In late October, the greatest explosion yet in the whole Trump-Kremlin collusion controversy was detonated by the Washington Post from leaks that were sprung by the squeaking wheels of justice: the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had taken over the Fusion GPS anti-Trump research originally commissioned by Trump’s Never-Trump Republican opponents, after Trump clinched the Republican nomination, and ramped it up, approving and bankrolling the assembly of the Christopher Steele dossier to the extent of approximately ten million dollars. This financed a very scurrilous pastiche of what even Comey called “salacious and unverifiable” material, and Bob Woodward called “garbage.”
The Mueller and congressional investigations appeared to be based on this nonsense (mere “campaign dirt” in political parlance), and congressional committees had issued subpoenas to the Justice Department and the FBI, requiring witnesses and evidence about their involvement in the Steele dossier. The subpoenas were ignored and there was soon agitation to cite the Department and Bureau for contempt of Congress. Trump was careful not to order Justice Department compliance with the subpoenas, issued by the Republican majorities, and be re-tarred with the frayed brush of obstruction, but he also did not try to discourage his congressional supporters from impugning the impartiality of the Mueller investigation, and the competence of the Justice Department and the FBI. On January 4, Rosenstein finally agreed to hand over documents congressional committees had subpoenaed (under threat of a contempt of Congress citation), and senators Chuck Grassley (Judiciary chairman) and Lindsey Graham asked the Justice Department for a criminal indictment of Christopher Steele. They alleged that Steele had lied in a civil trial in London or to the FBI and had feloniously shopped his dossier to the press while under obligation to the FBI. This was another startling turn of events.
The Senate intelligence committee leaders, Republican Richard Burr of North Carolina and Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia, acknowledged that they could go no further without Justice Department and FBI responses to their questions about the Steele dossier. This same Senator Warner had been proclaiming nine months before that there had been “upwards of a thousand paid internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia” generating fake news which was broadcast to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He implied that the Russians had delivered Wisconsin to Trump—again, a completely unsubstantiated charge, and even Comey had said that Russia’s efforts had had not influenced the outcome of the election.
Hillary Clinton’s woeful memoir on the election, What Happened (not a question), almost accuses Trump of treasonable collusion with the Russian government to defeat her, citing exclusively Steele dossier sources, never mentioning that her own campaign commissioned and paid for it (presumably with her knowledge given the scope, cost, and implications of the work). Thus, the source cited for her heinous accusation was her own slime-smearing operation, which she henceforth described as “campaign information.” The Washington Post, having broken the story, acknowledged that the fact that the Clinton campaign had financed the Steele dossier provided Republicans with “a talking Point,” but without admitting how grievously it compromised the whole Russian collusion issue,1 especially as many of Steele’s sources were themselves Russian, perhaps peddling official disinformation, which would lead an impartial observer to wonder who, in fact, was colluding with the Russians, if not the Clinton campaign.
Mueller’s investigation had tried to maintain momentum by indicting General Michael Flynn, who on December 4 pleaded guilty to a single charge of lying to federal officials (something Comey said he thought Flynn had not done). As the charge of collusion collapsed—under the implications of the fact that Mueller was essentially investigating the incumbent president on the basis of slanders collected and paid for by the defeated presidential candidate—the hope flared up in the Resistance and what was left of the Never-Trumpers that Flynn might inculpate the president. This was unlikely, as a cooperative witness would have had to confess to participation in the principal alleged offense (Russian collusion), which Flynn did not do; Flynn was pleading guilty to what Trump had fired him for—lying about conversations with the Russians and specifically the Russian ambassador in Washington (who had since been recalled).
This appeared to be a mouse-trapping operation, as the Obama administration seemed to have relied also on the Steele dossier to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to intercept the Trump campaign and transition team telephone conversations. There is also the possibility that on the strength of this, various names of Trump campaign personnel were illegally “unmasked” and leaked to the media as well, from intercepted conversations with Russian diplomats (which would not, in themselves, need a FISA warrant, but the unmasking would). This would have been part of the departing administration’s effort to inflate the Trump-Russian collusion case as high explosives on a short fuse to discommode the incoming administration. (There would be the added benefit of breathing fetid air into Hillary Clinton’s limp argument that the Kremlin and Comey had cheated her out of the election.)
