The Case for Trump

It seems like it was only yesterday, but in fact it was three days ago when distinguished New York Times columnist Bret Stephens presented the case for Trump.

Of course, Stephens sprinkled his text with disclaimers, presenting his bona fides as a Trump detractor. He opposes Trump but he is desirous of keeping his job on the Times op-ed page. To be fair, no Times columnist will long continue to pontificate from its pages if he seriously supports Donald Trump.

Whatever the reasons, Stephens believes, correctly, that his fellow travelers on the political left are making a serious mistake. They have become so thoroughly overcome by their emotions that they have failed to understand Trump. Wallowing in irrationality they do not know their enemy.

Stephens might have, but he didn’t quote Sun Tzu: 

Know the enemy and know yourself in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.

As he puts it:

You can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable. Too many people, especially progressives, fail to think deeply about the enduring sources of his appeal — and to do so without calling him names, or disparaging his supporters, or attributing his resurgence to nefarious foreign actors or the unfairness of the Electoral College. Since I will spend the coming year strenuously opposing his candidacy, let me here make the best case for Trump that I can.

It could be that progressives never learned to think. But, their therapists taught them to emote; it makes them feel that they are in touch with their feminine side.

To make his case Stephens begins by noting that Trump got the illegal immigration issue right. Or at least he got it a lot more right than did his successor:

Arguably the single most important geopolitical fact of the century is the mass migration of people from south to north and east to west, causing tectonic demographic, cultural, economic, and ultimately political shifts. Trump understood this from the start of his presidential candidacy in 2015, the same year Europe was overwhelmed by a largely uncontrolled migration from the Middle East and Africa. 

Trump understood nationhood:

But enforcing control at the border — whether through a wall, a fence, or some other mechanism — isn’t racism. It’s a basic requirement of statehood and peoplehood, which any nation has an obligation to protect and cherish.

One suspects that the frenzy surrounding Trump has something to do with the fact that progressives see his anti-migrant policies as a direct critique of Barack Hussein Obama. And we cannot have that.

But, Stephens addresses the issue in terms of nationhood:

Public services paid by taxes exist for people who live here, not just anyone who makes his way into the country by violating its laws. A job market is structured by rules and regulations, not just an endless supply of desperate laborers prepared to work longer for less. A national culture is sustained by common memories, ideals, laws and a language — which newcomers should honor, adopt and learn as a requirement of entry. It isn’t just a giant arrival gate for anyone and everyone who wants to take advantage of American abundance and generosity.

It said something about the self-deluded state of Western politics when Trump came on the scene that his assertion of the obvious was treated as a moral scandal, at least by the stratum of society that had the least to lose from mass migration. To millions of other Americans, his message, however crudely he may have expressed it, sounded like plain common sense.

The second issue that Trump understood was American pessimism. For all the Democratic talk about how we have never had it so good, because Bidenomics is saving the nation, the American people are simply not optimistic about the nation’s future:

… when liberal elites insist that things are going well while overwhelming majorities of Americans say they are not, Trump’s unflattering view captured the mood of the country.

He continues:

Nicholas Eberstadt joined this pessimistic perception with comprehensive data in an influential essay for Commentary. He noted persistently sluggish economic growth and a plunging labor-force participation rate that had never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. There was a rising death rate among middle-aged white people and declining life expectancy at birth, in part because of sharply rising deaths from suicide, alcoholism or drug addiction. More than 12 percent of all adult males had a felony conviction on their record, leaving them in the shadowlands of American life. And there was a palpable sense of economic decline, with fewer and fewer younger Americans having any hope of matching their parents’ incomes at the same stages of life.

And also,

Labor-force participation remains essentially where it was in the last days of the Obama administration. Deaths of despair keep rising. The cost of living has risen sharply, and while the price of ordinary goods may finally be coming down, rents haven’t.

Stephens continues:

If you’re saying it’s “morning in America” when 77 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, you’re preaching to the wrong choir — and the wrong country.

