Between the abyss and what goes on in
Portland and the Magnificent Mile, there is for the moment nothing else but
Trump standing in the breach.
Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of
Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller
government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes
traditionalism.
But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited
his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by
energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had
either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether.
NeverTrumpers talk
of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP.
They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their
Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.
Trumpist conservatism is usually defined as not free, but
fair trade, strict enforcement of immigration laws, and an end to optional
interventions that will in a cost-to-benefit analysis not likely result in
U.S. interests or strategic calm for a purported troubled region.
His brand of conservatism is also a belief
that industry and manufacturing are not brick-and-mortar anachronisms, but the
creators of what we cook on, sit on, live in, work in, and drive.
It involves our
non-virtual world that everyone relies on and yet takes for granted as so
passé.
If Trump left his agenda at that, NeverTrumpers likely
would be disgruntled but mostly quiet. The Left, as is its wont with Republican
presidents, would have remained serially hysterical as in the Reagan and Bush
years, but not completely unhinged as it has been since 2017.
What distinguished Trump then was not just his substance,
but also his style.
Translated it could be envisioned as chemotherapy, toxic
enough to kill the status-quo cancer, but not quite lethal enough to kill the
host.
Or maybe Trump derangement arose from class disdain over the orange skin,
the combed over dyed hair, the mile-long ties, the Queens accent, the oddly
agile bulkiness, the raucous Manhattan career—the antithesis to all that
appears on the Sunday morning talk shows.
Or maybe Trump’s don’t-tread-on-me brand could be defined
as a remedy, a promise no longer to lose nobly rather than to win ugly (the
last Republican to do so had been George H. W. Bush in 1988).
Or maybe the rub was rather than being defensive about
having neither prior military nor political experience, Trump was boastful and
strutting about just such inoculation from Washington.
Whereas his haters
believed he was unscientific in not consulting with the beltway intelligentsia,
he countered not only that they were overrated, but to most outside their
bubble were themselves silly, self-important, and superfluous.
Most hated Trump not because he hated or ridiculed them,
but because he found them useless, as we saw from the fixations of John Brennan
and James Clapper to the dazed pundits of NeverTrump to the wise men of the
retired military.
What created the hatred of Trump and his supporters,
then, was not a rather heterodox political agenda (see below), but a style that
took on the Left on its own terms, and shocked a Republican establishment—again
not just by conjuring the specter of Lee Atwater, but by shrugging as
irrelevant his ostracism by the traditional conservative beltway insider.
We forget some Republicans could be crass and crude,
albeit in their own polite way.
But, given a choice between Trump and privileged gentlemen conservatives, I prefer Trump.
I prefer Trump, the supposed braggart, cracking
down on China.
I prefer Trump, the purported narcissist, closing the border.
I prefer Trump, an alleged
demagogue, promising change in the Rust Belt.
I do not want any more sermons from
privileged gentlemen conservatives that tolerating illegal immigration “is an
act of love."
I do not want another silent agreement that those manufacturing “jobs are not coming
back” as Obama put it.
I do not want to endure wonkishly boy wonder Paul Ryan being drilled in a
debate by the vacuous smiling Joker Joe Biden or Mitt Romney oblivious that
Candy Crowley had just hijacked his debate momentum—and with it the
election.
Crassness is not a requisite for needed change, but so
often in a flawed world the two are shared, in the reverse fashion that gaseous
pieties are frequently voiced by the sober and judicious.
But all this is irrelevant when we consider what Trump did
rather than what he said.
I mean not just that action matters more than rhetoric,
but rather to evaluate Trump by the general past standards of presidential
comportment rather than through Platonic ideals.
Trump is less randy and gross
in office than were John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton who were reckless and sexually cruel, but are now revered icons.
Trump has not weaponized the federal government for
political advantage in the manner of Barack Obama (who may go down soon as the
most corrupt president since Warren G. Harding).
Trump, of “Crooked Hillary,” “lock her up,” and “Sleepy
Joe” infamy, was more likely to react concretely to the plight of the inner
city and the economic aspirations of minorities and the white working-class,
who were not just crushed by globalization but so often ignored by their
supposed champions of both parties.
The Economy
From early 2017, Trump pushed three general themes to
reawaken an inert economy that only sluggishly had survived the 2008 financial
panic.
One, was to deregulate, recalibrate tax incentives, and
create an entirely new psychological climate that would encourage capitalists
to invest, spend, and expand, rather than retreat, ride out, and hoard.
The
point was to go out, get busy, build, profit and not fear talk of “you didn’t
build that” and “at some point you’ve made enough money” as warning shots
across their bow.
We forget that psychology is a great part of economic growth.
After 2017, trillions of dollars reentered the U.S. economy that had been hoarded,
protected, and sequestered since 2009.
Second, Trump hectored corporations, foreign and
domestic, to relocate into the U.S. heartland, given that U.S. workers, energy
costs and supplies, security, and the business climate were in truth more
frequently competitive than abroad.
Third, Trump at least sought trade equilibrium with those
nations, friends, foes, and neutrals—China, Japan, Germany, Mexico, South
Korea, and Canada—who ran up huge trade surpluses, a fact in the past that was
contextualized as either irrelevant or unalterable.
