Chapter 18

Never Surrender

The doctrine underlying the Trump movement’s effort to Make America Great Again is mostly implicit. There hasn’t been a short checklist of political commandments in Trump’s playbook, and he does operate on a sort of intuition at times. But as we look back over the major planks of Trump’s thinking, we can see a set of recurring principles, ones that have also guided America as a whole during its history. Among others, those are:

• Disruption of calcified systems is a good thing. We haven’t just faced one bad party but a static two-party cartel. President Trump is unafraid to go after both parties and both orthodoxies. If it doesn’t make sense, he won’t defend it for partisan sake.
• Boldness, on issues ranging from trade to peacemaking, is preferable to timidity. Patterns of behavior that impoverish or kill may appear permanent only because no one has dared challenge them. President Trump didn’t run for office to slightly alter the regulation books in Washington, he ran to change the course of history and restore America’s greatness. While others might have tinkered around the edges, President Trump has never met a challenge too big to face.
• Recognize that the wisdom of the ancients, such as Cicero, shapes the best aspects of our culture today. We are not just the pawns of today’s experts. We stand on the great wisdom of many that have come before us.
• The foreign policy establishment can be as wrong as the domestic policy establishment. A great nation does not waste trillions on never-ending wars. For decades, private citizen Donald Trump championed the idea we must put America first and shouldn’t be wasting our precious resources on building around the world. The foreign policy establishment has been wrong for decades, and this president is unafraid to call them out on their failures.
• Nationalism can be a philosophy of peace. Loving one’s own country does not mean attacking others. On the contrary, it means recognizing that each country will tend to pursue its own best interests, while we should often be suspicious of those who claim to speak selflessly for the whole world. President Trump ran to represent the rights of Americans on the global stage. He didn’t run to rule the world. Each leader is better if they do what is best for their nation. Globalist institutions such as the United Nations have done very little for our nation except drain our tax coffers.
• A freed economy is a robust economy. Get rid of taxes and regulations, and American ingenuity will soon raise standards of living more effectively than any government program. When government is out of the way, the economic engine of America roars.
• America is not a mistake. Patriotism is natural and good. The left tries to make us feel guilty about our past, our cultural inheritance, to soften us up and make us easier to control. We should be proud of being the best in the world. We should strive to be the best at all times.
• America produces larger-than-life characters, and that is wonderful. Trump is the kind of bold, experimenting giant that the Founders hoped would one day flourish in the United States. Let’s not allow the left to turn us into cramped and cowardly shadows of our former selves.
• A great nation wants justice for all people, not just a few. Our laws have sometimes been too punitive, our prisons too crowded, and we can affirm conservative values and the rule of law even while showing mercy where we have failed to do so in the past.
• Healthcare requires the sort of transparency and market freedom we see in other businesses. Everything opaque tends to become a scam. America spent decades making healthcare an overlapping mess of government, markets, employers, and insurance companies. We can simplify and improve that important sector of the economy instead of layering on new mandates as Obamacare sought to do.
• Civilization needs an array of fuel sources. We cannot continue to be so afraid of oil and every other method of energy production that we end up “clean” but literally powerless.
• Free speech is necessary for all problem-solving. As Trump said, we can’t fix society’s problems if political correctness prevents us from even talking about them. And while we applaud the technical achievements of social media and computer companies, we should recognize their growing power to stifle and skew public discourse.
• The Bill of Rights is still the law of the land. The Constitution is our guide, and it enshrines principles that remain true no matter how far modern lawmakers might like to stray from them. The Constitution was not written for its times but written to stand the test of time.
• A conservative judiciary is a practical link to our nation’s core principles and the original intentions of its Founders. The MAGA Doctrine is not, as some of the most vicious critics would say, a “strongman” philosophy of rule by whim. It is a restoration of the rule of law after too many decades of thinking we could safely leave most of the nation’s decisions to unelected bureaucrats and elected legislators more enamored of the latest social justice fad than the traditions that have bequeathed us this great nation.

