Trump the Fighter: A Meeting With the President in the Oval Office - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Trump the Fighter: A Meeting With the President in the Oval Office
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President Trump in the Oval Office last Christmas (Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday, the Democrats of the House struck out. Their star impeachment witnesses were duds who put on public display the utter arrogance of Washington elites who believe that they and they alone run American foreign policy — and not the elected president of the United States.

So what of that president? How is he doing in the middle of all of this? As it happens, after spending an hour with the president in the Oval Office, I can tell you.

Let’s start here with this Washington Post story on the soon-to-be-released book from “Anonymous” — a presumed Trump administration official — with the oh-so-scary title A Warning.

It quotes the author as writing this, among other things, of President Trump:

I am not qualified to diagnose the president’s mental acuity. All I can tell you is that normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. Those who would claim otherwise are lying to themselves or to the country.

Well, now. Got that? Anonymous says that “normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness.”

As it happens, I can easily take Anonymous up on that challenge.

Anonymous’ claims, not to put too fine a point on it, are bald-faced lies. How do I know? On Tuesday, November 5, I, your basic “normal person,” personally spent over an hour with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office with two other “normal people”: the founder of The American Spectator, Bob Tyrrell, and Wlady Pleszczynski, the Spectator’s editorial director. For our entire visit, the president was energized, focused, completely up on all topics discussed, and in decided good humor. He is totally up for the impeachment fight and most assuredly will be happily fighting back. He is indeed a happy warrior.

The president illustrated quite vividly, up close and personal, that what Anonymous said about him — and no, Anonymous, you were never mentioned, much less discussed — is absolutely false. Were the president in the shape Anonymous describes, it would be impossible to hide, as Anonymous himself/herself makes perfectly clear when saying that “normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness.”

My colleagues and I did exactly what Anonymous said to do — and suffice to say we saw absolutely nothing amiss. To the contrary. In fact, we marveled at Donald Trump’s upbeat spirit and his eagerness to take on his critics. What we did witness was a seriously great president of the United States doing his job — and loving every minute of it.

Let’s be clear. What Anonymous is really about is propaganda in book form. Read some of the other things that the Post article quotes from the book, like this:

I’ve sat and listened in uncomfortable silence as he talks about a woman’s appearance or performance. He comments on makeup. He makes jokes about weight. He critiques clothing. He questions the toughness of women in and around his orbit. He uses words like “sweetie” and “honey” to address accomplished professionals. This is precisely the way a boss shouldn’t act in the work environment.

In other words, Anonymous is one seriously uptight politically correct prude. Among the many reasons Donald Trump was elected, a major one was that millions of Americans have had it with the fascism of political correctness. Anonymous apparently wasn’t reading the Washington Post on January 4, 2016, as it was dawning on the fake news media that the Trump campaign was taking off. The headline:

Why Trump may be winning the war on ‘political correctness’

The Post story began this way:

Cathy Cuthbertson once worked at what might be thought of as a command post of political correctness — the campus of a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio.

You know, I couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And when we wrote things, we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone, but nobody’s afraid of offending me,” the former administrator said.

All of which helps explain why the 63-year-old grandmother showed up at a recent Donald Trump rally in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where she moved when she retired a year ago.

The Republican front-runner is “saying what a lot of Americans are thinking but are afraid to say because they don’t think that it’s politically correct,” she said. “But we’re tired of just standing back and letting everyone else dictate what we’re supposed to think and do.”

One of the reasons Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office in the first place is that millions of Americans like Cathy Cuthbertson are tired of the politically correct nonsense that Anonymous clearly personifies. It is the stuff of hyper-sensitive, would-be totalitarians who are obsessed with dictating the behavior of anyone with whom they disagree — and millions of Americans are sick of it. So too is the president.

Invited to spend some time with the president, my colleagues and I marveled afterwards at the man we saw close-up. We had all gotten to know him long before he was president. Way back on June 3, 2013, I wrote the following in a column titled “Never Ignore Donald Trump”:

Trump is also, as might be expected with such a successful person, someone who has taken the time to pass on the wisdom he’s gained from his life in book form. My personal favorite is my dog-eared copy of Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life that was written with Bill Zanker, the President/Founder of The Learning Annex.

The book is filled with wise observations about having what it takes to succeed, the importance of having passion for what you do, never taking your eye off the ball and more. In an era when, tragically, so many people are unnecessarily going through hard economic times because of Obamanomics, Trump’s advice is as pointed as it is correct. 

One of my favorites:

“Worry, fear, and indecision destroy focus. To take charge of your life you must conquer fear. My advice is simply to zap every negative thought as soon as it shows its ugly face. Stop the indecisive internal dialogue before it starts. That is your biggest enemy. You can have enemies at your door, deal with financial crises, fight legal battles, and face the biggest difficulties in life, and none of these things will have any effect on you if you control your mental dialogue…. Keep focused on your goal and never give up. Besides, bad times bring great opportunities.”

That was exactly the mentality that the president displayed last week. There were zero negative thoughts in our conversation. There was no “indecisive internal dialogue” on display. The president was 100 percent in control of his “mental dialogue.” He was a sterling example of the wisdom that he wrote about in his book: “Keep focused on your goal and never give up. Besides, bad times bring great opportunities.”

The topics we discussed with the president were wide-ranging. As someone who has worked for a president, I’m a strong believer that one doesn’t have a conversation with a president and then spill the details. But it is certainly permissible to describe the man, his mood, his state of mind. And it is very safe to say that Bob, Wlady, and I walked out of the White House that Tuesday night seriously impressed by the man we saw behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.

In contrast, the House impeachment Democrats who ran this assault on due process and American values in the opening round of these impeachment hearings could not hold a candle to the man we saw in the Oval Office.

America and Americans are approaching the holiday season, the end of the year. If I learned anything from this time with President Trump, it is that when the new year arrives and the election bell is rung, the president who will take his case for reelection to the American people is not only up to the task but is also a well-honed, focused fighter whose opponents have seriously misjudged him — just as they have misjudged the American people.

If ever there were a president who should be sitting in the chair behind that desk, it is President Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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