Just as the Steele dossier, apparently the entire basis for the Trump-Russia sham, was crumbling, a torrent of revelations about apparent conflicts of interest among what months earlier the media was referring to as Mueller’s “dream team” was pouring into the public domain. Mueller removed senior intelligence officer Peter Strzok in July for texting thousands of anti-Trump messages to his girlfriend, who was also an FBI official on Mueller’s team (Lisa Page). It soon emerged that the same Strzok had persuaded Comey in July to describe Hillary Clinton’s conduct in the email affair as “extremely careless” rather than the criminal description “grossly negligent.” This was also the same Strzok who had conducted the FBI interview of General Flynn.
Mueller had withheld the reason for removing Strzok from his investigation until his virulently anti-Trump texting with Ms. Page was leaked. The leaks were now flowing both ways as the balance of forces in Washington on the Russian collusion issue shifted toward the president and away from his accusers.
Within two days of the revelation of the Strzok affair, it emerged that a senior Justice official, Bruce Ohr, had been demoted for an improper contact with the Russians and with Christopher Steele. Then it emerged that his wife, Nellie Ohr, a Russian expert, had worked on the Steele dossier for Fusion GPS. There were also plausible but unconfirmed reports that another of Mueller’s investigators had disposed of two large batches of emails for Mrs. Clinton in that matter, and that many of Mueller’s people had been Hillary Clinton contributors. One of them had attended the Clinton election night celebration (that did not, in the event, have much to celebrate) and later sent an email to former deputy attorney general Sally Yates professing to be “so proud” of her for being fired for insubordination by the new president. There were endless rumors of further indiscretions. It could not have been more different from the previous special investigations of Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton. Under Trump, the investigators were now being swarmed by doubters. Congressional Republicans snapped and tore at the vulnerable facades of the Justice Department and FBI which had been highly politicized under the previous administration. The president said the FBI’s reputation was “in tatters” (December 16). Justice and FBI witnesses were badly mauled before congressional committees, and the deputy director, Andrew McCabe, was implicated in anti-Trump activities in one of Strzok’s text messages. McCabe’s wife had been a Democratic state senate candidate in Virginia and had received $467,500 from a PAC controlled by Virginia governor and Clinton intimate Terry McAuliffe. Three months after his wife’s failed election bid, Comey appointed McCabe deputy director of the FBI with oversight of the Clinton emails “matter.” It was announced just before Christmas that McCabe would be retiring from the FBI in April, as soon as he was eligible for a full pension. But he abruptly departed on January 29 after the new FBI director, Christopher Wray, saw a memo about to be released by the Republican majority of the House Intelligence Committee condemning use of the Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warrant on minor Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.
Trump continued to cooperate with Mueller and gave the FBI graduating class and rank and file a stirring address of support that was strongly applauded, on December 15. Trump’s tactics in supporting the institutions and their personnel while the attempted politicization of them was being steadily exposed, was sophisticated and effective. As it became clear the tide was finally turning, most Democratic politicians were now rather circumspect, except for the egregious Congressman Schiff, who produced his own memo that the Justice Department requested be withheld because of its revelations of classified information. The anti-Trump case was in full disintegration by early 2018. It was released, heavily redacted, on February 23, and attempted a radical change of narrative, denying that the Steele dossier played a role in obtaining the FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on junior Trump campaign official Carter Page. The counter-memo had serious credibility problems, as it cited the appearance of McCabe before the committee in which he testified under oath to the contrary. Trump’s enemies on this issue were losing ground and squabbling between themselves.
In the special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump parted ways with his former strategist Steve Bannon, endorsing Luther Strange in the Republican primary. Bannon’s candidate, Roy Moore, won the primary runoff and the media trumpeted it as a Trump loss. They adapted their tune, but not its theme, as the story developed. In early November, the hyperactive Washington Post opened another front, with the aid of militant feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, and unveiled complainant Leigh Corfman, who alleged that thirty-eight years before, when she was fourteen, Moore had fondled her over her clothing.
Allred, in a career of forty years of relentless controversy, had been involved in scores of sex-related cases, many of them frivolous and vexatious. Her targets included Donald Trump (very late and implausible), Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Jackson, Senator Robert Packwood, Anthony Weiner, Herman Cain, Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods, Meg Whitman (head of eBay), and Roman Polanski. Ms. Allred is something of an ultra-feminist Roy Cohn in drag.
