3
Drain the Swamp
JUST SEVEN MONTHS INTO the Trump presidency, journalist Thomas Frank summed up the mainstream media’s attitude toward the new president in these words: “The news media’s alarms about Trump have been shrieking at high C for more than a year. It was in January of 2016 [a year before Trump’s inauguration] that the Huffington Post began appending a denunciation of Trump as a ‘serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, birther and bully’ to every single story about the man. It was last August that the New York Times published an essay approving of the profession’s collective understanding of Trump as a political mutation—an unacceptable deviation from the two-party norm—that journalists must cleanse from the political mainstream.”
Far from dissenting from these fevered attacks, Frank embraced them: “Trump certainly has it coming. He is obviously incompetent, innocent of the most basic knowledge about how government functions. His views are repugnant. His advisers are fools. He appears to be dallying with obviously dangerous forces”—a reference to unfounded Democrat accusations that Trump was a Russian agent or—to quote MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow’s unhinged commentary—“the American presidency is effectively a Russian op.”21
These reckless media smears were completely detached from the reality of Trump’s accomplishments in his first seven months. His tax and deregulation policies had created a record-setting economy. Unemployment rates for minorities had reached historic lows. He had strengthened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and even shattered the leftist claims of a Trump-Russia collusion when he punished Putin’s murderous ally Bashar al-Assad with a devastating Tomahawk missile strike. Trump was also well on his way to destroying the Islamic caliphate in eight months—something Barack Obama had failed to accomplish with five years of feeble military efforts.
The bizarre and baseless media attacks on the president were intended to halt Trump’s progress and shake the loyalty of his 63 million political supporters. Instead, Trump continued to rack up policy victories, while the media attacks actually intensified his public support.
Trump’s Twitter Feed
No aspect of Trump’s presidency has been more widely criticized than his rhetorical barbs, especially on the social media site Twitter. Though Barak Obama was the first president to use Twitter, Trump mastered the art of the tweet as a means of communicating directly to his constituencies without the filter of a hostile press.
On June 4, 2017, for example, after the deadly Islamic terror attack on London Bridge, Trump tweeted, “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse.” Trump’s critics in the media claimed he should have limited his remarks to condolences for the people of London. But Trump wasn’t about to hide the fact that the politically correct effort to protect the Islamic world from accountability for the deeds of its radical elements had led to a dramatic weakening of the West’s defenses.
A month later, Trump’s media critics roared their disapproval when he retweeted a ten-year-old video of a Trump appearance on WWE’s WrestleMania. The video had been altered so that when Trump, dressed in a suit and tie, appeared to body slam a man outside the ring, his victim’s face was covered by the CNN logo. It was clever political satire, and Trump retweeted it shortly before the Sunday TV talk shows for maximum impact. Trump knew the talking heads would condemn it—but his supporters would applaud a body slam of the media. Hashtagged #FraudNewsCNN, it was one of the most retweeted of all Trump’s posts.
The media also did a collective spit-take over a November 11, 2017, Trump tweet. The president responded to a statement by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un that called Trump a “lunatic old man.” Trump’s well-crafted response: “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’ Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend—and maybe someday that will happen!” Pundits excoriated Trump for insulting the Communist dictator instead of attempting to negotiate with him. Seven months later, in June 2018, Trump and Kim greeted each other warmly at their first summit in Singapore, which elicited derisive remarks from the same media that had criticized him before.
On January 20, 2018, just before the second Women’s March protest against him, he struck just the right note of sarcastic congratulation, while touting his administration’s triumphs on behalf of women: “Beautiful weather all over our great country, a perfect day for all Women to March. Get out there now to celebrate the historic milestones and unprecedented economic success and wealth creation that has taken place over the last 12 months. Lowest female unemployment in 18 years!”
The leftist media could never understand why Trump would praise dictators like Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdoğan, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping. But Trump had always made deals by building relationships with the people across the table. That approach resulted in tweets like this one from April 8, 2018: “President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade. China will take down its Trade Barriers because it is the right thing to do. Taxes will become Reciprocal & a deal will be made on Intellectual Property. Great future for both countries!” Heads exploded at CNN and MSNBC, but this tweet helped keep China at the bargaining table.
