AND SO IT BEGAN

In February 2011 Trump spoke before The Conservative Political Action Conference. This was his first appearance at that annual carnival of politics and culture. He walked to the podium with the sounds of “Money, Money, Money,” filling the auditorium. This was the beginning of the end of the presidency as we know it. More importantly, in my opinion, was the keynote speech of Mitch Daniels then governor of Indiana, who was considering running for the presidency

In his remarks he called for a truce on social issues in order to focus on America’s fiscal decline. In the opinion of Tim Alberta, Daniels delivered one of the more compelling speeches by a Republican in the 21st century.

The Indiana governor had offered a “vision grounded in realism and reasonableness that elevated common purpose over cultural warfare.” But the Republican leadership determined that Donald Trump’s brand of swaggering confrontational bravado was a better fit then Daniels diagnosis of the country’s condition plus it was a sexier story for reporters to write.

Nearly a decade has passed, Trump is president and the national debt is now -$26,233,671,903,448

[SOURCE: American Carnage, Tim Alberta]

We face an enemy, lethal to liberty, and even more implacable than those America has defeated before. We cannot deter it; there is no countervailing danger we can pose. We cannot negotiate with it, any more than with an iceberg or a Great White. I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic. No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.