Millions, perhaps billions, of words have been written analyzing this election and the phenomenal rise of Donald Trump in his quest for the White House. The metaphor often used to describe his blunt, hyperbolic, sometimes vulgar rhetorical style is that of a bull in a china shop. And there’s no question that he has broken a lot of china, both in terms of conventional political wisdom in how to run a presidential campaign and in the politically correct sensibilities of elitist Americans, and of many regular Americans as well.

However, I was struck by a minor epiphany and a better animal metaphor as I was walking my newly acquired mutt, Charlotte, yesterday. My wife and I adopted the pooch at a dog rescue show two months ago as a friend for our older mongrel, who lost his beloved Labrador Retriever companion that we had to put to sleep last year. The new pup, four months old when we got her, was recovering from a bout of mange and was slightly hairless. She seemed sweet, docile and a bit forlorn. With her baleful brown eyes, she looked up at us and our Wheaten terrier mix, who we brought along to “pick out” his new friend. She wagged her tail, which had a strange stripe running down the middle, and sniffed our older dog. He sniffed and wagged back. We found our new family member.

We were told that Charlotte, whose pregnant mother was found wandering a road in West Virginia, was a mix of bloodhound, plot hound and Rhodesian Ridgeback, according to a DNA test. The Ridgeback part would explain the stripe running down her tail, which seems like a ridge that decided to quit forming when it realized it wasn’t on the Serengeti. The Ridgeback is also known as the African lion hound, because of its ability to keep a lion at bay, while waiting for its lion-hunter master to take the lion down, according to Wikipedia.  

Charlotte has been a wonderful dog. In the house, she is playful, loving and loves to wrestle with our Wheaten. She is warm and affectionate with family members and friends who come to visit. She is a bit mischievous, but in that lovable toddler sort of way. However, when we take her on walks in the neighborhood, it seems that her inner lion hunter comes out whenever she encounters other dogs, sometimes three times her size. A Cujo-like demon seems to emerge and she strains with remarkable power for a 50-pound puppy to rip the heart out of the hapless canine on the other side of the street, complete with growling and barking, of course. What a bully we’d adopted! What an embarrassment. That’s when it hit me. We had the Donald Trump of dogs.

Sorry for the long wind-up, but I thought the atmospherics would be helpful in making my point. The American people are sort of like homeowners in a pleasant suburb of hard-working, family-oriented folks living in lovely, modest homes with nicely manicured lawns they worked hard for and saved up to buy. They just want to raise their children, send them off to college or onto careers, own a crazy dog or two, and enjoy their lives.

For the past eight years, however, they’ve discovered that their neighborhood, and indeed their home, has been changing in disturbing ways. They discover that people have been trespassing on their property, violating it, leaving trash, breaking the windows of their house, and even occupying it when they’re not home. They contact the police, but it seems that not only do the police not care, the cops have been encouraging the lawbreakers by delivering them to our prototypical Americans’ community.

This scenario is actually playing out on our southern border. The Department of “Homeland Security” (DHS) has contracted with the security firm G4S to transport illegal aliens caught at the border and deliver them further into the interior of the United States, where they are released, as Judicial Watch has reported. We know that illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes in this country and been deported multiple times continue to re-enter the United States, and in some cases go on to commit heinous crimes while being harbored in “sanctuary cities,” like San Francisco. The case of poor Kate Steinle, who lost her life to one such illegal alien while she innocently enjoyed the sites of that city with her father, is one of the most notorious examples, but such cases abound.

Back to our representative American family. They are living their lives, minding their own business, when suddenly they get a knock on the door and are told by Mr. Government that he has determined that their health insurance policy does not conform to standards that he has deemed “minimum essential coverage” -- you know, like maternity care for 60-year-old women. As a result of Mr. Government’s new requirements, our typical American family loses the insurance coverage they’ve been perfectly happy with for many years, and is forced to purchase an insurance plan from Mr. Government’s marketplace with higher premiums, higher deductibles, and fewer choice of physicians. But it gets better. Our representative family has just discovered their new insurance policy premiums will increase 25 percent next year.

Then our hypothetical family discovers that Mr. Government, working with a so-called religious “non-profit” (which in reality takes in tens of millions of dollars a year of taxpayer money), is planning to resettle a small colony of Syrian refugees in a “seed community” right inside their quaint little town, without informing them or their neighbors. No vote of the local population is taken. The town’s aldermen are not even informed. The town’s mayor, seeing federal dollars and future votes, furtively communicates with officials from the “non-profit” as they scheme together. This scenario is playing out right now in Rutland, Vermont, and in towns across the country. Rutland’s treasurer has also informed its residents that they are looking at property tax increases of 35 percent over five years as a result of the drain on the city’s fisc from the social services needed by the refugees. The director of the FBI has testified to Congress that it is impossible to vet such individuals, who originate from a breeding ground for jihadism, because databases do not exist in Syria against which to check them.

It is these sorts of abuses, along with many others, that our typical American family has been enduring, seemingly on a daily basis, since the Obama administration came to power. Now with a presidential election upon us, many of these heretofore helpless Americans are using the one tool at their disposal to correct what seems like a never-ending spiral of decline for themselves and their country. They have opted in effect, to use our homeowner analogy, to get a big, obnoxious, kind of scary dog to protect their home, in the form of Donald Trump. Such dogs are sometimes called junkyard dogs. They may embarrass us a bit with their ferocious temperaments and unseemly displays. They sometimes soil the carpets. They tear up pillows on occasion. But they are also fiercely protective of us and our property. They will rip the heart out of a lion if it threatens us, or die in the attempt.

I think the junkyard dog analogy might be more suitable for The Donald because, unlike the clumsy bull, the junkyard dog has some redeeming qualities, not least of which is a belief in the people he would serve. At least, that is the hope of many Trump supporters.

William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government and private sector for 30 years. He is presently a Senior Investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)