Moore denied the allegations, but was a peculiar candidate regardless, having been twice elected and twice removed as chief justice of Alabama for an unauthorized construction of a large monument to the Ten Commandments within the courthouse, and later for refusing to accept constitutional approval of same-sex marriages. He had been a supporter of the absurd birther movement against President Obama, was a fundamentalist Christian, and was apt to wave a firearm around at election meetings to show his support for the Second Amendment. As it turned out Trump’s political instincts were far better than Bannon’s. Strange would have won the seat easily (it was a safe Republican seat) but Moore, dogged by endless unfolding controversy, lost by twenty thousand votes out of more than 1.2 million cast. Trump could do without the Moore stigma, but Republican control of the Senate, with elections looming in 2018, was very unstable.
By now, it was clear that the Democrats thought they had a new Waterloo for Trump, on the imperishable misogyny issue. But unfortunately for them a litany of prominent media and Hollywood personalities, most of them associated with the Left, were soon forced out of their careers on the basis of an avalanche of post-Weinstein sex-related grievances, and so were Democratic politicians. Democratic senator Al Franken of Minnesota, a former comedian, was accused, by a Republican talk show hostess and former prominent model, of lewd behavior when they were preparing for a USO tour in 2006 and had a somewhat corroborative photograph; this unleashed the customary sequels of other ostensible victims. Franken denied the subsequent claims and remembered the original one “differently.” He put himself in the hands of the Senate ethics committee.
The twenty-seven-term dean of the House of Representatives, African American Democrat John Conyers, was also accused, and at first defended by former speaker Nancy Pelosi as “an icon.” When the Democratic leadership assessed the potential of the Moore issue, and further complainants came forward against these and other politicians, they swiftly forced the retirement of Franken and Conyers. They went with docility, victims for the cause.
Overall, media claims that Trump was a boorish misogynist ricocheted around rather hollowly as, to their own collective embarrassment, it seemed as though Hollywood and the media itself harbored the greatest quantity of misogynists and sexual harassers in the country, as new allegedly guilty parties were revealed on a daily basis, including liberal news lions like Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer.
There were more scandals of a more political nature to come. Shortly after the revelation that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had taken over the Fusion GPS anti-Trump operation and engaged Christopher Steele, former Democratic chair Donna Brazile published a book claiming that Hillary Clinton and her campaign had strangled the Democratic National Committee financially and had rigged primaries against Senator Bernie Sanders (contrary to the Federal Election Campaign Act). It was Ms. Brazile, as WikiLeaks revealed just after the election, who had given Mrs. Clinton advance notice of questions, because, as she later explained, “I did not want Hillary to be blind-sided by questions.” She appeared to be oblivious to the fact that a main purpose of such a debate is to test candidates’ familiarity with issues.
Mrs. Clinton’s denial of the Brazile primary-rigging charges was rather perfunctory, but Elizabeth Warren, the leftist Democratic Massachusetts senator, agreed that Mrs. Clinton had stolen the nomination from Sanders. A couple of days later, as the sexual harassment tide rose, New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand said President Bill Clinton should have resigned the presidency because of the sexual outrages he committed. This gave the Republicans—including President Trump, tweeting to his scores of millions of followers—and conservative talk show hosts, the opportunity to rake over the Democrats’ earlier dismissal of complainants against Bill Clinton’s conduct as “bimbos” and “trailer trash” and tools of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
Trump claimed that Gillibrand in her previous campaigns had begged him for financial assistance and said she would “do anything” for it, which Senator Elizabeth Warren denounced as an attempt to “slut-shame” Gillibrand, which did not do Gillibrand any favors. Indeed, the whole delirious attempt to co-opt the post-Weinstein “me too” movement as a political weapon against Trump backfired nearly every day. Caitlin Flanagan wrote a piece in the Atlantic titled, “Reckoning with Bill Clinton’s Sex Crimes,” which reminded Democrats that they already had a lot to answer for when it came to sexual harassment. This cascade of revelations and the failure of Hillary Clinton’s election memoir to be taken seriously as an explanation for her defeat, compromised the position of the Clintons in public esteem. Investigations of her emails and the Clinton Foundation resumed. The book was a toe-curling exercise in blaming everyone else for her electoral loss. Churlish denigrations of Trump and his supporters were scattered throughout the book. Her masquerade as a loving intellectual, every day a celebration of her idyllic and faithful Norman Rockwell, Pleasantville marriage to Bill, strained credibility, even among long-serving Clinton supporters.
