Tim Burke: Special interest groups stonewalling Trump

Trump is virtually alone in his mission to rid our government of waste and corruption.

Question authority. The 1960s slogan was a result of the counterculture movement which formed in the late 1960s out of opposition to the Vietnam War.

The election of Donald Trump to president in many ways is a new counterculture movement against the government. Our government has become bloated and corrupt. Our politicians in Washington have built miniature empires of their own. Controlled by special interest groups and lobbyists, they have lost touch with middle America.

The most brilliant man I have ever known was a close friend who had been an actual rocket scientist at NASA. He later went on to become a very successful entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley. He was in many ways my children’s de facto grandfather and spent many evenings offering advice on a broad range of topics to them. Because his formative adult years were in the 60s he often counseled my children to “question authority”. My youngest son fully embraced that philosophy while in school, but often the result was not in his favor. He would regularly challenge his instructors in philosophy, history, math and science.

He generally refused to accept the standard answers that they wanted to give him, often resulting in their branding him as a non-conformist and a troublemaker. One example of how it caused him issues was a high school math teacher who gave him an F on a test he took in class, even though his answers were correct.

When confronted by my son, the math teacher said it was because he didn’t show his work, therefore, he must have cheated. My son challenged him and told him to put a problem on the board. The teacher did, and then my son put the correct answer on the board that he had done in his head. He still got an F even though he proved he hadn’t cheated and knew the material. He didn’t conform to the system that the teacher had put in place and therefore, he was wrong in the teacher’s view.

President Trump is a non-conformist. He built a massive business empire by controlling costs, being efficient, and moving forward to get projects finished. He often didn’t follow the standard rules and instead, made new rules to accomplish what needed to be done.

He is trying to do the same thing in Washington but is running into the huge corrupt politics of our government. He is not having issues with only Democrats, he is getting stonewalled by Republicans as well. Think for a minute what he is up against. Massive numbers of career bureaucrats working for the government collecting big salaries and building up high-dollar retirements. Wealthy special interest groups that want to protect the government funds pouring into their organizations.

In 2005, Michael Crichton wrote a fiction book based around global warming and politics.

One of the main premises of the book is that special interest groups warn of dire events and consequences if their cause is not funded. And that they create the need for funding based on pseudo-science and use politics to achieve their goals. The crises that these special interest groups claim they are fighting on our behalf continue into perpetuity. Think for a minute of the hundreds if not thousands of special interest groups who are now afraid they will lose their funding and the massive pressure they are putting on politicians to stop President Trump’s cuts.

President Trump has submitted a budget outlining cuts to agencies he feels are bloated and unproductive. He is eliminating entire agencies and making deep cuts in others. There are thousands of career federal employees working at those agencies that are affected. Those bureaucrats are doing everything they can to stop President Trump’s cuts by undermining his efforts to try and save their jobs.

The mainstream press also loses with a Trump presidency because they have built their recent viewership by catering to viewers’ emotions and not their logic and reasoning. Certain causes, especially liberal ones, generate emotional responses and by pandering to those causes they have tried to increase the number of viewers. The reality is that mainstream media viewership is falling. Mainstream media no longer reports actual news but instead, focuses on promoting a point of view devoid of real facts.

For a time, I cringed when President Trump would go on a twitter rant against the media, the deep state, and fake news but after weeks and weeks of reading and listening to the hysterical news reporting against the president I have come to understand why he does it. Much of what you read and hear is a smokescreen created to cause fear, dissension, and mistrust of our president so that the career bureaucrats and special interest groups can protect their empires.

I didn’t understand his campaign-like rallies after the election, but I do now. He is virtually alone in trying to return the government of the United States back to the people. He faces a backlash in the government from the bureaucrats, special interest groups and career politicians like this country hasn’t seen since probably Lincoln and the Civil War. This is a new kind of war but it is indeed a war.

At his rallies, he turns to the people that elected him for strength, for support, and for our help. I get it now.

Tim Burke is a businessman, philanthropist, educator and Pahrump resident. Contact him at timstakenv@gmail.com