Foreign Policy
Joe Biden has claimed the recent historic establishment
of diplomatic relationships between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was not
of the Trump Administration’s own making, but the logical epilogue to years of
hard Obama Administration foundational work.
Biden is right in a sense. For eight years, his
Obama team sought to empower Iran—through the lifting of sanctions; through the
flawed Iran Deal; through appeasement of Hezbollah, the Assads, and Hamas;
through estrangement of the Arab Gulf States and Israel—all as a bizarre
Persian/Shiite counterweight to the Sunni Arab world and the U.S.-Israeli
special relationship.
Obama and Biden so succeeded that they drove Israel and
Gulf States to seek an-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend realist partnership,
whose fruition we witnessed last week.
We forget, however, when Trump entered office, that
Israel was isolated.
Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States were bewildered by U.S.
neutrality in the Middle East. Iran was ascendant. The “jayvees” of ISIS had
overrun much of Iraq with delusions of caliphate grandeur. The Ottomanizing
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was supposedly our new trusted “bridge” between East and
West.
Less than four years later, Iran is isolated, broke, and
a veritable client of China. ISIS was bombed out of existence. Israel and much
of the Arab world are more worried about Iran than they are about each other.
The Palestinians are not the key to regional peace. Turkey is recognized as the
rogue that it had become while relations with Greece have warmed.
The United States is energy independent of the Middle
East, as is Israel—because of the expansion of fracking and horizontal drilling
that a Biden-Harris Administration claims would cease upon assuming
office.
Indeed, the fact of U.S. energy independence is often
forgotten, but it is a reality that anchors almost every major breakthrough
we’ve seen in the Middle East over the last four years, from cancellation of
the Iran Deal to pushing the Gulf States to détente with Israel, and leaving
the EU and China to worry about the security of Middle East oil exports as much
or as little as we do.
Trump’s signature foreign policy achievement is a
complete recalibration of policy toward China—one deeply resented by the
legions of Wall Street investors, corporate interests, celebrities, athletes,
foundations, universities, and media, all deeply leveraged by Chinese
lucre.
Before COVID-19, Trump was written off as a crank, a
protectionist, a Sinophobe, a quixotic anachronism screaming about Chinese
mercantilism.
After the virus, the trick for the bipartisan establishment was
how to square the circle of emulating or trumping Trump’s Chinese skepticism
and decoupling—but without appearing to be anyway influenced by Trump, or in any
manner embarrassed by their prior overt appeasement or collaboration with
Beijing.
After all, how could a guy like Trump be right, and the Council
on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution wrong?
For all the hoax of “Russian collusion,” Vladimir Putin
is in terrible shape and has not fooled the administration as he did with
“reset” in the Obama years.
In the last four years, the United States upped
sanctions on Russia, crashed the world export market of natural gas and oil so
dear to Moscow, beefed up NATO spending, and hectored Germany about its new energy
dependence on Putin.
We've increased U.S. military capability, reached out to
frontline Eastern Europe, left an asymmetrical missile deal with Russia, and obliterated Russian mercenaries in Syria.
We've sold lethal weapons to Ukraine—even
as the likes of James Clapper, John Brennan, James Comey, and an array of
retired generals sermonized that Trump was a Russian “asset.”
Translated that
means Trump is the president who contained Putin they loathed, as well as the Obama presidency
that empowered him they idolized.
Even Trump’s most controversial steps did not cause catastrophes as predicted.
Those steps included: redeploying of
12,000 troops from Germany, the art of the deal brinkmanship talk with North Korea,
withdrawing a few troops from the Kurdish-and NATO-allied Turkey fire zone in
Syria, and jawboning NATO members to honor their reneged pledges of military
investments.
Indeed, for the most part,
many in the bipartisan establishment knew warnings were overdue and change was
needed. They just assumed that whoever was naïve enough to bell the cat would
be blamed for making the danger noisy.
For Trump’s critics he did more psychological damage by
his often coarse rhetoric than the material good he achieved with undeniable
breakthroughs.
For that exegesis to be persuasive, however, they would have to
make the argument that the mellifluous citizen-of-the-world rhetoric of the
Obama Administration far outweighed in importance the serial setbacks it caused
to U.S. interests and security.
Or perhaps, one could explain how, prior to
2017, China had weaponized the Spratly Islands, North Korea apparently had
nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the U.S. West Coast, Iran was bragging about
a new Shiite crescent, and Russia felt free to invade eastern Ukraine, absorb
Crimea, and habitually since 2014 interfere in U.S. elections with impunity.
Immigration
Trump sought to redefine illegal immigration, in the
manner of 1960s and 1970s lunch-bucket Democrats and Cesar Chavez—as a threat
to the wages and viability of U.S. workers, especially those most vulnerable
entry-level laborers.
Whatever the catastrophes of the caravans and the
coordinated efforts of Central American nationals and Mexico to swarm the
border in 2017-2018, illegal immigration is now way down.
The wall, for all the lawsuits, the deep-state inner
resistance, and the hysteria of the media, is now finally making progress.