At the same time, the Clintons and Obama were struggling in the quagmire of having commissioned the Steele dossier, foisting it on the FBI as Steele shopped it to the most scurrilous media sites, and then invoking it as if it were a serious work of independent sleuthing in accusing Trump of acts of treason. This and the unplumbed depths of the email and uranium controversies appeared likely, eventually, to “ooze out, sluggish and filthy.”2
While the Democrats were engaged in unwitting acts of self-destruction, the president had a very successful trip in November to Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The Chinese president Xi Jinping publicly emphasized that China entirely shared American determination that North Korea not become a nuclear military power. Trump claimed progress on trade and monetary differences and picked up tangible investment pledges of $250 billion, and appeared to have reached a complete state of solidarity with Seoul and Tokyo opposite North Korea. Even the most demonically hostile elements of the anti-Trump media could find no fault with his performance and accomplishments (an unprecedented occurrence). Unable to find legitimate cause to criticize the president, CNN’s coverage focused on how Trump allegedly overfed the koi fish at Akasaka palace during a photo-op with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, though this turned out to be another instance of “fake news.” CNN contradicted the president’s medical report and spuriously alleged that he had heart disease.
On December 7, President Trump announced that the U.S. embassy in Israel would be moved to Jerusalem. There was the usual outcry from the Russians (out of sheer hypocrisy as they had made the same move in April 2017); China (which prefers Americans to be mired in Middle East disputes); Western Europe (which has never had any policy in the region except to await the American position and take a stand more favorable to the Arabs); and the Arab and other Muslim powers. The Czechs and Hungarians indicated that they might follow the Americans (as Guatemala did), and Canada and Australia and many other countries were very judicious, deferring statements of any sort. The anti-Israeli Left in America wrung its hands even more vigorously than usual. Rioting, however, was almost entirely confined to Gaza and the West Bank, and by the standards of the region was minor. The Israelis, whose competence at dispersing Palestinian mobs has been amply demonstrated, had no difficulty dealing with riots in Israel-occupied territory.
The whole alignment of forces had changed in the Middle East. Israel’s formerly most ardent enemies aren’t enemies: Iraq and Syria have disintegrated; Saudi Arabia and Egypt are now Israeli allies against Iran. The Arab governments had used the Palestinians to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment they were inflicting on them. But in Iran, their ancient Persian foe, they have a real threat and not a mere pretext based on bigotry and political cynicism.
Saudi Arabia was in the midst of an extensive clean-up of its medieval regime by the thirty-two-year-old crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, the first Saudi leader not to be a son of King Ibn Saud, who died in 1953.3 He perhaps recognized the obvious: the Palestinian leaders could have had a state at any time in the last thirty-five years if they had been prepared to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, but they would then have led a very small country. The Palestinian leaders had rejected instant floods of foreign assistance and chose celebrity, personal enrichment, and violence; they had allowed the Palestinian people to be used as cannon fodder and now they were no longer useful to Saudi Arabia or Egypt as they were irrelevant to the fight against Iran. Israel posed no threat to Saudi Arabia or Egypt; Iran did.
Donald Trump, as was often the case, sliced through the paralysis and pusillanimity of those invested in the stalled status quo, including the State Department, and did what he had promised to do in announcing that the United States embassy would move to Jerusalem, something his six immediate predecessors had pledged to do and never did. The sanctimony of the British prime minister, Theresa May, in denouncing Trump’s action as “unhelpful” was especially galling, given that Britain precipitated the entire problem by promising, in the Balfour declaration of 1917, to make Palestine a “homeland for the Jewish people” without compromising the rights of the Arabs. They sold the same real estate simultaneously to two rival occupants. (Not even Donald Trump in his flamboyant heyday as a Manhattan developer was accused of that.)
On December 21, the United Nations General Assembly voted 128 to nine, with thirty-five abstentions, that the United States had no right to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The American ambassador to the United Nations, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who has been an impressive spokesperson in that impossible place, warned that the United States “would not continue to pay for the ‘dubious privilege’ of being disrespected while bankrolling the U.N.” On Christmas Day a 25 percent reduction ($285 million) in the annual U.S. contribution to the UN was announced, and there were suggestions that there would be economic reprisals against individual member countries who voted against the United States. Ambassador Haley promised that the vote would be remembered when, “as often happens, American assistance” is solicited by member countries.
With heavy interventions from the White House, Trump’s tax reductions and reforms inched through both Houses of Congress, were slightly modified, went to reconciliation, and were adopted. Corporate taxes were cut to 21 percent, most Americans were left off the federal income tax rolls, and more than 80 percent of those who remained would see their taxes reduced. Tax forms would be highly simplified, and American companies were given incentives to return up to three trillion dollars of overseas profits to the United States.
