Basing opinions on facts
A life-long friend asked me, in a confidential tone of voice: “What do you think of Trump?”
It turns out she is a Trump fan. I asked what she liked about the 45th president of the United States.
She liked that he wanted to build a wall on the border with Mexico. “My family came here legally,” she said, contrasting the experience of her relatives with today’s immigrants, many of whom entered the country without checking in first with authorities.
She liked that the president was a businessman. She felt it gave him an edge up on job creation.
Was she disturbed by Trump’s antics, both as candidate and as president? I asked.
“I think we needed someone who was OK with throwing a monkeywrench into the works,” she said, or words to that affect. For her, the country has veered so far off-course that it needs a radical readjustment.
Donald Trump was the man for the job. “I don’t think he’s very couth,” she said. But that’s just the way she likes it. For now, at least.
Here’s the thing: My friend got her facts wrong. Illegals have not, until recently, been flowing over the border pretty much at will. I pointed out that more illegals were leaving the country than were coming in, a trend that went back several years to the Obama administration. In addition, Obama’s Immigration and Naturalization Service deported more people than just about any administration in history.
That wasn’t her understanding at all, she said. She knew people who knew people who live and work on the border. They confirm the job Trump has done in stopping illegals from coming in. It stood in sharp contrast with the Obama record.
As for jobs, she said, young people were now able to secure employment with a fair amount of ease. Suppressed during Obama’s time in office, jobs were now plentiful.
She wasn’t buying the fact that Obama came into office facing mounting job losses due to the bursting of the housing bubble, and, despite this, had managed to stabilize the economy in a relatively short space of time before launching the recovery that continues to unfold today.
Now, I found it hard to argue against her idea that Washington requires a top-to-bottom mid-course correction, both because national politics has entered a phase of willful inaction that is harming the country and because it’s an opinion not subject to objective information. It was purely subjective on her part, a feeling of unease, if you will.
I suppose if my friend were asked to measure, on a 1-to-10 scale, the direction the country was headed pre-Trump, she would have given it a solid eight, or even a nine or ten, for the very worst of directions.
The question is, did she reach these conclusions based on her understanding of facts, or did it stem, and does it continue to stem, from some other, perhaps deeper, source?
I didn’t have time to inquire. The hour was late. We both had to move on.
My friend, as far as I know, is financially secure, at least up to a point; she lives — again, as far as I know — a solid middle class life.
I didn’t get this impression of the group that gathered in a Pittsburgh bar to meet with the native Pittsburgher who became CIA and National Intelligence chief, Michael Hayden.
Hayden, out of office for several years, describes the gathering with Trump voters in his latest book “The Assault On Intelligence” — intelligence, in this case, being the kind produced by the CIA for the president of the United States and others in the national security loop.
Hayden led up to the meeting with passages in the book describing “globalization” and its impact on accomplished individuals like himself (highly beneficial) and on blue-collar workers like his Pittsburgh acquaintances, several of whom he had known since childhood (not so good).
About the meeting itself, he sums up the mood of the participants this way: “For them it is still Nov. 8, 2016, and Donald Trump is still the guy.”
He quotes one man as saying, “Obama was against the country and did everything he could to undermine it.”
A Republican foreign policy type, Hayden was not an Obama national security fan. He’s even less enamored of Trump. Indeed, he is appalled by the president’s lack of judgment and sense of history, his disdain for informed decision-making, his utter disregard for the truth, and his incessant mouthing of deliberate falsehoods.
He quotes from Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny.” “‘To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”
Hayden paints a disturbing picture of Trump as president — a picture my friend would hardly recognize and would probably dismiss out of hand.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.