Breaking News! Trump Chooses Conservative Advisors!

Let the whining begin!  Donald Trump, the president-elect, has chosen Mike Pompeo, Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions to serve as CIA director, National Security Advisor and Attorney General respectively.  Here’s the shocker.  They are all conservative! 

Let me offer some guidance to the demoralized and deflated liberal, I mean ‘progressive’, political left.  When the nation elects a president who resides to the right of the political center (leaving aside that where Trump truly resides is an arguable question), he is going to choose personnel who share his philosophy.  Trump ran hard on immigration, trade, anti-terrorism policy and the Supreme Court.  Now elected, he should be expected to assemble a team that will further the objectives that he campaigned on.  Isn’t this what we expect when a candidate gets elected?

I think that Trump’s appointments mentioned above – all of whom are qualified – cause the left to hyperventilate in an effort to distract their base from their horrendous and systemic electoral defeats they suffered all across the country.   Keep in mind, cabinet positions are not lifetime appointments and all reasonable people agree that a president should be afforded great latitude in choosing his team members.  Americans today can expect very different priorities and philosophies regarding national security, immigration policy, law enforcement and foreign affairs.  This is the natural course of events  when the White House changes hands.

Intel Pros will be allowed to say, Islamic terrorists.

Isn’t this exactly what occurred when President Obama took office in 2008?  Elections matter, as the president himself has often stated.  Were we shocked that his choices for Attorney General of Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch focused on civil rights and were not regarded as champions of the law enforcement community?  Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote.  His Supreme Court choices of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor were not quite the judicial soul mates of the late Antonin Scalia.   Just today I read that the Obama administration will block new drilling in the Arctic Ocean, an example of several of the president’s actions that have tilted toward environmentalists’ concerns.  Liberal presidents tend to govern liberally.

Trump was criticized, properly in my view, for stating that he would only nominate pro-life individuals to the Supreme Court.  (I’m against judicial litmus tests for specific actions or policies.)  Before you criticize him over this litmus test, remember, that Hillary Clinton commited the same offense when she declared she wanted her nominees to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision?  Were you critical of her also?  Trust me, when President Trump offers his nominations for the high court, and he may have more than one opening to fill, we should not be shocked that they will view the judicial world through a conservative lens. 

Instead of carping about a new president’s personnel choices just to offer balm to your political base, why not contemplate the hard lessons that caused your party to be thoroughly trounced and repudiated?  Then, bring your own ideas and vision into the marketplace of ideas and compete for votes.  Then, if your side prevails, you can choose your own team to carry out your mission.