Many challenges lie ahead even if we hew closely to the MAGA Doctrine. There will be crises. There will be domestic turmoil. There will be foreign enemies even if we do not go looking for them. But I think President Trump has set a good and sometimes underappreciated example of how a brave person meets those challenges.

You greet challenges with actions, not just comforting words.

You tackle problems with practical strategies, not just hopes.

You give the public that has entrusted you with power victories, not just apologies and rationalizations.

Challenges bring growth, and growth is good. Challenges go hand in hand with building—and before all else, Trump is someone who builds.

Trump is also a man who never surrenders.

I know that to his detractors, that must sometimes look like stubbornness. They think he’s the sort of person who can’t admit errors and so has to be stopped by impeachment threats or electoral setbacks.

That’s not quite right. He admits defeats—even does so with a self-deprecating laugh now and then. But he doesn’t give up. He keeps striving for that win.

American resilience is a trait that has been admired and envied around the planet. We push ourselves harder than any other nation. We don’t settle for second or third place. We never used to, anyway. And I don’t think we’re about to start doing so.

We are the inheritors of the tradition that set out across the frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We are the nation that invented more devices than any other, from cars to global positioning systems—from televisions to radio telescopes.

We were first to the Moon.

Why do Saudi royals come to the United States for healthcare? It’s because we continue to be pioneers in medicine.

We bankrupted the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, and we outmatched them at the Olympics numerous times before that.

Yet over the last two decades, we have seen a slow-emerging push, mostly from the left, to settle for second. Has your child come home with a participation ribbon or medal yet? If not, be thankful! We are nowadays told “everyone is a winner,” even if no one competed and gave it their all.

If the left’s mentality on “participation” and being a “winner” had been around in the days of George Washington, we might not have a nation today.

To understand who Donald J. Trump is, and what the Trump philosophy really is, you must believe in American exceptionalism, resilience, and perseverance.

The man is exceptional—entertaining America even while making his billions, being beloved even by most of those people he publicly fired.

The man is resilient. Sure, not every company he started flourished, but that’s how business works. The distinction is, he never gave up.

Look at how not only Democrats but the former leaders of his party counseled him to give up, to drop out of the 2016 presidential race, to admit he wasn’t even serious about it all.

Senator Bob Corker called Trump support “cultish.” Mitt Romney warned that if Republicans nominated Trump, “the prospects for a safe and prosperous future are greatly diminished.”

Then he got elected, and the investigations started from day one. In addition to the Mueller investigation, Trump faced investigations over petty matters from the House Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight Committee, Ways and Means, Intelligence, Financial Services, and more. From the beginning, the Democrats and some Republicans could not accept the legitimacy of this president. They made it a mission to destroy him and the progress that he has achieved, so long as doing so meant we would get a different person in the Oval Office. Can you imagine rooting against your nation because you dislike the president? Well, in today’s world, some have openly called for the economy to tank and for things to go wrong because it might help prevent the reelection of this exceptional president. While liberals have harbored hate for him for a very long time, today they are quite open about it. This is shameful behavior.

You might disagree with our president, but to root for your nation to fail? To root for a recession? This is entirely new and unchartered territory. To those who don’t believe in Trump Derangement Syndrome, I say it is very much real and in full force. TDS has overtaken entire sectors, from Hollywood to Congress. How many Hollywood elite stars think they are wonderful because during an award ceremony they got up and started swearing about our president? These coastal liberal elites lost, and they are in full denial and a state of rage over what they can do about it. Instead of presenting an alternative vision for America, the left has focused on hatred, impeachment, violence, and vulgar language. Pathetic behavior that will get them nowhere. (I wonder if they’ve even noticed that Hollywood has also thrived during his time in office. It’s hard to see what they have to complain about.)

Democrats can’t accept that he won. Democrats appear to be willing to spend all 1,460 days of his presidency talking about impeachment. President Trump doesn’t give up, though, doesn’t quit, and doesn’t back down—and neither does America in the face of adversity.

Never give up, never surrender, and always go for the win.