TRUMP: COMMANDER IN COMMON SENSE

Commander in Common Sense

July 31, 2017 - Family Research Council

The media and Democratic Party share a lot of things -- and their miscalculation of voters seems to be one of them. 

In the days since Donald Trump wrestled the military back from the radical transgender policy of the Obama years, liberal commentators are desperate to show that it will hurt the president politically. But good luck proving it.

Please don't tell the Left, but according to a number of pundits, the same Democrat leaders who underestimated Trump in November may be making the same mistake now. As far as most are concerned, winning the war against political correctness in the military only strengthens the president's hand in the red and purple pockets of the country that elected him. 

"Let the Dems be the transgender party," George Neumayr writes in the American Spectator. It will just make it easier for Trump to win a second term:

"Trump's uncomplicated defense of common sense is nothing if not conservative. He doesn't need 'commissions' to tell him whether or not enlisting men who pretend to be women and women who pretend to be men hurts military readiness. Anyone with five senses and a functioning intellect can see that it does. 

It is only under the vast experiment against common sense that is liberalism could such obvious truths fall into disfavor."

The only thing that confounds people like Neumayr is why some Republicans are teaming up with the Left on a failed strategy that not only cost them the White House but the congressional majority. 

"According to this confederacy of dunces, Trump is making a grave political mistake. The Dems naturally agree and have announced to the press that they 'welcome this culture war.'" No one is quite sure why, since the majority of observers blame that same social agenda for Hillary Clinton's epic collapse. 

Now, with a president in the oval office who can't be cowed by the media or its phony notions of "tolerance," voters finally have a champion for the common sense that Barack Obama rejected. That same fearlessness, Neumayr argues, is what drew people to Trump in the first place.

"In a time of terrorism, the American people are not going to punish at the polls a commander-in-chief for insufficiently prizing political correctness," he writes. "If anything, the hidden Trump vote will increase. Perhaps most parents don't want to say this out loud, but the onslaught of transgender propaganda scares the hell out of them. They don't want their sons to grow up to be mutilated 'women.' And most taxpayers don't want to pay for this grotesque delusion.

To these Americans, the Dems lift up their middle finger and declare them 'intolerant.' This gives Trump an enormous political advantage. With very little effort, he can pick off uneasy religious voters in the center while pulling down almost all of them on the right."

If the Left is surprised by these cultural course corrections, they haven't been paying attention. "The president has expressed concerns since this Obama policy came into effect [in 2016], but he's also voiced that this is a very expensive and disruptive policy," said White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

"And based on consultation that he's had with his national security team, came to the conclusion that it erodes military readiness and unit cohesion, and made the decision based on that." Trump showed the same boldness on Obama's social agenda in the first few weeks of office, rolling back a hugely unpopular school bathroom mandate. Like the military policy, it too had the broad disapproval of the American people -- including a number of leaders inside the administration.

Former Texas Governor-turned-Secretary of Energy Rick Perry sees the wisdom of Trump's ways. "I totally support the president in his decision," he told reporters. 

"The idea that the American people need to be paying for these types of operations to change your sex is not very wise from a standpoint of economics... Or military culture, says White House security aid Sebastian Gorka. 

"The military is not a microcosm of civilian society," he said on BBC Radio. 

"They are not there to reflect America. 

They are there to kill people and blow stuff up. 

They are not there to be socially engineered."

The military has never been -- and should never be -- used as a vehicle to advance civil rights, political correctness, or workplace fairness. It does not exist, the editors of the Washington Examiner point out, "for personal enrichment, leisure, community, the pursuit of happiness, or for its own sake, as civilian institutions do. 

The military's sole purpose is to smash and destroy enemies." Fortunately, our nation has a commander-in-chief who recognizes this. If November was any indication, America also has an electorate who will reward him for it.

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Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.