A Skeptic’s View of Campaign Politics

My inner skeptic – we all have one --is a skeptic’s skeptic. The word “skeptic” is yet to be used as a political cudgel by incumbent politicians and those who look favorably upon them, unlike such battering rams as “Nazi” and “Fascist.” Connecticut US Senator Chris Murphy has notably deployed his moral brickbat against President Donald Trump, nearly universally reprehended in New England, New York and Connecticut, the “land of steady [bad] habits.

 

“We must not,’ my skeptic says, “expect to see on Connecticut editorial or Op-Ed pages commentary in praise of Trump. Victor Davis Hanson, an astute political historian and commentator, wrote a book a few years ago titled provocatively The Case for Trump. The book has since been updated. The Epoch Times recently ran an analytical piece titled, “30 Ways Trump Impacted the US, World in First Year.” There is no question, even among Trump’s most energetic opponents, that Trump stands at the head of a transformative presidency.

 

Factually reported last year there are numerous “… Democrats and public figures who made or were reported as making Hitler or Nazi comparisons. Examples in the reviewed material include Hillary Clinton, Jerry Nadler, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Gore, Rep. Dan Goldman, Rep. Maxwell Frost, and Sen. Chris Murphy, and the Biden-Harris campaign account, with publication dates ranging from mid-2024 through late 2025. The claims vary in tone and specificity: some officials issued categorical warnings about fascism’s presence, while social-media content made sharper visual claims equating Trump to Hitler.”

 

Political campaigns introduce into partisan politics an uncertainty principle that is the enemy of rational thought. Consider ICE detentions of convicted criminal illegal immigrants by way of example.

 

Having been battered for weeks concerning the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, disarmed before he was shot in a confusing arrest scrimmage, Trump proposed a deal: If politicians in Minneapolis will modify their sanctuary policies to allow police in the state to coordinate information and activity in the case of known violent illegal aliens, some of whom have committed crimes in the US, then U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will reduce its numbers in Minneapolis – because they will no longer be needed to assure the safety of federal police authorities and citizens. It takes two ICE agents to apprehend criminal illegals but six to wedge such illegals from sanctuary cities that impose barriers on ICE agents. Alex Pretti, it may be mentioned in passing, is not the mild mannered St. Francis that has appeared in many news accounts. The Department of Justice has launched a civil rights investigation into the Pretti shooting.

 

The Trump plan is a workable one that answers many of the objections of fair-minded politicians and reporters: Allow ICE to rid city streets in Minneapolis of known criminal illegal aliens and there will no longer be a need for an enhanced federal police presence in the city. This cannot be done so long as obstructive sanctuary city barriers continue to exist between federal, state and municipal police authorities. The sharing of information alone will serve to dispel the tortured anxieties of political moralists such as Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy.

 

“This president,” Murphy asserted in a recent interview, “has lost any political advantage he has on the issue of immigration and border security, because people don’t believe anything that’s happening in Minneapolis has to do with border security. But it’s not really an issue about immigration or border security any longer. It’s an issue of abuse of power. It’s an issue of humanity and morality.”

 

Sorry, everything happening in Minneapolis is centered on border security. Murphy should tell his constituents precisely how ICE, or indeed the police authority in Minneapolis once ICE has been abolished, as Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner has suggested, or stripped of its necessary policing authority by overzealous reformers, may arrest and deport lawbreakers in the illegal-entry community when necessary communications between ICE and Minneapolis police are short-circuited by politicians hunkered down in political campaigns.

 

My inner-skeptic is telling me that campaigning has supplanted sound political decision-making. Democrat politicians seem unusually eager to burn down the house to catch a mouse. Why else would leading Democrats such as US Senator Chuck Schumer seek to repeat the closing down of government in the United States a second time, when the first months-long closing has given birth to disastrous and insupportable consequences? Fool me once, the old and reliable political apothegm goes, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.