Trump was no less a political hard-baller than his Democratic enemies: the bill retained the provisions that over-spending states like California, New York, and Illinois would have very reduced deductibility of state and local taxes against federal taxes. Also retained by the final tax bill were modest taxes on the incomes of the vast endowments of America’s private universities. Many leading figures in the administration consider a large number of American universities to be infestations of the American self-hating Left where underworked and often seditious and over-stuffed faculties churn out under-trained and misdirected graduates, on campuses that frequently discourage freedom of expression. Much of American (and Western) academia was dedicated to the propagation of what the eminent British writer Malcolm Muggeridge fifty years ago called “the great liberal death wish.”
The tax bill also struck out the most offensive core of Obamacare, the coercive mandate that fined those who were not insured. With this, Trump would begin the disembowelment of that measure, with which Obama had addicted much of the country to apparently free medical care while inciting skyrocketing premiums and the rupture of doctor-patient relations for millions of others. With Trump’s massive deregulation, economic growth rhetoric, and gradually solidifying promise of tax cuts and reform, economic growth had reached 3 percent, and would have exceeded that without the devastating hurricanes in Texas and Florida, and would approach 4 percent in 2018 (more than double the Obama-era growth rate).
Eleven months into his term, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average had set a new all-time record on sixty-two different days, and it broke twenty-five thousand on January 4, 2018, and twenty-six thousand two weeks later. That indicator had risen since the election by more than 40 percent at the end of January, representing more than six trillion dollars. The Democrats were reduced to their customary railings about a free ride for the rich and their hypocrisy about tax cuts worsening the national debt. Having increased the national debt by $10 trillion (125 percent) under Obama’s spendthrift administration, they complained of a projected additional increase, under Trump, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office, of $1.5 trillion in debt over ten years, which would occur only if economic growth were just 1.9 percent, an almost impossibly pessimistic scenario, especially given Trump’s sterling record of economic growth during the first twelve months of his administration. The Congressional Budget Office has never predicted anything accurately since the Eisenhower era.
The tax bill wasn’t popular at first, because of the class warfare obloquy the Democratic and media propaganda machine heaped upon it, but there was a growing realization of the bill’s benefits for working-class Americans. Polls showed ever more support for the measure, especially as businesses shared their tax relief by rewarding workers with bonuses and raises. Former speaker Pelosi dismissed these bonuses and raises as “crumbs,” but they went out to many millions of workers and only showed how out of touch Democrats were with what was once their working class base.
Trump’s tax bill was, with the Johnson tax reform of 1965 (initiated by President Kennedy) and the Reagan tax reforms of 1981 and 1986, the most important tax bill in American history, and the greatest legislative accomplishment in more than twenty years. Many large companies announced large investments and employment projects in the United States, and the repatriation of immense amounts of accrued profit. Apple was the largest early benefactor, bringing back $350 billion and announcing plans to hire fifty thousand more Americans.
Just as the Republicans were congratulating themselves on their tax triumph, they also had reason to believe that the Democrats’ Russian collusion story was turning into a game of Democratic Russian Roulette. The full array of Justice Department, special, and congressional investigations was only unearthing embarrassments of the Democrats. As 2018 dawned, the Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee were still calling for more witnesses and documents, though they had already collected nearly three hundred thousand documents, and reviewed more than five thousand pages of testimony taken in 164 hours of hearings from sixty-seven witnesses. None of it produced anything remotely justifying the entire immense wild goose chase they had launched. But the insufferable Senator Warner and his colleagues fervently wished that it continue even as all the evidence appeared to show that Democrats were guilty of hypocrisy, cynicism, hysteria, and perhaps even collusion themselves in promoting a document, the Steele dossier, chock-full of Russian disinformation.
At time of writing, the war continues, with the media and the Democrats more hostile and frenzied than ever. Al Hunt, a formerly rational Wall Street Journal writer, wrote for Bloomberg News on December 10 that Trump might, if accused of wrongdoing, whistle his followers out into the streets of America—the implication was that the sixty-three million people who voted for him would in large numbers respond to a call for civil insurrection from the great rabble-rouser. My dear and esteemed friend David Frum remarked on CNN on December 11 that the chief failing of the media in its coverage of Trump was its “overzealous ambition to be fair to the president.” It is hard to foresee how normally reasonable people could be induced to return to their senses anytime soon, having taken such distant leave of them.
