The problem with President Donald Trump is that his opponents are even worse than he is.
In 2016, Americans were faced with a dreadful choice, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. They (or rather the voting system) decided he was the lesser of the two evils. The same thing is likely to happen next year, given the awful leading Democrat candidates.
Trump is a strange president. He has two great strengths. The first is that he is an outsider, not part of America’s political ruling class. This includes Hillary Clinton, who finds Trump’s low-class supporters ‘deplorable’, and most of the big media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. The fact that these snobs hate him gives him popular appeal. The second is that he is what he is, and never pretends otherwise. Many American politicians change like chameleons, depending on audience and place, acquiring a Southern accent if they’re in Texas or putting on workman’s clothing if they’re in a factory town. Trump is the same everywhere, with his dark suit, red tie, orange hair and New York accent, never pretending to be anything other than a rich businessman. But he has many faults.
He tweets idiotically. He is vulgar and blundering. His foreign policy includes shameful acts. He condemns Iran and sucks up to Saudi Arabia, even though Iran had nothing to do with the terrorist attack on New York in 2001 and Saudi did. He betrayed the brave and faithful Kurds in Syria. He had some crazy idea of buying Greenland from Denmark. His notion of ‘Fair Trade not Free Trade’ is socialist nonsense, which you’d expect from Greenpeace or Oxfam.
Behind such damaging turns, there seems to be no conspiracy at all or even any foresight. He acts on instinct and whim. The immoral act of removing the American forces who protected the Kurds was a sudden impulse, coming from his correct moral instinct to remove America from conflicts abroad. He was right to withdraw from the ridiculous Paris Climate Accord, but the reason he gave – that climate alarm was a Chinese hoax – was nonsense. I think he was right to move the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
At home, Trump has a good record. Under him the economy has boomed and there is record unemployment. His tax cuts encourage business entrepreneurs to expand. He boasted in his immodest way about reducing black unemployment to an historic low, making claims that he is a racist look ridiculous. He removed stifling regulation, freeing up the economy.
Opposing him are a ghastly gang of Democrat grandees. Their shock at this boorish outsider winning the 2016 election was so great that they immediately set about trying to reverse the decision of the voters. The more we learn about their attempts to impeach him, and the details of both the Russian and the Ukrainian machinations, the more they look like a Democrat plot to remove him, even using some institutions of the state, notably the FBI. In both cases I think Trump just behaved in his usual immediate, blundering way, hoping to score some advantage, such as getting dirt on Joe Biden, the leading Democrat candidate, through his son in the Ukraine. I don’t see any ‘quid pro quo’ or any other cause for impeachment at all in all the hearings I’ve heard.
The three leading Democrats are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. All are awful. All talk rubbish about immigration, climate change and the economy. Biden, who was Obama’s Vice President and is old and wooden, is the least bad. Sanders is a rich old socialist who rants like a schoolboy Marxist and flies by private jet to climate rallies where he berates the evils of air travel. Elizabeth Warren is even worse, although, unlike Sanders, she is very pretty, and, at 70, could easily take a romantic lead in a Hollywood film (she’d have to improve her acting). She is a chronic deceiver. Although she is blonde and white, she once claimed to be a Cherokee Indian. She sent her son to a posh private school and then told a black audience she had only sent him to state schools. She is rich and privileged but poses as one suffering hardship and being of the people. Watch the embarrassing video (1 min 27 sec) of her drinking a beer from the bottle. (Google: ‘Elizabeth Warren drinks a beer.’)
The younger Democrats are worse still. All seem to hate the United States (US). Many seek victim status in the new ‘Identity Politics’. All think capitalism is wicked and that rich people (apart from themselves) should be punished. None seems to know that it was liberty, hard work and capitalism that turned the US into the most prosperous country in the world and made them so safe and privileged.
How did this come to pass? How has American politics become so horribly polarised and so barren? Why cannot a nation of genius produce wise and able politicians? As soon as I find out, I’ll let you know.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the IRR.
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