The Trump Steamroller
By Conrad Black
July 16, 2019 3:55 PM
As he piles up successes (and gaffes), the Democrats implode
As we settle into high summer and the period of maximum difficulty in finding anything to fill in hours of television news, especially 24/7 news television, two well-established political trends are emerging in this pre-electoral period: The president’s opponents continue to dig themselves into foxholes that they will not be able to escape, and the president’s tactical victories continue to be compromised by his verbal sloppiness. In completely nonpartisan terms, both phenomena are disappointing. The process of the president’s leaving verbal lapses for his enemies to exploit, and of the Democrats and national media doing so excessively, is more complicated than it seems. The initial shock at the success of this blunt and volcanic man who attacked all factions of both parties and assaulted almost every element of OBushinton political correctness and conventional wisdom, whose inaugural address was described at once by George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton as “some weird s***,†has mutated into a fear that Trump presages a Dark Age of dictatorship, official thuggery, and oppressive know-nothingism.
They are failing to make the distinction between Trump’s policies and his mannerisms. No serious person can dispute the president’s economic successes (especially the virtual elimination of unemployment and energy imports), his revival of a viable policy of nuclear nonproliferation, taking serious measures to stop mass illegal immigration, moving decisively to address dangerous disadvantages in some trading relationships, and shaping up the Western alliance from an association of freeloading beneficiaries of an American military guaranty. He is the first businessman to be president, and he engaged in a policy form of zero-based budgeting. The underlying premise for climate policy is unproved and almost certainly largely false; he scrapped it. The notion that the U.S. performed a service for international development and world harmonization by allowing the Mexicans, Chinese, and others to pick America’s pockets and export unemployment to the United States was false. He is scrapping that. The idea, cherished by Democratic politicians and Republican employers of low-skilled workers, that masses of people could swarm into the country undocumented, be exploited in the labor market, and not be counted anywhere, but still vote (Democratic) and use the welfare and education systems is an outrage. Trump is scrapping that, too. The country is tired of spending billions more every year on education to destroy freedom of expression in the university and produce ever-less-well-educated students in the unionized state school systems. He is attacking those problems, too.
more
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/the-trump-steamroller/