The New York Times, scrambling to find cover as the Democrats’ collusion narrative caved in, conjured up the completely spurious theory that the collusion investigation began because of the drunken indiscretions made by a junior Trump campaign advisor (George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to minor offenses) to the former leader of the opposition in Australia, Alexander Downer in London’s Kensington Wine Bar. Papadopoulos’s babblings were eventually reported to the State Department, but only after the FBI investigation had begun. The discomfort of the Times and less august members of the Resistance in wanting to assign blame for the failing Russian narrative can be gauged by the absurdity of this initiative.
The implausible Carl Bernstein hit the speaking and interview circuit yet again, on the theme of the “constitutional crisis” that might require the removal of the president under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment for mental incompetence and instability. It was like the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman claiming that the Trump campaign’s alleged (and utterly unproven) Russian collusion was equivalent to Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and Nancy Pelosi calling Trump’s tax bill “Armageddon” and “the worst legislative disaster in history.”
On an even lower level of professionalism and believability was a book by one of the Western world’s most malicious and tedious gossips and one of the sleaziest published authors in American history, Michael Wolff (whom the author has encountered). Wolff purported to quote former White House strategist Steve Bannon accusing Donald Trump Jr. of “treason” in the collusion affair. Bannon denied this but the formerly Bannon-hating anti-Trump media briefly cited him respectfully; and if Bannon had spoken to Wolff in this way, out of hatred for certain factions in the White House, it was a suicide move that made one doubt why Trump had retained him in the first place. Trump tweeted that when Bannon “lost his job, he also lost his mind.” The night of the publication of excerpts from the book, January 3, Bannon was on the air proclaiming that Trump was “a great man” whom he still supported. On CNN, correspondent Brian Stelter conceded Wolff’s book was “sloppy” with errors, but claimed that “many Trump experts say the book ‘rings true’ overall.” In fact, Fire and Fury made the Steele dossier seem like Revelation in its moral authority; to anyone who knew Trump, as this author does, it read like a fabricated, confessedly part-fiction, smear job from A to Z.
On January 17, 2018, Trump announced his awards of the most “corrupt and dishonest” political journalists. Paul Krugman, of the New York Times, won with his election night prediction that the stock markets would “never recover” from Trump’s victory. Among respectable commentators in the press, however, there was a discernible shift away from lunacy. The Wall Street Journal seemed dedicated to common sense, and many of Trump’s more measured opponents in the New York Times or at National Review now seemed more interested in setting up a loyal opposition than in reflexive hysteria.
In part this was because such hysteria could not be squared with the facts. Trump completely debunked the argument about his mental competence and stability with a deft, fifty-five-minute, televised White House discussion with the bipartisan congressional leadership about immigration, on January 9. But even this blew up when Senator Dick Durbin a few days later released the claim that Trump had asked why the United States had to accept so many immigrants from “s--thole countries” which was apparently at least a slight misquotation, but it enabled the president’s enemies to accuse him of racism, rather than to focus on the president’s point, which was that the United States should have a merit-based immigration system that gave preference to immigrants with skills rather than providing a giant welfare state for the world’s poor. But whatever harsh language Trump might have used it was as nothing to the sort of language routinely used by Presidents Truman, Johnson, and Nixon (or even Dick Durbin who had once called American troops “Nazis”); and the whole issue was nonsense, which blew over, despite a media frenzy, because Trump’s question was likely one held by a majority of Americans as well. It certainly had no perceptible impact on the polls when the government partially shut down on January 20 because of the Democrats’ insistence that they would not vote for a stop-gap funding measure unless Congress also voted for the naturalization of eight hundred thousand children brought into the United States by their parents illegally. The shut-down fizzled after one business day, again indicative of how the balance of power in Washington was shifting.
In February, Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russians, who cannot be extradited, for “conspiring to defraud the United States,” by improperly advertising in American social media before and in the election campaign, decrying various conditions of American life and supporting Trump, Sanders, and Green candidate Jill Stein. It was an insignificant, ineffectual bipartisan intervention and the case will never be tried. Not even the Left was excited.
It came to light that the Clinton campaign had been feeding misinformation directly to Steele, and that Senator Warner of Virginia, one of the leaders of the spurious collusion narrative, had been attempting, “without leaving a paper trail,” to deal directly with Steele. There were widespread calls for indictments of Comey and McCabe, and even Hillary Clinton. At last, the dangers of the criminalization of policy differences were being exposed. As the long effort to quarantine Trump failed, the Democratic congressional leadership showed signs of cooperating with the administration, and joined in a spending-cap agreement that put off the necessity of hand-to-mouth continuing spending resolutions for over a year. The pretense that Trump was a freakish president who should be impeached on general principle and prevented from governing effectively stopped. He was not a president like the others, but he was the president.
