Why Trump prevails

While the corrupt corporate media work overtime to convince average Americans that President Donald Trump is fanning the flames of trade wars destined to cripple the economy, Trump merely sticks to his guns, doing what he said he would do as a candidate.

He also said he would consider meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The media, Democrats (and many Republicans) dismissed that as pure folly. North Korea, with shadow support from China, was hell bent on becoming a nuclear threat and would never consent to talks, the experts said. Trump knows nothing about conducting delicate foreign policy, especially with North Korea, they said.

Coming out of the recent G-7 summit, the media had company issuing dire forecasts in the form of shell-shocked political leaders, most notably the petulant Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau, who expressly disparaged Trump’s stances as “insulting”. Trudeau apparently thought he was attending nothing more than a photo-op while Trump arrived for a showdown.

In a matter of days, the Trump administration has reshaped history. It is dismantling obsolete, unfair trade that heretofore U.S. Presidents and politicians have ignored, even to the detriment of the country, because they feared retaliatory tariffs. Trump does not understand why the United States should approach trade from a position of fear or weakness.

In Singapore, Trump made clear he does not understand why the United States would stand by and allow North Korea to pursue nuclear ambitions that threaten citizens of many countries, including our own. Again, he rejected fear and weakness; fear that North Korea would use a high profile summit to legitimize Kim; weakness in failing previously to have directly threatened North Korea with devastating military strikes.

These developments, already widely derided by the U.S. media and the Left, underscore what some observers always expected out of a Trump presidency. We recently re-visited a salient piece of writing by conservative author and political comedian Evan Sayet, who nearly a year ago in July 2017 expressed why Trump’s unconventional, some would say unrefined and undignified, approach to being president would succeed.

“While (Republicans) were playing by the rules of dignity (George W. Bush), collegiality (John McCain) and propriety (Mitt Romney), the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of (Socialist godfather) Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob (that gave us Barack Obama).”

As Democrats in Washington, in state houses and in the courts, have moved further left, Republicans rarely groomed candidates to take them on. There are exceptions such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, but they did not become President. Trump did, warts, Twitter rants, ego, and all.

Sayet in his explanation of the Trump phenomenon, and why he emerged at precisely the right moment in history, recalls the dilemma facing President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War when his lead warrior was the notoriously hard drinking, rough-around-the-edges General Ulysses Grant. Lincoln concluded, despite Grant’s critics, that, “I can not spare this man. He fights.”

Some rightly note our nation has entered a civil cold war pitting a bicoastal Left that wants to remake America by dismantling the Constitution against a Right-leaning populace still convinced of America’s exceptionalism. If we’re not on the brink of civil war, we are nonetheless in the midst of a culture war. Concludes Sayet (writing months before tax reform, trade showdowns and engagement with North Korea):

“Do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be ‘collegial’ and ‘dignified’ and ‘proper’? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.

“So say anything you want about (Trump) — I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.”