Tag: Steve Chabot

What Makes President Trump So Special: A magic night in Lebanon, Ohio

There were some deeply touching moments in the Trump rally in Lebanon, Ohio which I partially expected. But we’re talking about a sitting president stumping for some midterm candidates here, politics is not supposed to be this exciting and people normally don’t show up five, six and seven hours early to stand in the cold and in the rain to watch a 72-year-old man talk. This is a human phenomenon that is unsurpassed in the history of the world, I don’t even think the great Winston Churchill could have brought out the crowd that greeted President Trump at the Warren County Fair Grounds on Friday October 12, 2018. I was just a little stunned by the event. I had a feeling that there would be a large crowd, but the sheer magnitude of it was just jaw dropping. There was a collision of Americana present that was obvious and inspiring and I thought John London from Channel 5 News in Cincinnati put his finger on it perfectly in his summation of the night.

There is a lot to unpack from this event and it will certainly take more than one article to cover it all but for the sake of brevity here I have to thank the people who gave my daughter and I the opportunity to witness this spectacle from the comfort of the V.I.P. section. Yes it was freezing cold and we got rained on and we did stand most of the time. But at least we had a seat and a good vantage point to watch this unusual moment in history.

I always feel sorry for people who don’t have that kind of access to these big Trump events, but as I looked at people’s faces on the floor, many who had been standing under the roof for more than four hours—before President Trump even arrived—they were happy people just willing to be near the star of the show if even for a moment. People were packed everywhere that people could put themselves for as far as the eye could see and it was quite something to witness. It was inspiring to say the least. If these people were willing to show up in the cold and rain of an October in Ohio, they would surely show up to vote for Republicans Trump endorsed in the upcoming election.

This was my oldest daughter’s first time to go to one of these events with me and she was very touched by it. She is a professional photographer and shares with me a tendency to like to view the world through big picture vantage points. The event organizers couldn’t have put us in a better spot for that particular venue, we had the top row of the bleachers just behind the president. I’ve watched President Trump speak many times so it was good to be behind him because my interest was mostly the crowd. The media never does justice to what the crowds look like from Trump’s point of view and we were fortunate to see the whole thing more from the president’s perspective even watching the motorcade role in to drop him off, and turn around all the vehicles to take him back to Lunken afterwards. President Trump does many very subtle things that only a polished pro like him can do on such large operations with many moving parts coming together seamlessly. He is super smart, from where I was standing I could see him staging up his entry onto the stage to match perfectly the various cable news top of the hour broadcasts, and he ended everything right on time like such a seasoned performer. But he’s of course juggling much more than that just in the complexities of his job. Yet while Steve Chabot was talking the President could get a sense that the crowd was drifting. People not under the roof of that magnificent structure on the fairgrounds were getting soaked, including my daughter and I. People next to us were starting to head for the exit. Trump was watching and he ever so subtly tapped Steve in the middle of the back to change things up a bit. Chabot took the cue and sped up his speech and Trump seamlessly changed gears and held the audience to his next twenty minutes of oration. Most people might not even see the value in such a thing, but that is one of the very raw distinctions that Trump has over everyone else in the world. He is literally a master communicator and he knows exactly what he is doing all the time. I continue to be impressed by President Trump every time I see him live, I don’t think I’d ever get sick of it.

After the event was over and people headed out to the parking lot, which used to be the old horse racing track that was moved to Miami Valley gaming several miles to the west my daughter and I lingered around watching the press. I literally stood next to an AP writer and watched her write the news feed of the event, which she mostly got all wrong. But she was shivering and tapping her feet viciously trying to stay warm. For people who haven’t been to these types of things before the media are always given a spot near the back of a rally to photograph from, and behind that raised camera platform is usually rows of tables so that writers can get their stories out. Mostly these reporters are like anybody else, they just want to get their jobs done and get home. Once the Trump supporters had left for their cars the reporters could relax a bit and get their stories out to their employers to meet their deadlines. Most of those reporters didn’t go to the trouble that John London did at Channel 5. They see hundreds of these types of rallies so there is no magic in them that they can see, they only care about the surface stuff. But one thing that everyone missed from a reporter’s standpoint that was very clear to me was how Trump handled the weather.

