Last night, Donald Trump told us what I imagine was a surprise to almost no one on earth — that he is running to be the 21st Century’s Grover Cleveland, i.e., the 47th President in addition to having been the 45th.
How do we deal?
Let us start with the unassailable. Donald Trump’s presidency from 2017 to 2021 was like none before it. We have had an occasional Army general take on the presidency without experience in government, but in our lifetime, our elected presidents have all been former governors, senators and/or vice presidents — in my own lifetime, six of the fourteen had previously been vice-presidents, and only Eisenhower had never held elected office.
Mr. Trump had been quite on the “other side” — when he was asked if the government was innately corrupt, the long-time businessman, never before a candidate for anything, relied that he knew for sure, since he had been “part of it”, i.e., that he had leveraged his own political donations for the good of his companies. When he came into office, he hadn’t even been inaugurated when he started negotiating with Lockheed Martin to slash the pricing on the in-progress Air Force One jets. He knew gouging when he saw it.
Being on the other side, he looked at the government as having only the money it took from the taxpayer and, therefore, it fell to him to be the steward of what was taken from working people. This naturally ran squarely into what he called the “Swamp”, the entrenched interests found in both parties that ran up the cost of government and made people like Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Kevin McCarthy extremely wealthy.
Ever wonder why the swords were out for Trump before he even took office? Well, we know now — he was a threat to the system by which (A) incumbent, long-term congressmen and senators made millions, and (B) government was grown to provide a huge civil service complex that survived changes in their senior executive levels — the prime example being the now-utterly corrupt FBI, used by the leftover Obamists and the more recent Bidenists as a political hit squad since Trump came down the escalator in 2015.
Many, many of us who ultimately voted for him in 2016 did so in part, because he was an “outsider” in our view, one who would come in without loyalties to the Swamp, and who might look with fresh eyes at entities with questionable Constitutional underpinnings, like the Departments of Education and Energy, that sucked up billions of taxpayer dollars and kept the Swamp active.
We were obviously frustrated when an actual Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, who seemed outwardly jubilant at the opportunity to press a conservative agenda, appeared to do nothing and subvert President Trump wherever the opportunity to pare the Federal government appeared, or when he questioned the necessity of many programs. Sure, they “allowed” the removal of vast numbers of Federal business-stifling regulations, but that didn’t do anything to trim the bureaucracy, and the House didn’t really have the power to stop him anyway.
The Democrats, of course, put whatever boulders they could in his path, dragging out judicial confirmations, filibustering sound proposals, and then going after him with two impeachments, after having created the whole-cloth russiarussiarussia hoax.
Had Trump been able to “be Trump”, and we all know what that means, well, who knows what he could have done. Because even with all the obstructions, after three years in office, Trump had used tools such as a slashing of corporate tax rates to have achieved a historically outstanding economy, featuring historic low unemployment for black, Hispanic and female Americans. He had achieved a reasonable channel of communications with North Korea that had managed to cool the tensions present before his election. And he left office with the Nobel Peace Prize-worthy achievement of several recognitions of the State of Israel by formerly intransigent Arab states.
But there is the other side, of course.
I am not even an amateur psychiatrist; but it certainly appears as if President Trump, having run a business for decades with his children as his senior management (and therefore with an implicit trust and explicit loyalty), but without experience in government, came into the White House with an expectation that the people that were recommended to him, to be hired into senior positions, would carry that same loyalty. That expectation was dashed for four years, leaving him understandably bitter.
This is part of the concern I have about a second term, that I would not have had in 2020 to that degree. On the one hand, I believe that a Trump 47 able to press his legislative agenda would be a huge benefit to the country. On the other, it would be beyond exhausting to have four years of the explicit opposition by the leftist, virulently anti-Trump Democrats and media (but I repeat myself), and the more subtle subversion by the RINOs and the Swampian senior executives presiding over the second levels of the Cabinet departments.
So what is most important?
I’m not a fanboy. I don’t care if a robot is president, as long as the goals are to minimize government, defend our nation, defend freedom, protect the taxpayer’s wallet by cutting taxes, and return to energy independence. In other words, I want a Trump-type administration and agenda, but I know that the odds of getting that without the exhaustion of the counter-Trumpists on both sides are very low.
I know how I feel. I know that I was quietly hoping that the speech last night was to be an atypical Trumpian surprise, and that he was to announce that, in fact, in that he would be 78 at the time of a second inauguration, the more important thing would be to realign the direction of the country. I hoped that he had decided not to run in 2022, but would assess the MAGAnetism of the various candidates as they declared, and get behind one at the appropriate time — or at least behind the eventual nominee.
I didn’t get what I suppose I wanted. But regardless of the nominee, regardless of whether Mr. Trump runs or not, the important thing, above all else, is the policy. It is the expectation that the nominee, if elected, will do everything possible to drive a conservative policy — Trumpism with or without its primary advocate.
And that’s my real hope — that Mr. Trump, as candidate, will use a different strategy in the primary season from the scorched-earth one that had him savaging all his competitor primary candidates (save Ben Carson, whom no one can successfully savage).
Let the former president fly on the positive wings of his previous accomplishments, and save his denigration for the left, and for whomever it is that actually tells Joe Biden what to say and do. There is so little difference between the economic and foreign-policy highlights Mr. Trump espouses and those of likely Republicans in the primaries, that it is beyond political self-immolation for him to lash out at those also seeking the office.
He is “in it.” How he conducts his campaign, whether it leans far toward the positive and uplifting, leveraging his achievements, and eschewing the denigration of his fellow candidates — that will go a long way to attracting the votes of the independent and conservative voters he will need in any event.
Copyright 2014-2022 by Robert Sutton
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