World Affairs Brief, September 2, 2022 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

WHAT TRUMP DID AND DID NOT DO WHILE PRESIDENT

I think it’s time for a solid review of what Trump did and did not accomplish while president. Ollie Williams presents this overview: “Looking back at the presidency of Donald Trump.” I’ll add my comments where I disagree.

Many blame the shortcomings of the Trump presidency on the ‘deep state’. Writing in the New York Times, a White House insider revealed that “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda”. In an unsent resignation letter Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused Trump of subscribing “to many of the principles that we fought against” in the Second World War. Rather than resign he decided to stay and “fight from the inside”. These people weren’t the deep state, they were Trump appointees.

Wrong. They were Deep State AND Trump appointees, because Trump never studied the history of conspiracy, so he could never tell who was Deep State and who wasn’t until they betray him. Yes, he’s responsible for having allowed them into his administration, but it was out of ignorance or pandering to the establishment, not bad intent.

He appointed Ja’Ron Smith who, prior to joining the White House, had helped organise the Hoodies on the Hill protest about the death of Trayvon Martin (his avatar on Facebook is an image of a Black man raising his fist). He appointed Omarosa, who went on to make the absurd claim to Al Sharpton that the president wanted to start a “race war”.

He appointed national security advisor H. R. McMaster who told the National Security Council that the term “radical Islamic terrorism” was not helpful because Islamic terrorists are “un-Islamic” (this would be news to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who gained a PhD in Islamic Studies before founding the apparently misnomered Islamic State). He appointed Mark Milley who defended the study of critical race theory in the military. He appointed Gary Cohn, a registered Democrat who referred to violent Antifa protesters as “standing up for equality and freedom”.

Did Trump know anything about these people before he invited them into the White House?

No, he was relying on other mainstream advisors because Trump never ran in conservative circles, and knew none to appoint.

In 2016 Trump was the only Republican candidate willing to condemn the disastrous Iraq war. He picked John Bolton, one of the leading advocates of that war, as his National Security Advisor, apparently without doing a cursory google search. Here’s an exchange between the President and the Wall Street Journal:

Trump: And after the first month or so, you know, I asked him one question. I said, “So, do you think you did the right thing by going into Iraq?” He said, “Yes.” And that’s when I lost him. And that was early on.

WSJ: You didn’t ask him about Iraq before you brought him into the White House? If he regretted that?

Trump: No

Darren Beattie, who worked as a speechwriter for Trump and remains a Trump loyalist, said of the ex-president “what was remarkable was how little authority he actually had… He is not the author of the things that his own administration was doing. And he had really little say in it and frankly I think he didn’t have very much interest in having a say in it”.

And when he did want a say in the matter, like overturning birthright citizenship, he lacked the arguments to counter the objections of his advisors. He was totally unprepared to be president. He never does any homework other than listen to Fox News, and relies totally on briefings.

Many blame Jared Kushner for everything bad about the Trump presidency. According to Peter Navarro, who worked as an advisor to President Trump, Kushner repeatedly said the words, “That was the campaign. This is reality,” while subverting everything Trump had claimed to stand for. But who in the White House was any better?… he had surrounded himself with politically-correct swamp creatures.

Platinum pandering: There were many surreal episodes from the Trump presidency but none comes close to making gangster rapper Ice Cube a key policy consultant in the run-up to the 2020 election. Ice Cube is the man who rapped: “Beat a police outta shape and when I’m finished, bring the yellow tape…punk police are afraid of me… when I’m finished, it’s gonna be a bloodbath”. According to New York magazine, “Ice Cube’s biggest push was to get Trump to commit to a $500 billion investment… The $500 billion (reparations in everything but name) was essentially a bribe to get the black vote.

Law and order… and nonstop riots: During the prolonged riots of 2020, Senator Tom Cotton convincingly made the case for invoking the Insurrection Act. The act had previously been used by George H.W. Bush during the L.A. riots in 1992. President Trump… considered it safer politically to let the riots take place and blame them on Joe Biden, repeatedly labeling them “Biden riots”.

Yet the “LAW AND ORDER” president, when not impotently tweeting, was letting African American criminals out of jail. In 2019 Kim Kardashian, the daughter of O. J. Simpson’s defense attorney who rose to fame by starring in a sex tape, visited the White House to discuss criminal justice reform. Ivanka tweeted that “at the recommendation of @KimKardashian” her father had granted clemency to three criminals.

Yet in office Trump expressed a desire to meet with the family of violent criminal Jacob Blake, for whom he said he “feels terribly” — the 2020 Republican Party convention started with a prayer for him.

Immigration — where’s the wall? “Build the wall” was the signature policy of the Trump campaign. Since he entered office, only 80 miles of new wall have been built (the border with Mexico is almost 2000 miles long). Making Mexico pay for the wall, as Trump repeatedly promised, may have sounded hyperbolic, but could have easily been achieved by taxing remittances, as Trump had suggested. That never happened.

Yes, Trump failed to pay for the wall with a US to Mexico transfer tax, but it was because Paul Ryan wouldn’t support it, and Trump didn’t have the arguments to push it forward. I believe Trump would have completed the wall had not Ryan failed to get funding. And Trump failed to push back on the high price tag of the wall bids he got.