A tweet’s brevity forces blunt discourse. Trump’s “in your face” tweets do not reflect a lack of knowledge about how government should function, as his critics both left and right maintain. Rather, they are a calculated strategy to blow back the bullies of political correctness and political doublespeak, who had effectively cowed Republicans through the previous two administrations. The purpose of bluntness is precisely its shock value, which changes the dynamics of a political exchange, peels back its deceptions, and—in a favorite trope of the left—“speaks truth to power.”
Deferring to Hillary Clinton as a female, as Republicans prior to Trump had done, allowed her to hide behind a veil of gentility while she launched a one-woman witch hunt against them, calling Republicans racists, sexists, deplorables, and so on. It took a Trump to look her in the eye with seventy million people watching during one of the presidential debates and say, “You are a liar and a crook,” which she was both. Everybody knew it, but only Donald Trump dared to utter it out loud.
Long before Twitter was created, Trump had made it clear that if such a means ever became available it would suit him perfectly. In his book The America We Deserve, written seventeen years before his presidential run, Trump explained his attitude toward political speech: “Most politicians use language to conceal what they think. Or to conceal the fact that they don’t think. Many are trained as lawyers and use language to win support rather than to define the truth. Being blunt hasn’t hurt me so far. I use language to speak my mind. I’ve lived my life as I choose, and said what I wanted to say.”22
Trump’s blunt candor won the support of the working and middle classes who had grown increasingly frustrated by politics-as-usual. They had seen slick politicians of both parties vow to serve the people and the Constitution, then go to Washington and serve themselves and special interests. Both Republicans and Democrats had promised for thirty years, for example, to solve the problem of border security and illegal immigration. By the 2016 election, the voters had figured out that both parties viewed the border crisis as an issue to run on, not an issue to solve. Then along came Trump, speaking his mind, bluntly and forcefully, vowing to build a wall and “Make America Safe Again.”
Once elected, President Trump gored the oxen of the left on a daily basis, and they responded by attacking him. Even Trump’s conservative supporters were sometimes uncomfortable with his blunt-force tweets. What Trump’s critics on the right failed to appreciate was that his unapologetic refusal to genuflect before PC sacred cows had an explosive—and long-overdue—impact on the progressive culture. The PC culture with its leftist bias had dominated political discourse in the decades since the radical sixties. No one but Trump had the audacity to reshape that discourse.
By frankly saying what needs to be said regardless of conventional decorum, Trump regularly lights up the media with his tweets. His leftist critics cry foul and accuse him of being an obsessive narcissist or of not being sufficiently “presidential.” His supporters on the right sometimes cringe at his tweets and complain that he often steps on his own message. But both left and right miss the point.
Trump ascended to the office as an apprentice politician. He had to feel his way under intense and hostile media scrutiny. He was being aggressively sabotaged by agents of the deep state. In this difficult environment, Trump certainly made mistakes. But even as an apprentice, Trump wielded his Twitter account as a potent weapon against his ideological opponents. Trump’s abrasiveness often provoked them to overreact and expose their partisan agenda and dishonesty. In this way, Trump shone a spotlight into the deep chasm in the nation’s politics. Through his tweets—and the overreactions of his enemies—Trump proved that the problem in America is not a character issue in the White House, but a deep ideological rift that has been tearing at the fabric of American life for decades.
An Illuminating Case
One such combustion occurred on July 27, 2019, when a Trump tweet vented the president’s ire at Congressman Elijah Cummings, the African American chair of the Government Oversight Committee. The president was angry with Cummings for a humiliating dressing-down of Trump’s acting secretary of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan, over conditions in migrant camps along the border. McAleenan had been summoned to testify about the crisis caused by the flood of migrants seeking illegal entry into the United States. He only got to say eight words—“We’re doing our level best in a challenging . . .”—when Cummings interrupted and launched into a two-minute tirade.
Cummings’s Democrat colleagues had already compared the migrant camps to Auschwitz, so the leftists’ rhetoric had already bottomed out at the reductio ad Hitlerum level. Cummings took full advantage of the protection afforded by the rules of political correctness, which protected African Americans like him. He scolded and berated McAleenan as if he were a delinquent child, confident that no one would dare criticize him. Clenching his fist and leaning into the microphone, Cummings shouted, “What does that mean? What does that mean when a child is sitting in their own feces, can’t take a shower? Come on, man. What’s that about? None of us would have our children in that position. They are human beings.”23 In other words you’re a racist who treats brown people as though they were less than human.