The
Left no longer argues that it will never be built, that it is porous and
ineffective, or that it will not discourage illegal entries from the south. Instead, they voice fears that it is suddenly advancing far too rapidly, that its
construction and height are too imposing, and that in its perimeters it has stopped
far too much illegal immigration.
Trump screamed about making Mexico “pay for the wall.”
I’ll leave it to both his critics and supporters to argue over whether what Mexico is doing is proof, a token, or irrelevant to the idea that Mexico is contributing more than at any time in its recent history to discouraging illegal entry into the United States from its soil.
Mexico’s actions include:
The costly deployment of some 15,000 troops to the border to discourage mass
influxes,
The fortification and guarding of its own southern border to
discourage Central American arrivals into the United States, and
Rebooting of the
old NAFTA on more favorable terms.
Pre-virus, all of the above had led to strong GDP growth,
low unemployment and record low minority unemployment, and historical rises in
middle class wages and family incomes.
Trump’s chief weakness was a spending
binge in line with those of both Bush and Obama. It is sustainable only in the
short term due to de facto zero interest rates, which both has deleterious
effects on the thrifty middle class and is likely to change sooner rather than
later.
But then again, Trump is not running against fiscal
conservatives, but a Biden-Harris socialist conglomerate that wishes to borrow
far more on things like Medicare for All, reparations, and the Green New Deal
that will result in more debt and even less economic growth.
Culture
Trump is neither a traditional conservative in the Ronald
Reagan mode nor a centrist establishmentarian Republican like John McCain or
Mitt Romney. But he has done more culturally for the conservative cause than
any president since Calvin Coolidge. Like him or not, he has appointed more
constructionist federal judges at all levels than any prior Republican
president in a single term.
He likewise has been more opposed than any prior Republican
to the current culture of abortion on demand. His education secretary is trying
to enforce the Bill of Rights on what have become sometimes neo-fascistic
college campuses, and to discourage race-based set asides and de facto
discrimination on the basis of race.
He is a defender of the police while acknowledging the
need for greater oversight, and opposed both violence in the streets, and the
appeasement of it by blue state governors and mayors.
In some sense, there are
no conservatives, either by temperament or by political ability, eager to stop
the summer madness of statue toppling, arson, spiraling crime, shakedowns,
cancel culture and the vows of Antifa and BLM that all this is the beginning of
a complete rewriting of American history and a radical recalibration of our
shared futures.
Between the abyss and what goes on in Portland and the
Magnificent Mile, there is for the moment nothing else but Trump standing in
the breach.
A Final Note
No president in the history of the Republic has ever been
targeted for removal by the opposition party, the permanent bureaucracy, and
members of his own party, and in such an illegal and unethical manner.
The list of their shameful criminal and immoral acts is long and includes:
The first impeachment effort,
The Beltway
punditry in early 2017 calling for his removal by coup if necessary,
The voting
machine suits,
The Clinton-Obama-Steele subversion of the Trump campaign and
transition,
The Hollywood assassination chic,
The effort to take out former
National Security Advisor Michael Flynn,
The farce of the 25th Amendment that included
the bathos of high federal officials contemplating wearing wires in private
conversations with the president,
The psychodrama of Professor Bandy Lee
testifying before Congress about Trump’s mental state,
The silly Emolument
Clause gambit (Trump has lost over $1 billion while in office and taking no
salary),
The subversion of the FISA courts,
The Russian hoax,
Robert Mueller’s
two-year long and $35 million witch hunt,
The fabricated Steele dossier
implanted in the bowels of the Obama government and media,
The one-phone-call
impeachment circus,
The revolt of the retired generals,
What has rightly
lately been called “coup porn,”
The hysteria over Ukraine, and lately
The caricaturing
of Trump in 2020 as Typhoid Mary, Herbert Hoover, and Bull Connor as the Left
weaponized the contagion, quarantine, and rioting.
The Left, the media, and the NeverTrump Right rarely now argue all of the above was warranted or based on verifiable
wrongdoing, but see the mish-mash instead as a righteous “any means necessary”
tactic to achieve the noble end of destroying a president who they
detest.
That Trump is still standing is an unrecognized tribute
to his resilience, stamina, and willpower to fight it out to the bitter
end.
His critics say 2020 is not 2016. This time the polls are
right on, not rigged by the sort who trafficked in absurd Russian hoaxes or
were mesmerized by Michael Avanetti.
The silent Trump voters no longer exist,
they add. The suburban mom, we are told, fears Trump’s temper more than Antifa.
The fence-sitter is bothered more by tweeting than Biden’s ever-longer moments
of confused silence. And on and on.
Perhaps.
But Americans at some point empathize with an underdog
fighter on behalf of what they fear may be a fading America, even someone they
are not always fond of, but who does not give up when bullied and subjected to
a level of unwarranted abuse that they themselves know they could never endure.
The Left never wished to beat Trump at the polls (indeed they feared such an
ordeal); they instead wanted to destroy his person, his family, and everyone
who followed him.
That Trump withstood such illegal, unconstitutional, and
unethical venom also says something about those who dished it out—and, in the
end, did so viciously and yet so impotently.