His reflexive denigrators were imperishable but he was unstoppable, and he was a moving target for his enemies. On February 14, an apparently deranged youth killed seventeen people at a high school in Parkland Florida, and Trump called for training and arming some teachers and parted company with the National Rifle Association by proposing curbs of public ownership of automatic weapons. In early March he unveiled proposals for new tariffs on steel and aluminum. On both these issues, as with admission of children who had been brought illegally into the United States, he had more support from Democrats than Republicans. And he confounded those who had accused him of potentially blundering into war in Korea on March 8, by agreeing to meet with Kim Jong-Un with the goal of military denuclearization of the whole Korean peninsula. The combination of U.S. military force and sanctions and Chinese pressures had finally induced a change, and a compromise slightly like that of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 seemed likely. No one could accuse Trump of being ineffective. The Republican majority on the House Intelligence Committee closed the committee’s Russian collusion investigation on March 12, over Democratic protests, and declared that there was no evidence of collusion with Russians by either party in the 2016 election, though the Russians had spent a million dollars a month on social media lamenting the conditions of America and supporting Sanders and Stein (Green), and Trump. The committee majority did not consider that the Russian intervention had influenced the result. The whole Russia distraction was finally fading.
Nothing was easy and every week was a struggle, but Donald Trump was gradually taking hold of the vast apparatus of the U.S. government. He appeared to be slowly winning his tumultuous crusade against political correctness and systematic defeatism in foreign and domestic policy that had afflicted the U.S. government in all branches and both parties, and had enervated the spirit of the American people. His successful economic record could not be denied. He had made great progress in stopping illegal immigration. He had rolled back unsuccessful trade deals and rejected self-punitive climate change policy initiatives. On the issues of taxes, education reform, energy production, and health care, he had made significant advances. There was progress too in Korea, the Middle East, and Ukraine (where on December 24 Trump announced he would give Ukraine anti-tank weapons to deal with Russian incursions into eastern Ukraine). No one promised, or expected, quick makeovers in these very difficult theaters, but there appeared to be more hope to advance American interests in the world under Donald Trump than there had been under eight years of President Obama, and the sixteen previous years under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Those who oppose Trump generally do not understand how desperate and disgusted almost half of Americans are at the most inept twenty-year streak of presidential misgovernment in American history that preceded the 2016 election. These decades of fruitless war, bone-cracking recession, humanitarian disasters, collapsing alliances, oceanic deficits, and the erosion of economic growth and private sector industrial investment to a third or a quarter of levels under Ronald Reagan, could rattle any American’s patriotic self-confidence. Trump is a throwback to Reagan in that he rejects the chic defeatism of the establishment; and despite all the media and Democratic Party and Never-Trump calumny of him, his political program is essentially conventional, moderate, conservative wisdom lifted in large part from the policy recommendations of thoroughly respectable conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. Trump speaks to Americans fearful of decline. He wants, as his slogan says, to make America great again.
To those unaffected by the decline of America, that decline was invisible; to those who were affected by it, it is a challenge and a constant fear for their own welfare and national pride. The Democrats have had no policy for some years except to denigrate their opponents, and try to bribe and anesthetize a comatose lumpenproletariat addicted to state benefit. Their nomination of Hillary Clinton showed that they did not realize how many Americans rejected this vision of America.
The great majority of anti-Trump activity in the first year of his administration was devoted to the propagation of falsehoods, which were then justified by the selective and intentional misinterpretation of Trump’s careless and ambiguous statements. Distaste for Trump’s straight-shooting and sometimes vulgar style caused otherwise intelligent people to withhold any benefit of the doubt, and pathologically to interpret anything he said or did in the worst possible light. He is not, in fact, a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior. No opposition can continue on this name-calling basis alone for much longer than this one has.
Every two weeks in the first year of his term a new alarm was raised, and all quickly fell silent. In a calmer atmosphere, the faddish frenzies will become rarer and shorter. For two weeks in August, Confederate statues were being taken down all over the South, but now such iconoclasm happens only intermittently; the abrupt termination of famous careers for alleged sexual liberties that once happened on a daily basis has become much less frequent. Trump’s opponents are tenacious but unimaginative and they have yet to seem to prepare for the possibility, now more of a likelihood, that he might be a durable and effective president.
