He's Still the One

Hold firm, patriots! From Compact:

Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement. Only Trump has taken on the mania for free trade and outsourcing. No other figure of the right has shown the same willingness to break with his own side’s orthodoxies.

Trump’s opponents on the right often describe themselves as “principled” conservatives. But this is no cause for boasting when one’s principles are bankrupt. The policies pursued by GOP elites since the Reagan era had plunged the nation into costly wars while accelerating the decline of the middle class. Trump promised to punish the architects of these failures. His rhetoric evoked the party’s older Eisenhower-Nixon tradition, which made peace with the New Deal and pursued realism and restraint abroad.

Trump resisted the security apparatus, which sought to keep him from office and then to remove him from it. He also disrupted the broad trend toward depoliticization. From immigration to transnational governance, elites in the years before Trump had removed fundamentally political questions from the realm of political contestation. Voters’ voices on these issues mattered far less than the determinations of elites wielding market rationality and supposedly non-political “expertise”—which just happened to serve their own interests. Trump’s rise promised a return of the political as such. So would his second term.

Trump also exposed the carnage caused by the neoliberal turn in American political economy and the neoconservative turn in foreign policy. For starters, there was the disaster of the post-9/11 wars, which most Republicans defended to the hilt—until Trump came around. “Obviously, the war in Iraq is a big, fat mistake,” Trump declared at a primary debate in South Carolina in 2016. “We have destabilized the Middle East.” The right’s foreign-policy experts were aghast. Yet Trump channeled the anger of military families and millions of others wondering what, exactly, the sacrifice had been for.

In 2019, when Iran shot down a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz, several of Trump’s top advisers—including conservative luminaries John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence—supported a retaliatory strike. Trump nixed the attack, pointing out that killing an estimated 150 would not be “proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.” In this and other moments, Trump showed more good sense than the supposed experts.

Then there was the Reaganite establishment’s support for free trade, which had weakened labor organizations and hollowed out the nation’s manufacturing capacity. Once-vibrant industrial regions became desiccated wastelands, strewn with the corpses of the opioid-addled, haunted by memories of good union jobs. Trump—to his credit—sounded more like progressive critics of globalization from the 1990s and early 2000s than any conventional Republican.

Once in office, he tapped Robert Lighthizer, a critic of unfair trade practices, as US trade representative. Trump imposed $350 billion in tariffs, pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (prompting Bernie Sanders to say, “I am glad the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead and gone”), and renegotiated NAFTA in ways favorable to the United States.

Trump also broke from the right on entitlements. Under the Bush-Romney regime, the GOP had sought to privatize Social Security—the perennial fetish of libertarian extremists and Wall Street fee-skimmers. Trump disagreed. Addressing local radio in Wisconsin, the home state of then-House Speaker and arch-libertarian Paul Ryan, Trump said, “I’m not going to cut” Social Security, “and I’m not going to raise ages, and I’m not going to do all of the things that [Republicans] want to do.”

When Republicans had control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, conservatives pushed for entitlement “reform.” But as Ryan later complained, Trump disagreed. “He and I fought about Medicare and entitlement reform all the time,” Ryan said. “It became clear to me there was no way he wanted to embrace that.” Trump boasted of this record in 2020, telling voters, “I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the past three years.” (Read more.)

Don't blame Trump. There was a lot more at play. From Senator-elect J.D. Vance at The American Conservative:

Of course, no man is above criticism. But the quick turn from gobbling up credit to vomiting blame suggests there is very little analysis at work. So let’s try some of that.

Let’s start with an obvious caveat: there is a lot we don’t know. Precinct level data is still outstanding in most states, and exit polls are notoriously finicky. Votes are still being counted out west. We’re still ignorant about a lot. But any effort to blame Trump—or McConnell for that matter—ignores a major structural advantage for Democrats: money. Money is how candidates fund the all-important advertising that reaches swing voters, and it’s how candidates fund turnout operations. And in every marquee national race, Republicans got crushed financially.

The reason is ActBlue. ActBlue is the Democrats’ national fundraising platform, where 21 million individual donors shovel small donations into every marquee national race. ActBlue is why my opponent ran nonstop ads about how much he “agreed with Trump” during the summer. It is why John Fetterman was able to raise $75 million for his election.

