On many issues — naming
Scalia-like judges and backing Reagan-like tax cuts — President Trump is a
conventional Republican.
Where he was exceptional in 2016, where he stood out starkly
from his GOP rivals, where he won decisive states like Pennsylvania, was on his
uniquely Trumpian agenda to put America and Americans first — from which the
Bush Republicans recoiled.
Trump alone pledged to kill amnesty and secure the border with a
30-foot wall to halt the invasion of our country.
Trump alone pledged to end the de-industrialization of America
and bring back our lost factories and lost jobs.
Trump alone pledged to end the democracy-crusading and extricate
us from the endless Mideast wars into which George Bush, Barack Obama and the
War Party had plunged the nation.
And, upon how he delivers on these three uniquely Trumpian
issues will hang his political fate and history’s assessment of whether he was
a good, great or failed president.
Where this city stands is not in doubt. It is salivating to see
Trump’s presidency broken, his agenda trashed, and him impeached. This city
looks to Robert Mueller as the Moses of its deliverance from the tyrant whom an
uncomprehending electorate imposed upon it.
While Trump’s support among his deplorables is holding — indeed,
he is creeping back up in the polls — the outcome of the battle to bring him
down remains in doubt.
Consider. Trump’s border wall was treated like a disposable
bauble in the GOP Congress’ $1.6 trillion budget deal. Cities and whole states
are declaring themselves sanctuaries for people here illegally and defying U.S.
authorities’ requests for help in deporting accused criminals.
A “caravan” of a thousand Central Americans is passing through
Mexico, aided by the authorities, and headed for the U.S. border.
When they arrive, rely upon it, the anti-Trump media will be
there to bewail any transgressions by the Border Patrol.
The hysterical reaction to news that the 2020 census will
include a question, “Are you a U.S. citizen?” testifies to what this is all
about.
America’s elites are adamant that our country should vanish
inside a new Third World nation that resembles in its racial, religious and
ethnic composition the U.N. General Assembly. The old God-and-country America
the people loved they detest.
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Trump is likely the last president who will try to preserve that
country. If he leaves office with the border unsecured, it is hard to see what
stops the Third World invasion, even as it is also coming across the
Mediterranean into Europe.
“The Camp of the Saints” is no
longer a dystopian novel.
Enoch Powell’s warning, 50 years ago, about mass migration into
Europe, “Et thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno,” “I see the River Tiber
foaming with much blood,” is now seen as prophecy.
And Trump’s agenda of economic nationalism — restoring the
industrial dynamism and self-sufficiency America knew from Lincoln to Reagan —
faces relentless hostility from institutionalized power.
Against Trump stand corporate elites, whose profits and stock
options depend on producing outside America, and the managerial class of a New
World Order that runs the EU, U.N., IMF, World Bank and WTO.
Yet if global elites are hoarding the largest slice of the
wealth of nations and a goodly slice of their political power, one senses that
they are an unloved crowd, and they are sitting on a volcano.
The third unique Trump issue was his commitment to extricate us
from the Middle East wars into which Bush and Obama had entrenched us, and to
keep us out of any new wars. Trump also pledged to reach out to Vladimir Putin
and to Russia to avoid a second Cold War.
Those who voted for him voted for that foreign policy.
And if Trump is drawn into new wars with Iran or North Korea, or
reaches 2020 with U.S. forces still fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen
and Libya, he will be perceived as having failed.
Yet the resistance of this city to giving up its vision of U.S.
global hegemony is broad and deep, for that vision is almost a defining mark of
our foreign policy elites. For them to give it up would be like death itself.
The stunned reaction to Trump’s suggestion last week that we
will be leaving Syria after ISIS’s caliphate is destroyed, testifies to how
much their identify is tied up in this vision.
That Trump would accept an end to Syria’s civil war, with Bashar
Assad still in power, is intolerable. Yet how we can reverse that reality
without putting thousands of U.S. combat troops into Syria is unexplained. In
the last analysis, then, it is upon three questions that the Trump presidency
will be judged:
Did he secure America’s borders? Did he restore the industrial
might of America? Did he take us out of and keep us out of any more neocon
wars?