Personally insulted by this treatment of his cabinet secretary, and outraged by the left’s attacks on America’s border guards who risked their lives to defend American citizens, the president exploded in a tweet: “Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous.”24
Nor was Trump finished. In his next tweet, he wrote: “As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cummings’ District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”25
The left came unglued. Trump had dared to criticize a black man—so he was, ipso facto, a racist. House Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler told ABC-TV: “Well, the president is as he usually is often is disgusting and racist.”26 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted: “We all reject racist attacks against [Rep. Cummings] and support his steadfast leadership.”27
Senator Joe Biden, the leading contender at the time for the Democratic nomination, addressed Trump directly: “It is despicable for you to attack him and the people of Baltimore this way. Once again you have proved yourself unfit to hold the office. A President is supposed to lift this nation up. Not tear it down.”
Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, also a 2020 contender, said: “Donald Trump . . . is just a racist who lives in the White House.”28 Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy announced: “I’m unfollowing the President of the United States today on Twitter, because his feed is the most hate-filled, racist, and demeaning of the 200+ I follow, and it regularly ruins my day to read it. So I’m just going to stop.”29
Speaking in the name of black America, the Chairman of the NAACP pronounced a summary judgment: “The vile racist attack on Congressman Elijah Cummings and the City of Baltimore is despicable. The White House is the seat of a criminal enterprise and a racist cesspool.”30
This partisan uproar revealed the central paradox of Trump’s presidency. It showed how, by standing up to the attacks from the left, Trump was able to thrive despite their slanderous labels of “racist” and “hate monger.” It’s inconceivable that, say, Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush would have stood their ground against the “racist” smears. They would have been steamrolled by the viciousness of the left and quickly apologized for any “offense” given.
Trump’s response illustrated a basic strategy that has served him well on the political battlefield: When attacked, strike back. Strike back hard. Harder than they hit you. Use the facts concealed by political correctness, and the language of moral indictment, which progressives resort to all the time. Know that there are many millions of Americans who have been intimidated into silence by the same tactics, who will rally to your defense.
Donald Trump never attacked the people of Baltimore. Instead, he accurately diagnosed the political pathology that kept the people of Baltimore trapped in poverty and dependence. Whatever his intentions, Elijah Cummings had failed his own people. He was part of the swamp in D.C. Donald Trump was committed to draining that swamp, and he weaponized Twitter to serve that end.
How Low Would the Anti-Trumpers Go?
The anti-Trump chorus seized on Trump’s use of the word “infested” (as in “rodent and drug-infested”) claiming it proved Trump’s racism. Chris Matthews, host of Hardball on MSNBC, went on a rant: “Infested, infested, infested . . . It’s a word . . . It’s vermin, it’s a Hitlerian term. You go back and read Goebbels and all that stuff, it’s all about the Jews in that case. It’s the use of the word vermin—infested, he’s obsessed with this thing, about cities.”31
Any other Republican would have backed down in the face of this onslaught and found a way to distance himself from his own remarks. But Trump was not a prisoner of the PC culture that fueled the hate against him. Instead of apologizing, Trump posted a video of Cummings using the same word—“infested”—to describe his own Baltimore community. He had done so at a congressional hearing twenty years earlier: “This morning, I left my community of Baltimore—a drug-infested area, where a lot of the drugs that we’re talking about today have already taken the lives of so many children—the same children that I watched 14 or 15 years ago as they grew up now walking around like zombies.”32
The PC rules of engagement were both unmistakable and indefensible: If a white Republican criticized a black Democrat—or worse, took him to the woodshed—that constituted “disgusting,” “racist” behavior regardless of his intentions or whether the facts supported his criticism. If a white Republican demonstrated concern over intolerable conditions in a black-run inner city, that constituted a racist attack on the city and its inhabitants. This line of reasoning is not about helping the inner city or its poor minorities. It’s about damning conservatives if they do or if they don’t, by smearing them as selfish, mean-spirited “white supremacists.” It’s about maintaining an unconscionable and oppressive status quo.
