Voters ready to give Trump a second chance at draining the swamp
Timothy P. Carney
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COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — Donald Trump did many things as president to earn the loyalty of his supporters. Where he failed, Trump and his voters blame the “deep state,” “the swamp,” or bad counsel from his advisers.
“I trusted Trump. I think Trump f***** up when he picked [former Vice President Mike] Pence,” Carl King of Bennington, Nebraska, told me. King said he would never vote for Pence because Pence defied Trump during the events of January 6, 2021.
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This raises the question: If Trump harmed himself by hiring idiots and promoting backstabbers in his first term, why should we expect him to do any better in a second term? If he’s so bad at picking staff, how will he fight the deep state?
Chris Harter was at Trump’s Council Bluffs rally, where he told me Trump’s most important job in a second term would be to “drain the swamp.”
I replied, “He didn’t drain it last time. I live there. It’s still it’s still very full.”
“He knows different now,” Harter’s friend Ray Owens piped in.
Harter then explained how Trump’s first term got derailed: “He never had the opportunity to do anything. They brought impeachment on him from day one. How do you get things done when they are trying to impeach you? On false charges at that!”
Kim Houfek also said her priority for a second Trump term would be to “get rid of the deep state.”
Didn’t he obviously fail at that the first time around? “He would have another chance,” Kim’s husband Larry said. “The first two years, he fought the Republicans to get things done.”
Kim agreed: “He has to fight his own party.” Then she added that COVID-19 derailed some of his plans.
“You learn from your mistakes,” Kim said, “and he obviously is a guy who learns from his mistakes. He wouldn’t be where he is if he didn’t learn from his mistakes.”
Julie Fredrickson is herself a fledgling politician — she recently lost a campaign for state legislature and is now running for the local school board. Fredrickson said the Trump appointees turning on Trump are simply playing standard cynical politics, and their current criticisms should be ignored:
“Everybody has the right to sell out,” she said. “If they want to get a lobbying position after they leave the White House, they’re welcome to do that. But once they get those lobbying positions, they’re not going to support him anymore.”
But why did he appoint so many people who are by his account incompetent or corrupt? “He might have gotten bad advice,” Fredrickson said. “He wouldn’t have done that on his own.”
Larry Houfek made the same defense of Trump’s failure to drain the swamp: “Well, he trusted his advisers, and they didn’t always give him good advice.”
This doesn’t help Trump’s case, though. A president is supposed to take the blame for following bad advice. One of the skills you would want in your president is telling the difference between good advice and bad.
Fredrickson believes Trump is a changed man, though.
“When he entered the race in 2015, I don’t think he was a Christian,” she told me. “Now he’s got Christian support from all the Christians in the nation — most of them. I think that that helps him with his decisions. His decisions for his new group of people will be better.”
I asked, “What would help him make better decisions next time?”
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“God,” Fredrickson said.
Fredrickson added that Trump did make hires she liked. “He has some good people that worked for him too. But they’ve been under such attack.” Who did she have in mind? “Look at Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, and they’ve been under such attack by the Left.”