From time to time recently, people have asked me if I have
second thoughts about this post from a few
months ago. I was a tiny bit more critical than normal, but in my defense, I
have no sense of humor on the gun issue. There are certain issues that draw a
bright line between the chosen and the damned. Guns are one of them. There’s no
“sort of getting it right” or “only being a bit wrong.” You either get it or
you don’t and I still don’t think Trump gets it, but he has shut up about it.
He went to the NRA convention, so I’ll give him a pass.
That said, I’m still waiting for Trump to deliver on the stuff
that is important to me. Despite the bold talk on immigration, he has so far
been an economic populist, rather than a national populist. His best work has
been on trade, where he has gotten tough on China and re-opened the NAFTA deal.
He’s also dismantled the climate change apparatus inside the Department of
Energy and cut a ton of regulations. These are all good things and in another
age, I’d probably be over the moon. But, it is not another age. It is now.
Despite making lots of noise on the issue, nothing much has
changed on the immigration front. The wall is no closer to reality than it was
two years ago. The number of guest worker visas has increased, rather than
decreased. The DACA issue is still out there, as Trump now waits on the states
to solve the problem for him. He put a complete dunce in as secretary of DHS,
making things worst on that front, rather than better. Worse yet, that
perfidious weasel Paul Ryan is quietly trying to sneak an amnesty through the
House.
In fairness, the immigration issue is not an easy puzzle to
solve. No reasonable person should have expected sweeping reform in the first
two years of his presidency. The fact is, a third of the GOP is bought and paid
for by the open borders lobbies. Another third are so utterly clueless on the
issue, they don’t know where to start, even if they wanted to push the issue.
Still, Trump has been outfoxed and outworked by his opponents on immigration.
He seems to like talking about immigration more than doing anything about it.
All that said, he has a lot of time to make things right and he
has shown an extremly rare ability to address his own errors. The gun issue is
a good example. He was making all of the usual mistakes on guns, then he wised
up and reversed course. Most politicians are the opposite of a fine wine. They
get worse with age. Because he is not an ideologue, Trump learns from his
mistakes and adjusts. Maybe on the immigration front we see the same sort of
growth we saw on guns. There’s still time to get a lot done.
The bigger issue though, the thing now looming over his entire
presidency, is the wide ranging conspiracy engineered by senior elements of the
intelligence community. A few months ago it looked like a handful of
radicalized mid-level bureaucrats. What’s becoming clear is this was a
conspiracy hatched by the men at the top of the intelligence community, with
help from the White House, to not only help Hillary Clinton, but engineer a
coup after the election to get rid of Trump. This reality has to color any
assessment of Trump.
Think about the stones it takes to face off against the intel
community. They literally know all of your secrets. In the case of Trump, they
have the secrets of his friends, family and business associates. Even if they
can’t ruin him, they can ruin people he knows. It was 18 months ago that Chuck
Schumer warned Trump about doing this. When Schumer said, “Intel officials
‘have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you'” he was not being flippant
or rhetorical. We now know the intel community has been at this for a while.
It’s not just the fact that the intel community has the capacity
to spy on everyone and appears to be spying on everyone. It’s that these are
vicious, craven people lacking a moral compass. It’s ironic that James Comey
was fond of accusing his people of lacking a moral compass, when it is now
clear the guy is a sociopath incapable of knowing right from wrong. Clapper and
Brennan have no scruples whatsoever. There’s also the fact that on the CIA
side, they still have guys who kill people on behalf of the American deep
state.
Now, we can’t know how much Trump knows, or how much much he
knew back in the campaign about the spying. It is entirely possible that honest
people had told him what was happening long ago. We do know Mike Rogers went to
Trump Tower after the election and warned Trump about this operation. Once in
office, Trump would have been briefed on a lot of things related to this. Even
if he thought it was just a handful of crackpots in the FBI, it took mighty big
stones to take the issue head on.
One
of the funny things about these times is they are entirely unexpected. Back
when Trump came down the escalator and started talking like Pat Buchanan, I
recall thinking, “I can’t imagine a scenario where I vote for him, but I never
imagined anyone saying these things again either.” Trump is turning out to be
the most consequential president in our lifetime, which is not something any
sane person could have imagined two years ago. I think we have to withhold
judgement on him until these great events of this age unfold.