Does this sound like a caricature of “liberal” opinion? Here is the editorial comment of the sophisticated, liberal New Yorker on Trump’s tweet against the deplorable conditions in Baltimore’s inner city: “‘No human being would want to live there,’ Trump said of Baltimore on Twitter, implicitly questioning the humanity of the six hundred thousand human beings who do, in fact, live there.”33
This nasty absurdity was actually outdone by the editors of the liberal Baltimore Sun, whose editorial headline defended the rats in order to condemn the president: “Better to Have a Few Rats Than to Be One.”34 Actually, it’s not a few rats from which Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods suffer. A year previously, the pest-control company Orkin listed Baltimore as the ninth most rat-infested city in America (Democrat-run Chicago is number one).35 What the Baltimore Sun editorialists were actually defending with their repellent headline was their own collusion in creating the disgraceful state of the city they were supposed to be looking out for.
Behind the Hate
Baltimore is a mess, just as Trump claimed. Moreover, its decline can be traced to the moment over fifty years earlier when the city became a Democrat monopoly.36 Baltimore’s decline has been so precipitous under a half century of Democratic rule that it has lost more than 30 percent of its population.37 Today Baltimore ranks as the fourth most dangerous city in America with a violent crime rate that is more than five times the national average, murder and robbery rates that are nearly 12 times the national average, and a 22 percent poverty rate, which is nearly twice the national figure.38
Baltimore’s failed school system spends a third more per pupil than the national average while less than 12 percent of the students from fourth grade through high school qualify as proficient in math. Yet thousands of individuals—consultants, contractors, and administrators—are paid in excess of $100,000 a year to perpetrate this travesty.39 And because these employees are protected by Democratic unions whose priorities are the dues-paying adults, not the children, they can’t be fired.
Of course, Baltimore does have wealthy neighborhoods, as Cummings’s defenders were quick to point out. But “social justice” Democrats like Cummings habitually counsel others to judge governments by how they treat the most vulnerable of their inhabitants not the most powerful and prosperous. By that standard Baltimore is a much worse mess than the temporary situation at the border that triggered Cummings’s moral ire and precipitated his attack on the acting secretary and his border patrol.
When Cummings passed away in October 2019, Boston Herald columnist Don Feder described him as “typical of the political class”:
Yesterday, Elijah Cummings—chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Reform Committee—ascended to that big welfare state in the sky. The man who represented Maryland’s 7th Congressional District for 23 years is being lionized as a champion of the downtrodden.
Along with 14 years in the Maryland legislature, Mr. Cummings spent nearly 4 decades in the cozy bosom of government, almost all of his adult life. His net worth is variously estimated at between $1.3 million and $1.5 million—modest compared to some members of Congress, but far exceeding the average in his district, which has an unemployment rate of 13.4%—roughly four times the national average. Cummings district is one of the poorest, most dilapidated, most dismal in the country. While the people he represented live in squalor, the Congressman made headlines and lived handsomely.40
Who is to blame for the violence, poverty, poor sanitation, and educational malpractice that afflicts inner-city Baltimore? Who else is there to blame but Baltimore’s unaccountable Democrat machine that runs the city without any meaningful opposition? In 2018 over $21 billion in federal dollars were given to Baltimore, $15.7 billion of which went to Cummings’s own district. Where did the money go? Into whose pockets?41 The Democrats and their leftist ideology created Baltimore’s misery, and they own it. For decades, Elijah Cummings benefited politically from the corrupt system that dominated Baltimore. The people Cummings represented were no better off at the end of his tenure than when he took office. As Donald Trump accurately pointed out, many of Cummings’s constituents live in far worse conditions than the people in the migrant camps on the border.
Trump knew he would be branded a racist, but he didn’t shrink from the fight. Instead, he applied the same standard to Democrats that Cummings had applied to Republicans: “If racist Elijah Cummings would focus more of his energy on helping the good people of his district, and Baltimore itself, perhaps progress could be made in fixing the mess that he has helped to create over many years of incompetent leadership. His radical ‘oversight’ is a joke!”42
Before Trump, no Republican leader would have called a black Democrat like Elijah Cummings “racist.” No other Republican would have dared accuse Cummings of being responsible for the misery of his constituents. But in defying political correctness, Trump applied a single standard to blacks and whites. In so doing, he deprived progressives of their moral cover for deplorable misdeeds. It was essential to exposing the reality that everyone is aware of but afraid to mention. That is how Trump has become such a transformative and polarizing leader since he entered the White House.