Remember when Obama had to have a military official hold an umbrella over him while he gave a speech in the Rose Garden? Well in these times of high insurance rates and overly cautious appraisals of everything I didn’t think Trump’s people would let him take the stage because it had been raining so long. The stage was soaked. Part of the stage entry was raised and ran outside of the roof that most of the rally was under, so it was exposed to the weather. Rain had clearly soaked it after many hours. But Trump did the right thing when he arrived. Some of his security wiped off the platform with towels and Trump walked out across it without any concern for his safety which these days was highly unusual. Lesser people would have called the whole thing off, but not this president.

Trump shows up to talk to his supporters under any condition, and that is part of his appeal. But when he left the rain had been coming down even harder. The safe thing would have been for Trump to take the steps down into the pit and stay under the roof, but no, he went back out the way he came in and the ramp wasn’t dried off at all. Trump walked across it like a seasoned pro not even worrying about slipping and falling. Trump isn’t afraid of little things like that and that is part of what distinguishes him from everyone else. It’s a subtle little thing, but those add up and they make Trump and all those he endorses that much more appealing.

Trump has made the Republican Party much, much better. I’ve always identified myself as a Republican, but I have never been prouder to be affiliated with it. Trump is a superstar, he was before he ever ran for president, yet he’s not so pretentious that he’s afraid of rain, or hard work. And nobody works harder than President Trump.

These rallies may cost a fortune to put on, and may be traffic nightmares, but one thing that comes out of them is that Trump talks directly to people who support him. He doesn’t hide out in the White House enjoying the luxury of the office. He works, and he works hard—and he’s willing to endure the cold and the rain if his supporters are. And that is what makes Donald J. Trump special, and why the Republican Party has a new life because of him. The Democrats don’t have anybody even close and they likely never will.

Rich Hoffman

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Samuel Ronan the Progressive Extremist: What we learned at Lakota by the CNN star about why teachers should be armed

I didn’t know who Samuel Ronan was when he stepped up to the microphone at the very contentious Lakota school board meeting on February 27th 2017. My first impression of him was that he was just another overly emotional kid speaking against arming teachers in our public schools. The typical thing in these types of exchanges is to be respectful of the audience, even if they don’t agree with you, because it is the battle of ideas which sifts out the truth of a matter. When I spoke nobody heckled me or made comments from the audience, so I provided the same sentiment and that’s how it should be. However, there was something very fishy about the young man who quickly provided an address that didn’t seem to match anything within the Lakota district and instead of addressing the school board, the kid turned and addressed the crowd. We all sat stunned that he had crashed an otherwise civil meeting on a contentious topic. He had to be stopped because he went over the three-minute speaking limit. After Ronan spoke, the kid disappeared quickly before I had a chance to talk to him, which was fully my intention. I went out into the hall to see if he was anywhere about. He had left as quickly as he came. So I did a little checking to see who he was and what I discovered was rather revealing.

https://www.ronanforcongress.com/

My desire to confront the kid stemmed from a couple of things he said during his speech, namely what I took as a challenge when he said that he was trained on the AR-15 platform and he doubted that any teacher would want to face him during a rampage. Those aren’t his exact words, but that’s what he was essentially saying. I’d have to watch the tape of the meeting to get the exact dialogue which actually may have been more suggestive. Of course my answer to him is “hell yeah” I’d be willing to engage an active shooter—especially if it was a kid like him—disrespectful, aggressive, showing a disregard for the rules of conduct of the established practice of a forum—those are all alarm signs that such a person is up to no good. Now, you wouldn’t shoot someone like that without provocation, but if a person will bust in on a school board meeting and not reveal what their true intentions were, taking it for granted that everyone around him would be too nice to confront him, then he made the precise argument as to why we should arm teachers. That’s what I was going to tell him until I realized after he had left that the kid was actually a progressive Democrat from Springboro, not even from Lakota, and that he had switched parties to run against Steve Chabot in the upcoming 1st Congressional District race. Even more, this wasn’t just any progressive Democrat upset about the national trend toward gun rights—especially arming teachers in schools from domestic terrorist threats—this guy ran for the Democratic National Committee Chairman seat. Not your typical anti-gun protestor.