Republican small dollar fundraising efforts are paltry by comparison, and Republican fundraising efforts suffer from high consultant and “list building” fees—where Republicans pay a lot to acquire small-dollar donors. This is why incumbents have such massive advantages: much of the small-dollar fundraising my own campaign did went to fundraising and list-building expenses. If and when I run for reelection, almost all of it will go directly to my campaign. Democrats don’t have this problem. They raise more money from more donors, with lower overhead. (Read more.) 

Whoever the GOP nominee is will be demonized by the Left. From Just the News:

"Six out of 10 Republicans wanted President Trump to run again," John McLaughlin said on the John Solomon Reports podcast this week. "If he does run again, they say they support him 77 to18. If he was running against Joe Biden, he was beating Biden 50 to 43. If he was up against Kamala Harris, it would be 52 to 41."

While the polls seem to indicate that Republicans would prefer former President Trump to be the nominee, McLaughlin acknowledged that the GOP is divided on candidate choices roughly two years out from the next presidential election.

"The sad part for the Republicans is they were split," McLaughlin explained. "Going into the election while Democrats got behind people like Fetterman, there was a euphemism among unnamed Republicans in the media, who would say it was the quality of the candidates. They didn't like Trump's antics. So we're still having primaries in effect and we're divided when we're trying to take the house and the Senate."

Trump this week lobbed shots against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin on his TRUTH social network, claiming that both governors only won their elections because of him. (Read more.) 

 

Time to re-board the Trump Train, in spite of all the naysayers. From The National Pulse:

Last night was the first time Trump was able to say those things to major national television audiences since the corporate media stopped carrying his rallies, years ago. It was right that Trump should have used the occasion to not just speak to his base, but to speak to the millions of Americans from whom he has been hidden.

There is now – already – a massive, new, and dirty campaign against Trump. From people who grifted off him, like Ed Rollins and Mike Pence, to people he has brought immense amounts of wealth to, like Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos. That these forces are singing from the Never Trump hymn sheet, in unison, should serve as enough of a warning to ordinary conservatives and independents. They are not your friends. They do not have your best interests at heart.

But more interesting is the hurried response from Team Biden, and his fluffers at The Lincoln Project. They are already deploying major advertising resources into attacking Trump on television and social media. Which tells you everything you need to know. They are not this afraid – in fact they are not afraid at all – of Mike Pompeo, or Nikki Haley, or whoever else inevitably throws their hat into the ring during the upcoming primary season. (Read more.)

And once again, don't blame Trump. From Raheem Kassam:

A flurry of phone calls and texts at 2am taught me that some long-standing MAGA stalwarts are now preparing to ditch Donald Trump because they didn’t get the flood of feel good results last night. This attitude is incorrect, and sober analysis proves it.

The “OMG RED WAVE!!!” brigade are now the most vociferously disappointed. They set expectations so high – all the while carrying water for a Republican National Committee and party leadership led by the deeply unpopular Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell and Ronna Romney McDaniel. Now they’re upset.

Up and down the country, McLeadership candidates and strategies came up short of expectations. Not even all that short, to be fair. But still, deflating enough that people are already playing the blame game. Two can play.

Firstly, DC-based Republicans think its enough to run against something, rather than for something. They also fundamentally underestimated the appeal of Democrat messaging on abortion, student loan forgiveness, and the cringe-inducing “our democracy”. Honestly, we all did. People really are getting dumber and more pliant and there’s no ignoring that anymore, especially when you see how the TikTok generation turned out, and broke for the far-left. Congratulations, by the way, to Communist China for their apparently totally legal and unchallenged election interference, while CNN staffers shriek about how Elon Musk is trying to charge $8 for the very same verification processes they’ve been outwardly demanding for a decade. Argh.

There’s no need either, to sugarcoat Trump’s “bad endorsements”. As if the GOP field offering a choice between Dr. Oz and Dina Powell’s husband was Trump’s fault. Kathy Barnette may have been better, but her star rose too late. Expecting the man the RNC consistently demands to “stay out of it” to simultaneously tread lightly and deploy massive resources to deliver the same McLeadership who worked against him in office is asinine. And imagine what some of these results would have looked like without Trump’s rallies and assistance. Please. (Read more.)

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