Weakness on illegal Immigration: Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson comically tried to explain his immigration flip-flop: “He hasn’t changed his position on immigration. He’s changed the words that he is saying.” Most notoriously, Trump tweeted that amnesty would be on the table when negotiating with the Democrats: “Amnesty will be used only on a much bigger deal, whether on immigration or something else. Likewise there will be no big push to remove the 11,000,000 plus people who are here illegally”.

When it came to legal immigration, Mr Trumps record is even worse. He said in his 2019 State of the Union address “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” After the speech Trump doubled down, telling a reporter “I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in. We need people.” This was a marked change from his words in Phoenix only a few years earlier: “(W)e will reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers, the forgotten people. Workers. We’re going to take care of our workers”.

Juneteenth: Trump expressed pride for his role in pushing the made-up holiday ‘Juneteenth’ into the mainstream: “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it”. It’s now a federal holiday.

Hobnobbing with Clintons: In 2016, Ted Cruz accused Trump of harboring socially liberal “New York values”. It was an accurate assessment. It is well known that Bill and Hillary Clinton attended Trump’s wedding to Melania. Trump donated $100,000 to the couple’s Clinton Foundation. He donated to Hillary’s Senate campaigns six times between 2002 and 2009. Trump granted Bill free access to his Westchester golf club where he hung photographs of the ex-president. Maureen Down writes in the New York Times, “Trump realized that golf was his entree if he wanted to pal around with Bill Clinton, whom he considered a kindred spirit… Trump once told me that he rebuilt the club, in part, because he knew Bill Clinton would need a place to play.” Ivanka and Chelsea Clinton were once close friends. Mr Trump was himself so desperate to attend Chelsea’s wedding that he phoned up Clinton advisor Doug Band seeking advice.

Trump for decades maintained a close association with with two of America’s most notorious race hucksters: Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. He said of Jackson in 1999, “he’s a terrific guy, we love him and I’m here for him”.

Roger Stone, a long-time Trump associate and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” masterminded Al Sharpton’s 2004 campaign for the Presidency. The New York Times reported that Stone had a hand in some of Sharpton’s most effective attacks on Howard Dean, his opponent in the Democratic primaries.

What is the real legacy of Donald Trump? Is America a better country now than it was in 2016? Is it more conservative? Less woke?

I didn’t print all the blame he attributes to Trump on this theme because I highly disagree with blaming Trump for where we are now. It is in spite of Trump’s efforts, not because of them. Only the vaccine plague can be fully laid at his feet. Just because Trump engendered so much hatred and backlash from the Left doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have surfaced without Trump. The Left would have and will attack any defender of American and Western/Christian values with equal vehemence. That said Williams is sadly right about a new personality cult surrounding Trump which dominates the Republican party:

There has certainly been no great ideological realignment of the GOP. Steve King, one of the few genuinely nationalist Republicans who had advocated building a border wall and ending birthright citizenship while Trump was still just a reality TV star, was rebuked by his own party and lost his primary in 2020. With the ouster of the awful war-hawk Liz Cheney, it seems that Trump has largely taken over the GOP. She has been replaced by the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman, who in 2016 called Trump “racist and xenophobic” but who is now willing to to kiss the ring in order to gain political power. Trump has remade the GOP, but as a personality cult populated by opportunistic shills, not as a coherent political project.

It is true that the Republican Party is now downplaying many core issues like abortion and non-intervention in foreign affairs just to gain the approval of the mainstream.

Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, largely portrayed as preventing the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the Federal government, was signed in his final months in office. Having spent his presidency railing against cancel culture and political correctness, it was the only concrete action the ‘most powerful man in the world’ actually took to counter it. While commendable, it was instantly rescinded once Joe Biden made it into the White House. Biden signed 17 executive actions on his first day in office.

And, there were other failures:

He had promised to end birthright citizenship — it never happened. He had a plan to cut $4 billion in foreign aid but scrapped it. He vowed to officially designate antifa a terrorist organisation —that also never happened. Trump infamously said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”. He was so convinced of his own popularity that he didn’t realize he actually had to deliver. Trump sent over 11,000 tweets during the course of his presidency. Tweeting was not enough.

According to one poll, fifty-five percent of Trump supporters would prefer a more competent and presidential candidate with Trump’s views on immigration, nationalism and willingness to challenge political correctness over Trump himself. We need nationalism without Trump.

But that’s not going to happen as long as Trump is the perceived leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. His supporters are mostly blind to his faults. There is a kind of blind euphoria in conservative’s minds about the hope of someone who will “save them.” But we’re past overturning the Deep State. It’s too deeply entrenched.

Even DeSantis who is our best bet to replace Trump (he’s capable and savvy about most issues and well spoken) can’t afford to criticize him. You can’t challenge someone for the presidential nomination without criticizing the front runner, and right now that’s political suicide in conservative circles. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll gladly vote for Trump if he runs, but I’d prefer someone more savvy and careful with the facts and who can see through Deep State deceptions.