to Americans' safety today comes not from a country, but from millions of individual savages spread throughout the globe.
Americans aren't being slaughtered by invading Soviet troops, "Red Dawn"-style, but by Islamic terrorists on tourist visas flying commercial airplanes into our skyscrapers, and by first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants setting off bombs and shooting people at the Boston Marathon, American military bases, community centers and gay nightclubs.
Americans are raped, addicted and murdered not by the Red Army, but by millions of illegal aliens waltzing across our wide-open border.
Our freedoms are being taken away not by a foreign power, but by our own government—in order to protect us from terrorists, international crime rings and Mexican drug cartels operating in our own country.
Defeating a non-country adversary may seem an impossible task, but the savages are perfectly containable. Today's enemy has no capacity to harm a hair on a single American's head—as long as we don't let them come here.
We don't need a military victory. We need an immigration moratorium.
The Non-Trump Republicans promised us only more immigration and more wars. PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!
How does a military buildup help Kate Steinle? How about the 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11? Did Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan protect soldiers at Fort Hood or nightclubbers in Orlando? Did it do anything for Grant Ronnebeck, who was fatally shot by an illegal alien robbing a convenience store in Mesa, Arizona, in 2015?
More than 1,600 American troops died in Afghanistan under Obama, and not one American is safer.
All we need to do to win the current war is: Keep our nuclear weapons in working order and stop allowing enemy forces into our country. If we must have troops constantly deployed somewhere, the only place they'd actually be useful is 10 feet into Mexico. (Let a court try to stop that!)
During the campaign, Little Marco dismissed as unrealistic Trump's proposed temporary suspension of Muslim immigration to our country—including the more than 2 million Muslims we've taken in just since 9/11. Instead, Rubio proposed we do something achievable, like remake the entire Middle East with wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.
Trump, and only Trump, promised to put our country first and protect our interests when it came to immigration and foreign wars. He didn't care that political correctness dictated putting America's interests dead last.
But since becoming president, instead of draining the swamp, the swamp seems to have drained Trump. His agenda has been drowned out by the agenda of Washington's Uni-Party.
That's why all we ever hear about is tax cuts and war (unless Trump is speaking to one of his 30,000-person focus groups).
Rather than actually being like Reagan and winning the war we're in, Trump has decided to continue Obama's unconstitutional "executive amnesty"—opposition to which gave the GOP stunning victories in 2014 and 2016. This week, he grabbed the hot poker of Afghanistan, allowing ecstatic Democrats to scratch that disaster off Obama's Greatest Hits list. Now, it's Trump's war.
I don't know why Trump would surround himself with people who oppose his agenda, but on Tuesday night he heard again from the people who see him as our country's last hope. He should listen to them.
COPYRIGHT 2017 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION
Ann Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and is the author of TWELVE New York Times bestsellers—collect them here.
Her book, ¡Adios America! The Left’s Plan To Turn Our Country Into A Third World Hell Hole, was released on June 1, 2015. Her latest book is IN TRUMP WE TRUST: E Pluribus Awesome
