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Thursday, September 29, 2016

Donald Trump v. Grandma Clinton: What's Really At Stake? Featured

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Donald Trump v. Grandma Clinton: What's Really At Stake?

New from Remnant TV...

So, who won the debate?

Hello, again ladies and gentlemen, Michael Matt for The Remnant Underground.


So, did you watch the debate last night? Holy cow!  What was that!? I don’t know if I've ever  seen anything quite like that. The poor man -- after the first fifteen minutes, the cold and calculating Grandma Clinton had him up against the ropes, and it sort of went down from there.  (Note to Trump Debate Team: Tell the Donald not to get all temperamental when Grandma Clinton accuses him of being too temperamental for the presidency.)

But, hey, it’s Donald Trump. He’s not a seasoned politician, and, let’s face it, he got schooled by one who spent the last month getting her mind controlled by Orwellian gurus of debate who somehow made the robot seem almost human...almost. Not bad for a career criminal who's been promoting baby killing for years and who should be wearing her orange jumpsuit behind bars.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES: Our apologies for the obvious audio problems in this week's episode of The Remnant Underground. We have provided a transcript of the show below.  Thanks for your patience. MJM


Anyway, the debate was a train wreck for Donald Trump. But, like Charles Krauthammer said afterward, at least he went the distance for 90 minutes with a person who’s been doing this for 30 years.
So, in that sense, it could have been worse.

But listen, this is what we’ve been saying all along---Trump isn’t Garcia Moreno. 
He’s not a great Catholic statesman. His Christianity seems lukewarm at best, if not newly discovered. He’s a businessman. And some of the good folks who support him are not voting for the man -- the emcee, if you will -- so much as the constituency Trump now represents.  

At least he’s not an insufferable faux conservative RINO -- which is why Pat Buchanan and the late Phyllis Shlafly endorsed him.


The way I see it, Trump is really not the instigator or leader of this. He’s a fiscal conservative and an opportunist who saw a huge opening in the national discontentment movement that has had enough of liberal, democratic and RINO leadership and policies over the past 20 years. People are fed up and they’re not going to take it anymore.

Finally, a guy who's a pretty lousy politician -- there's hope!


Here's the key point: In order to get elected and, more importantly, in order to get reelected four years from now, Trump will have to appease us—pro-lifers, pro-family, pro-homeschooling, Focus on the Family, the American Family Association and all the rest of the good guys.

And who will Hillary have to appease? The usual suspects: Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the homosexual lobby, Catholics for a Free Choice, the USCCB and rest of the radical left.

So what are we voting for? A political counterrevolution, it seems to me.

Is Trump pro-life? Not sure, but he says he is. He says he is, and words have both meanings and consequences. In other words, he’s putting his campaign—his whole career—at risk by saying: I’m pro-life. If he loses, it may well spell the end of a conservative candidate ever again feeling the need to say he’s pro-life in order to have any chance of winning the White House.

Look, what we have here is a fight between good and evil—not so much Donald and Hillary—but basically good people vs bad people. The forces of darkness vs. the forces of light.

Hillary has declared herself champion of the Culture of Death.

The Donald has taken up the standard of what's left of the Culture of Life.

In that sense, this becomes much bigger than the candidates.  And I have to hand it to the Trump team—they are doing things that we can’t easily ignore.

Trump’s list of promised conservative Supreme Court Justice selections, for example, is huge. Nobody ever did that—not the insufferable Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush—nobody.

His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is a proud practicing Catholic.

His campaign chairman, Steve Bannon of Breitbart.com, a proud practicing Catholic.

And now this latest list of 33 conservative Catholics, including Rick Santorum, picked as Trump advisors.

This should be political suicide, by the way. Santorum?!  Nancy Pelosi Catholics hate guys like Santorum, so this surely isn’t helping Trump with the Catholic vote. So why did he do it?

You don’t have to like Rick Santorum to understand the political risk involved with anyone choosing a guy who’s against contraception as an advisor. And yet Trump’s campaign forges ahead, making it difficult for us to see a vote for him as a clear violation of the well-formed Catholic conscience, despite a long line of cringe-worthy moments such as last night’s debate and despite his many negatives.

You don’t believe Trump will make good on these promises? Okay, I’m not sure either. But nobody knows. And what if he does make good on them? If he doesn’t he’s a one-termer.

And no matter what happens it can’t be as disastrous for this country, our children, the unborn as what’s in store for us under the diabolical Grandma Clinton.

Like him or not—trust him or not—Trump’s campaign knows it must champion pro-life Americans, limited government, border control, economic conservatism in order to win.

They’ve promised to shoot down the

.
They're going to tighten up the U.S. borders and try to stop the madness in our streets

Is Trump actually going to do it all? I don’t know. But he says he is—he SAYS he is—and this is important. Again, words have meaning and consequences. His words are pro-life, pro-family, anti-illegal immigration, pro-Second Amendment, pro-limited government, anti-big government. We know what Grandma Clinton thinks of all of this and it ain't good!

Why is Trump making these promises? Because his team obviously thinks there are enough decent people in this country to make them politically viable. Are they right? Are there enough good people left in this country to make these campaign promises anything other than political suicide? Well, that's what we’re going to find out in November.

By the way, next month’s Argument of the Month is going to really get into this. Be sure to join us on October 11 at the Church of St. Augustine’s in So. St. Paul, MN where Remnant columnist Chris Ferrara will debate former presidential candidate and US Ambassador under Ronald Reagan, Alan Keyes, on this very topic. It’s going to be big. We're going to have it out, over cigars and good eats.

And until then let's just keep our heads. This is not easy, and a lot of sound arguments are going back and forth about whether or not faithful Catholics have a dog in this fight. I think we do. I have friends who are Never Trumpers, and they’re good people who are very concerned about Trumps negatives. 

I also have a good friends over at Catholics4Trump.com, and they’re hosting important discussions on all of this and trying to educate people on what's at stake.


We don’t need to anathematize each other over this. We Catholics have to do whatever we can to fend off the worst of the worse that's right there on the horizon, always mindful that no politician is going to solve the fundamental problem and rescue us from the chastisement that is surely coming if our nation does not turn back to Christ and Chirstian morality.

Until then, we’re only trying to maximize our chances of short-term survival in order to buy time to wake people up -- and Catholics have every right to do that, which does NOT mean they endorse every peccadillo and past offense of Donald Trump. We’re not voting for canonization here, just the next president of the United States.

I'm Michael Matt down in the catacombs, thanks very much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next week.

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Read 16669 times Last modified on Monday, October 24, 2016
Michael J. Matt | Editor

Michael J. Matt has been an editor of The Remnant since 1990. Since 1994, he has been the newspaper's editor. A graduate of Christendom College, Michael Matt has written hundreds of articles on the state of the Church and the modern world. He is the host of The Remnant Underground and Remnant TV's The Remnant Forum. He's been U.S. Coordinator for Notre Dame de Chrétienté in Paris--the organization responsible for the Pentecost Pilgrimage to Chartres, France--since 2000.  Mr. Matt has led the U.S. contingent on the Pilgrimage to Chartres for the last 24 years. He is a lecturer for the Roman Forum's Summer Symposium in Gardone Riviera, Italy. He is the author of Christian Fables, Legends of Christmas and Gods of Wasteland (Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll) and regularly delivers addresses and conferences to Catholic groups about the Mass, home-schooling, and the culture question. Together with his wife, Carol Lynn and their seven children, Mr. Matt currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.