The Democrats committed all their energy to proving their assumed self-evident proposition that Trump could not win, then that his victory could be undone, and then that it could be vitiated by scorched-earth obstruction, or destroyed completely by investigations and indictments. Now that Trump has reduced most peoples’ tax burden; relieved the fear that recession and unemployment are just around the corner (in fact provided a booming economy); and adopted a foreign policy of prudent and effective realism that has smashed and scattered ISIS, persuaded China to cooperate against North Korea’s nuclear program, and defended American interests; Americans will likely and rightly judge him a success, despite his lapses of suavity. He has been chronically underestimated, as a nonstarter for the Republican nomination until he clinched it; unelectable until he was elected; and likely to be impeached until the investigations faded and his accusers were engulfed in suspicion.
Trump is unpredictable and somewhat erratic, and his stridency and ill-tempered outbursts are not what Americans expect of their presidents. But there is nothing unconstitutional, or even irrational about his use of social media and his aggressive tendency to counterattack (sometimes preemptively). This has been his only available method of surmounting dishonestly partisan and hostile media. The presidency is what its occupants make of it. No president smiled much or took to the airwaves or used airplanes or held frequent news conferences before Franklin D. Roosevelt. Some of Trump’s techniques may be emulated by successors. If his policies succeed, so will he. And much more of his histrionics are just tactical than his hard-core critics imagine.
Donald Trump is not a blundering reactionary, but a battle-hardened veteran of very difficult businesses full of unethical people (and he is no Eagle Scout himself). He is a very tough and an almost demiurgically energetic man. His personality is so startling and at times garish that there is a large section of the population that will not warm to him. But if his persistence brings continued success, he will accede to the support of the majority.
It was always the case that, in making billions of dollars, surmounting an acute financial crisis, being a great television star instantly and for fifteen years, revolutionizing the nature and potential for celebrity, and seizing control of a great political party in his first real try at politics, Donald Trump accomplished more before he was president than had any prior president of the United States except Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Grant, and Eisenhower. His exterior is uneven, but his history is one of astounding accomplishment.
The strange mélange of Donald Trump’s virtues and weaknesses is unique in U.S. presidents. He genuinely loves the American people, but he has not always been above trying to pedal them his version of snake oil. He is contemptuous of most of the American financial and social elites as unmeritocratic snobs, who abuse their positions, misgovern the country, and bilk the people. He admires strength and respects earned success in every field.
Trump has promoted Americanism over the atomization of identity politics. His pursuit of America’s national interest—with no evangelical or Wilsonian notions of purifying other countries—has been successful to date. His unquenchable energy, gifts as a popular tribune, sheer entertainment talent, and raw toughness have served him well.
Trump has learned something about how to gain and hold the respect that is naturally available to the chief of state, and the country has somewhat got used to him. There are markedly fewer malapropisms, there have been no bungled foreign initiatives, fewer indiscretions, his economic program is working, and his enemies are largely a tired coalition of character assassins and hacks uttering antique class-war claptrap on autocue, or affecting a false and complacent superiority.
On the subject of Donald Trump, righteousness can be overdone, and often is; he has, as has been recounted, his inelegant aspects. But Benjamin Franklin’s role in persuading Britain to expel France from Canada and fifteen years later in persuading France to help expel Britain from America was the ultimate demonstration of the art of the deal. Some of Jefferson’s more florid passages in the Declaration of Independence are among history’s greatest expositions of truthful hyperbole. In international relations, Richard Nixon was a chess player and Ronald Reagan a poker player, and both were very successful. Trump seems more of a pool shark, but it seems likely he will do well too. Trump isn’t very reminiscent of Franklin or Jefferson or FDR or Nixon or Reagan; but he is a man of his times, and his time has come.
With President Trump, no setback is admitted or accepted; for him, rebuffs are really victories, disguised victories, moral victories, or the preludes to victories. Hyperbole, truthful and otherwise, is his common parlance. He speaks for the people, he has been a very successful man, and he has repeatedly outwitted his opponents, which is why he is attacked with such snobbery, envy, and spitefulness. But America is reversing its decline and wrenching itself loose from the habits of lassitude, elitist decay, appeasement of foreign enemies, and domestic inertia. His record is impressive; his foibles are not durably relevant.
Whatever happens, Donald Trump will be one of the most vividly remembered presidents and characters of American history. Difficult though it may be to believe at times, the office of the presidency, in that astonishing, ineluctable, and fateful American way, may have sought the necessary man again.