And then we as Americans have lost trust in our institutions. And yet, Stephens says, blaming it on Trump misses the point:

Trump’s detractors, including me, often argued that his demagoguery and mendacity did a lot to needlessly diminish trust in these vital institutions. But we should be more honest with ourselves and admit that those institutions did their own work in squandering, through partisanship or incompetence, the esteem in which they had once been widely held.

The media, the academy and the FBI have abandoned their missions in favor of promoting one political party against the other. The prosecutorial persecution of Trump makes manifest this phenomenon:

Much of the elite media, mostly liberal, became openly partisan in the 2016 election — and, in doing so, not only failed to understand why Trump won but also probably unwittingly contributed to his victory. Academia, also mostly liberal, became increasingly illiberal, inhospitable not just to conservatives but to anyone pushing back even modestly against progressive orthodoxy. The F.B.I. abused its authority with dubious investigations and salacious leaks that led to sensational headlines but not to criminal prosecutions, much less convictions.

Opposing the elites who run the country would not have stuck if these same elites had been functioning as responsible stewards of the public trust. They were not. They were pursuing another agenda:

Trump and his supporters called all this out. For this they were called idiots, liars and bigots by people who think of themselves as enlightened and empathetic and hold the commanding heights in the national culture. The scorn only served to harden the sense among millions of Americans that liberal elites are self-infatuated, imperious, hysterical, and hopelessly out of touch — or, to use one of Trump’s favorite words, “disgusting.”

Sometimes the left seems incapable of doing anything beyond name-calling and persecution. They keep denouncing Trump as a fascist and a dictator, Stephens considers the notion mindlessly risible:

In 2016, Trump was frequently compared to Benito Mussolini and other dictators (including by me). The comparison might have proved more persuasive if Trump’s presidency had been replete with jailed and assassinated political opponents, rigged or canceled elections, a muzzled or captured press — and Trump still holding office today, rather than running to get his old job back. The election denialism is surely ugly, but it isn’t quite unique: Prominent Democrats also denied the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s two elections — the second one no less than the first.

And he makes the obvious point that Democratic judges and bureaucrats have been inventing legal theories to keep Trump off of ballots-- as clear and present a threat to democracy as one can imagine:

If there’s any serious threat to democracy, doesn’t it also come from Democratic judges and state officials who are using never-before-used legal theories — which even liberal law professors like Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig regard as dangerous and absurd — to try to kick Trump’s name off ballots in Maine and Colorado? When liberal partisans try to suppress democracy in the name of saving democracy, they aren’t helping their cause politically or legally. They are merely confirming the worst stereotypes about their own hypocrisy.

Of course, for all the talk about Bidenomics, Stephens points out that the Trump years were good ones:

Americans have reasons to remember the Trump years as good ones — and good in a way that completely defied expert predictions of doom. Wages outpaced inflation, something they have just begun to do under Biden, according to an analysis by Bankrate. Unemployment fell to 50-year lows (as it has been under Biden); stocks boomed; inflation and interest rates were low.

And crime was far less of a problem before America’s blue cities declared war on policing:

And he shared the law-and-order instincts of normal Americans, including respect for the police, something the left seemed to care about on Jan. 6 but was notably less concerned about during the months of rioting, violence and semi-anarchy that followed George Floyd’s murder.

As for the world entire, no one can seriously suggest that the enfeebled Joe Biden, surrounded by a band of fearful cowards, has brought peace and safety.

Does the world feel safer under Biden — with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s assault on Israel, Houthi attacks on shipping in international waters, the Chinese open threat to invade Taiwan — than it did under Trump? Trump may have generated a lot of noise, but his crazy talk and air of unpredictability seemed to keep America’s adversaries on their guard and off balance in a way that Biden’s instinctive caution and feeble manner simply do not.

Stephens does not mention it, but under Trump we had the Abraham Accords. Under Biden we had piles of dead Jews in Southern Israel. Will the real Adolph Hitler please stand up?