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Writer's pictureJ. Michael McGee

The Cowboy Candidate

Updated: Jul 29

A case from flyover country





The spirit of the West, the prairie and the range, is steeped in America's development. With it, comes the ethos of the cowboy way, grit, stamina, and individualism.  


 This swagger of certitude runs deep in the soul of our culture, as much as mom, apple pie and baseball once did. But it is a spirit slowly dying, and rarely found in our elected leaders. In the last century, Ronald Reagan had the swaggering cowboy air, Teddy Roosevelt before him, the ever-the-western man, a more vigorous style. 


Today, hands down, Donald J. Trump, the high rise builder, exemplifies this maverick muscularity. 

 

For the ’Never Trumper,’ who affirms the cowboy ethos as virtues needed in a leader, whose head hasn’t popped off with such a claim, let me offer the following. 


Mr. Congeniality, Trump is not. In his first administration he spent too much time tweeting. And It is unlikely he has roped or ridden much, but there is more to the cowboy way than being a wrangler with spurs and boots, or being a mild mannered Matt Dillion.

 Clay West, a horse trainer and a resident of Oklahoma, the home of America’s cowboy Will Rogers, says there is a cowboy code. Writing in 2022 in his blog page for his company, Leather, West claims cowboys are known for a strong work ethic, resilience and overcoming adversity. 


If anything,Trump has a strong work ethic. His success didn’t fall out of the sky. Auspicious beginnings for sure, with a bankroll given to him by his father, but there is no getting around that he grew a real estate business into a world wide corporation, employing thousands; sky boys balancing themselves 1000 feet up, jackhammers cracking concrete below.


At 78, Trump’s schedule is packed, from sitting in a courtroom for hours, to hopping on a plane afterwards to give a speech and dropping in for a visit to small town mom and pop businesses. And all the while running for the highest job in the land. Stamina at its best. A lesser person would curl up in their basement under such rigor. 


The cowboy code, West says, is “inspiration to many outside the realm of the ranch and the rodeo.” 


To witness inspiration one only needs to count the red ball caps at a filled football stadium, in 2016, 2020 and in 2024. Trump’s base for sure. But, no such support came to Hillary or Biden when they ventured out to stump. In fact, many who witnessed these two over their many decades easily detected a phoneyness, commonly seen in other sanctimonious ‘virtue signalers’. 


 Hollywood darlings such as Clooney or DeNiro, who've lived their lives in a pretend world, along with tall-haired Joe Scarborough and wife Mika scream, Our democracy will be lost, people will be locked up, if Trump, the Nazi is elected. He’s an existential threat!


These virtue-signalers might have a case, if Trump’s record hadn't been tested. But it has. 


Author Batya Ungar-Sargon in her book Second Class, says the research supports his policies; most of which are dead center to what many Americans are concerned about, such as economics, crime, immigration and recurring foreign interventions. 


Having interviewed a cross-section of blue collar workers, Ungar-Sargon says, policies aside, many are united in support of Trump due to feeling disenfranchised by the country’s elitists, who have a holier than thou belief they know best.   


Victor Davis Hanson, author, college professor and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford-based Hoover Institute with a focus on classics and military history says Trump, “spits at the conventionality of Washington. He just doesn’t care. Those whose lives depend on the status quo can’t stand that.”


Thus, Hanson says, “Forces on both sides of the fence team up against him, joined by the media and coastal elites, and the ivory-tower educated. They come up with ideological attacks, racism, but attacks without substance.” 


Hounded by a squawking Blue Coat calvary spewing platitudes,Trump is very much an accidental cowboy, to borrow a phrase from Jameson Parker’s book with the same name. He plays life as it comes, the cowboy way; erecting and mending fences, and yes if shot, getting back in the saddle and riding on. 


With the world and country in collective peril, the coming months will bear out two distinctive choices for the US president.

 

The vice president, Kamala Harris, a career politician and the new democratic presidential nominee, will likely vituperously claim that a vote for the bellicose and braggadocious Trump is a vote for racism and sexism, which will sink the country. 


Trump, on the other hand, will ride tall and play out the campaign, not the stoic high plains drifter, but a  fearless fixer who has done it before and will do it again.


# Modern Cowboy Spirit




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1 Comment


"In fact, many who witnessed these two over their many decades easily detected a phoneyness, commonly seen in other sanctimonious ‘virtue signalers’." was news to me regarding Biden in particular. I would have applied phoneyness to Trump who consistently spreads talsehoods and does such things as sanctimoniously holding up a Bible at a news event.

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