"I think Joffrey is now the king in America," "Game of Thrones" creator George R.R. Martin told Esquire magazine. "And he's grown up just as petulant and irrational as he was when he was thirteen in the books" -- hardly surprising from a man whose show portrayed the decapitated head of Bush ‘43 on a spike alongside the severed head of series favorite, Ned Stark. While the fan base and the entertainment industry undoubtedly share these views, they have it all wrong. If anything, Donald Trump is more Daenerys Targaryen than Joffrey Baratheon -- they even have the same initials, an unusual whitish-yellowish coif, and three grown kids loyally by their sides.

Pick an evil character on the show -- Joffrey, The Mad King, Ramsay, or Cersei -- and your average leftwing drone sees Trump. Never mind that he is holding true to the Forgotten Masses, like Daenerys. Trump’s priority does not reside in the feelings of transgenders, terrorists, Democrats or the Senators in his own party. His focus is on the policies, changes, and actions he promised to those who stepped out on a precarious limb and voted for him. Daenerys and Trump might be highborn, but both lead with a sincere passion for and connection to the common man; and both endeavor to upend the system and wrest control from people who govern the old way, replacing it with a system that unleashes freedom, uplifts the enslaved, and remembers those who have been forgotten.

Daenerys survives raging fire without so much as a scorch mark, much the way Trump emerges unscathed from every conflagration we are told will be his last. But lately, run-of-the-mill conservatives fear he is flailing in the flames with a communications team that seems incapable of putting the right messengers with the right messages in front of the cameras and fails to tout his successes on the front pages.

But these criticisms belong to a different political universe where Republicans played their political games with tiddlywinks as opposed to the stones Trump has at his disposal and is employing.

The conservative grassroots implored Bush ’43, GOP presidential nominees McCain and Romney, Speakers Boehner and Ryan, Majority Leader McConnell, and the parade of nimrods chairing the RNC to take a different approach communicating our policies and accomplishments. For the last 15-20 years our national voice and messaging has been consistently lousy and no match for the ingenuity and forward-thinking communication strategies of the left. Our political spokespeople are too cerebral and verbose, their soundbites don’t stick, their use of social media neophytic, and, well, they just don’t fight back -- they are too cordial, too respectful of dissent and opposition, and too unwilling to risk their reputation and electability calling out the hypocrisies and slanders of the left.

The time to play that political media and communications game has long passed. When our politics was more civil and our media more neutral, we could dally in and do fairly well in that ballpark, even when we played with tiddlywinks.

But when the rules began to morph during the Reagan and then Clinton years -- crafted and controlled by what Breitbart called the “Democrat-Media Complex” -- Republicans naively continued to play with tiddlywinks while the left delivered political death blows -- clearly on a different playing field. Republicans garnered a handful of successes -- minor setbacks and defeats the left could swallow knowing that their future victory was all but assured as long as the GOP played polite politics while Democrats took no prisoners. 

The left-wingers worked the media-PR-communications game hard while right-wingers bumbled along in the delusion that because ours was a center right country, we would ultimately prevail when intelligent, informed voters experienced the poor results of liberal policies firsthand. Yet, with every outrageous Democrat accusation, mischaracterization, talking point and soundbite leveled against Republicans from Reagan to the present, the left made powerful propaganda inroads; with every feel-good policy and free-be, America’s socialists bought more votes; with activist judges and a strategy to fight tomorrow’s political battles from the inside, progressive radicals wielded complete dominion in the schools, media and culture; and, with every election -- mid-term or presidential, local or national -- it became harder for the right to fight the left in politics, in general, and the media, in particular. 

Republican leadership let opportunities slip through their hands by ignoring the pleas for change from the grassroots all because experienced pols knew better (how paternalistically liberal of them).

We conservative “plebes” have known at least since Bush ’43 that the GOP was not playing the media game properly -- we saw it when Bush failed to pushback against the accusations that 9/11 was our fault, that the war was a subterfuge for oil, that Katrina was the result of racism, and that his policies benefited the rich only; and, when he didn’t hammer the air and soundwaves day-after-day, hour-after-hour touting our record GDP growth and unemployment for some 6 years. We saw it again in the entire presidential candidacy of John McCain and, again, on full display when Romney let Candy Crowley body slam him about the Benghazi videotapes. From political “advice” I’ve received over the years from Republicans supposedly in the know, their MO is that if you defend yourself, you come across as defensive and all you accomplish is to keep negative stories -- however fallacious -- alive in the press. The best you can do is briefly acknowledge or apologize for whatever it is, then briskly move on to state your viewpoints.