I typically have a soft spot for young people, especially charismatic young people who involve themselves in the events of the world—but there was something creepy about Ronan that came across as startling. He wasn’t a listed speaker for the evening, he simply took the opportunity during the public comments portion, after the scheduled speakers had concluded, myself being one of them, and proceeded on with an uncomfortable rant that was misplaced for the event.  He wasn’t even speaking to the crowd, the board, or even a single individual–he was only interested in the cameras.  What was odd was that he gave his camera to a Muslim woman sitting in the middle of the crowd to record his video, then when he took the podium he addressed the crowd directly instead of the board and during his speech he edged as I said on confrontational language talking about his military background and how he knew how to use such dangerous weapons giving him an advantage over average teachers. It was an odd mix of euphemisms that had what to me contained ominous undertones. As he was talking I just took it as the talk of an overly anxious and political kid looking to be the next Dave Hog, maybe to get on the many television cameras that were present. Then for some apparent reason he included discrimination against Muslims which had no place in the discussion—only that he injected it out of nowhere. It wasn’t even relevant to the topic. Those of us present were mystified by his behavior which left us scratching our heads as he left.

It was only after that I did some investigation into the kid and discovered that he was quite a national activist, and that his presence there at Lakota showed to what extent the school district in my neighborhood was going to play in national politics yet again. Being one of the largest schools in the state of Ohio in a state that Donald Trump won by 11 points, which went his way even with the establishment Republicans at the time led by John Kasich working against him, the district of Lakota is conservative even for conservative standards. It would be Lakota where the issue of guns in schools would live or die, and this progressive activist put his sights on Lakota to leave his national mark. My instinct said to engage the kid, which I tried to do after the meeting and find out what his story was. And as it usually is, my instincts were correct—this was a kid up to no good.  Yet he hadn’t done anything overtly bad enough to mandate a confrontation.  We all just politely let him ramble on hoping he would come to reason on his own, which of course he didn’t.

He misled people about who he was to speak that night at Lakota. He stepped into the heart of Lakota management and trusted that we’d all be too nice to really engage him, and he was right. Even I was so respectful of his right to speak that we let him go on for over 3 minutes breaking all the rules that such public speaking at Lakota required. But even more than that he was misleading people on his printed campaign literature, listing himself as a Republican of the 1st District which includes the equally conservative Warren County, Ohio. He knows he stands no chance of winning a congressional seat unless he runs as a Republican in his town of Springboro. Yet just last year he ran for the DNC Chairman seat—the head of the whole enchilada and was on many debates on CNN. He was bold, and audacious—and very experienced at an early age in the art of radicalism. If you took away just a few layers of sanity from such a person, he might be the next school shooter—a person who pretends to be an innocent visitor to a school to get past the first layer of security, then when everyone was content that he was a safe person, that would be when the guns come out and a rampage would begin. If he was bold enough to crash a board meeting that has pretty strict rules of conduct and behave like he did, a similar person would work their way through official security protocols to unleash their ill intentions. That’s why we need that extra layer of security—a teacher comfortable with firearms discreetly hidden from view could engage such a radical saving so many precious seconds which likely would mean the difference between life and death.

That’s not to say Samuel Ronan is a terrorist—I think he’s a very progressive radical looking to make a name for himself. But if you consider his behavior and the way he exploited goodness, and the trust of good people there in the room with him at Lakota—a seriously deranged person would use the same tactics to get to kids in a school to satisfy whatever instability might inspire them into such a dire action. And instead of making the case for why teachers shouldn’t carry guns in the school, Ronan showed us why they should. When people can’t function on the basic elements of trust, our protocols rooted in honesty make us all vulnerable to villains who don’t observe such rules of conduct, and that is the way of our modern world, like it or not. People like Ronan who don’t tell you honestly who they are and pretend to be something when they are really something else are obviously up to no good—otherwise there would be no reason to mislead people.

The reason we are required to give our name and address as speakers before the board is to protect the process of debate for just this kind of outside intrusion of politics, and Ronan was no small-time flunky from Springboro. He was a regular on CNN who had no intention to address the school board of Lakota—he went there to record himself on a stump speech trying to cause trouble. And he came and went largely without confrontation. The point of the matter is that good people trusting that everyone attending that night had good intentions either for or against the debate in question and were operating with a basic level of respect. What Ronan taught us at Lakota is that–it is that very trust a school shooter would exploit to make a menace of our children contained within our buildings. And by the time we figured out who they were, it would be too late. That’s how 17 people died in Parkland, Florida and many other places, because there wasn’t someone there on point to stop a hostile agent of terror—even as they stand sometimes right in front of us with an offering of peace and civility, when they really intend carnage.

Rich Hoffman

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