Getting It Right — Zero Defects?

Buyers' remorse?

Today Judd Garrett posted an article on Substack that, at least for me, is a must-read. I will link and summarize it briefly and will then add a reflection from my own experience. Judd’s article is here: What's Important - by Judd Garrett. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite:

There is a lot of talk, speculation and fear mongering surrounding what Donald Trump has been doing since he was inaugurated in January. He is starting a trade war; the tariffs are on, they are off, they are back on again; the stock market has been very volatile; the jobs numbers were not great; we don’t have a peace deal in Ukraine; there isn’t a ceasefire in Gaza; all of our hostages are not home yet; maybe we are sliding into a recession. Democrats are claiming that Trump voters are having buyer’s remorse.

. . . . The approach to illegal immigration is a touchstone issue for me when I am evaluating a President and his administration’s performance. Under Biden, illegal immigration was at an all-time high and now less than two months into Trump’s administration, it is at an all-time low. Why is this such a defining issue? It tells me how much our President cares about the country or how much he is actively trying to destroy our country. Joe Biden was actively destroying the United States of America by not only flinging our southern border wide open and inviting the rest of the world to come in, he was actively flying plane loads of illegals to the interior of the country with pre-paid debit cards, cell phones, essentials bags and housing lined up at taxpayer expense.

That was all designed to destroy the United States as we know it. The PHDs and engineers from other countries were not coming en masse; the uneducated, the unskilled, the criminal aliens, the drug smugglers, the gang members were the ones who came. Everyday under Biden our country was getting worse and worse, regardless of what the economic indicators were saying, and it was all done intentionally which made me believe that every other decision that the Biden administration was making was intended to harm our country or at least was not designed to make our country better. Everything that was done by the previous administration was done to help ensure permanent Democrat power in Washington for decades to come and if that meant destroying the country in the process, so be it.

It is dramatically different under Trump. Trump solved our most glaring problem from day one - the threat to our national sovereignty from mass illegal immigration. The country gets better with every criminal alien, gang banger, cartel member who is removed from the country. . . .

We can get bogged down in the minutia of each and every policy decision that Trump makes and overanalyze the results. But I have a secret that you need to hear, there will be times when Trump will be wrong. He will make the wrong decision on occasion. That will happen. There has never been a President who has never made a bad decision and never been a person for that matter.

As Instapundit is wont to say, ‘read the whole thing’ (it isn’t long).

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Like Judd, I give Trump some leeway. His post reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend in 1972 or so. I was an infantry company commander in the 9th Infantry Division. One of the battalion commanders in our brigade had made some sort of bone headed decision (or so we thought at the time). In a discussion with my friend who was a company commander in that other battalion (Dan Cronin, are you listening?), I vented at some length about what a dufus this lieutenant colonel was to have made such a wrong-headed decision. ‘What an idiot! How could he possibly be a battalion commander?’

My friend said something like, “Lieutenant Colonel so-and-so probably makes, maybe, thirty decisions a day that affect someone’s life, job or career. All of them are not going to be something we agree with, or even the best decision. So, if he’s 29 - 1, that’s not too bad.” A valuable lesson from my Dan Cronin.

That was in the context of an officer who commanded about 800 men. The President is charged with the Constitutional duty to be the chief executive of a nation with a population of ~ 350 million souls — over four-hundred thousand times the size of an infantry battalion — with the largest economy in history, and a military with far more complexities than we ever dreamed of in 1972. Every day the President must make decisions. And as Judd Garrett said, some of them will be wrong.

But, like Judd Garrett in his article, I will cut the President of the United States some slack, even when he says or does something that concerns me, even as the stock market tumbles as it did today, as long as he gets the most important long-term things right. And I will not surrender to the jackals in the ancien régime media who try to hamstring him every time he makes a decision because bringing him down is their instinct and their moral imperative. Like the scorpion, it is in their nature.

Stay the course, Mr. President. Tack when you must but keep your bearing.