Okay, there is some truth to that but we are in a different political reality today -- one where America teeters on the brink of losing all she is; where traditional families are under attack; where true liberty has been bastardized; our judiciary is controlled by radical activists; and our schools, media, and culture are lost to the left-wing agenda. People sense that it just might be too late to fix any of this. They no longer want their political representatives to be genteel and accommodating to their political enemies. They want them to fight back at least as hard if not harder.

Over the years, conservatives found ways around the Democrat-Media Complex starting with groundbreaking talk radio with Rush, which spawned an entire industry of talk radio. Fox News gave voice to conservative points of view and was so successful nationally, that the left vowed to take it down -- and continues to take responsibility for doing just that with the attacks on Ailes and O’Reilly. Glenn Beck reached a wide audience straddling radio, TV, and the internet. And Drudge upended it all with his internet news aggregator.

In hindsight, these were all necessary steps along the way to where we are today. But the fact is, it was all just talk. We needed action.

Enter: Breitbart and the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party took the fight to the streets and made noise -- showing up to town halls, getting involved in campaigns and elections, being a counterpresence to the left -- and Breitbart taught us all how to fight back against the fake news with facts and conviction. He got in their faces. If you called him a racist, he wouldn’t turn the other cheek, play nice and hope it would all go away. He’d challenge you right out of the starting gate with facts and evidence to the contrary.

But fighting back and taking on the lies of the left -- whether Breitbart or the Tea Party -- are only as good as the ability to disseminate the truth. Although the internet was a paradigm shifter, if only like-mindeds access your site, watch your YouTube videos, or follow your tweets or Facebook posts, who are you really reaching?

The right, in general, and the Tea Party, in particular, hit a media brick wall during the Bush and Obama years that still exists. That wall is the Democrat-Media Complex which keeps the truth relative, filters the news as it sees fit, constructs the news as it wishes, and blacks out news that runs contrary to its needs. And they say walls don’t work!

No matter how refined our messages, no matter how slick our messengers, no matter how passionate our movements, rallies and protests… the harsh reality is we cannot get favorable headlines, we cannot get on the front pages, we cannot get the MSM to present our points of view, let alone the truth or alternate facts. Our ideas are as good as unspoken.

So, in 2016, the people opted for something more drastic, more “in your face,” more responsive to the forgotten and silenced, silent majority.

Trump is proving every day that he will not turn the other cheek, take the high road, or ignore left-wing attacks, accusations, and invective. He will not respond passively, giving life to left-wing lies, when Democrats hurl dung at Republicans like raging chimps. 

Trump is crude and unfiltered in a way that makes Republicans who still think old school squirm. Unlike standard politicians who don’t attack back but skirt around an issue or simply reiterate their point of view, Trump will not only attack the attack, but the attacker as well. He is effectively immune from their hype.  Show him a pussy hat and Madonna or Ashley angrily gyrating and threatening him, and he could care less. Most Republicans, by contrast, would recoil in embarrassment, apologize profusely, attend re-education seminars, and bow to the politically correct gods.

Trump might be an idiot and a fool and completely out of his league. Or, he just might know that the DMC will not treat him or any other Republican or conservative fairly -- cognizant that he can’t get his message out, let alone on the front page with a truthful headline.

If Rush, Beck, Fox, Breitbart and the Tea Party were paradigm shifters -- and they were -- then Trump is a paradigm shifter upending the status quo -- throwing tweet-after-tweet and comment-after-comment at the DMC like chum to the sharks. And these arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, johnny-know-betters, fall for the bait every time. Good. While they have their feeding frenzies, Trump is beginning the process of unraveling the most odious of regulations, reversing executive orders and policies, and hopefully, if the morons in Congress ever get it together, undoing laws and tax burdens the left has inflicted on the Forgotten Ones.

Trump is doing what we tried for decades to do -- be heard and effectuate real change -- not perpetuate the status quo as dictated by the political elites and entrenched establishment. He recognizes that this cannot be accomplished playing their game -- where they craft the rules, have all the pieces, and control the board. We might occupy the moral high ground, we might be sincere and nice and generous in our dealings with our enemies, but that’s a game we will lose.

He understands that the wall built and maintained by the Democrat-Media Complex is holding us prisoner and must be torn down brick-by-brick. He is playing a game of stones -- the stones you hurl and the ones of courage and chutzpah. No tiddlywinks in his arsenal.   

We can continue to play a losing game or grow some stones and play to win. In choosing allegiance to Daenerys, Varys says “I choose you because the people have no better chance than you.” 

That’s exactly why the people voted for Trump. The status quo is a guaranteed loss. But trading in an endless supply of tiddlywinks for the stones to fight back, is the only and best chance we have.