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.”

 

Maybe GOP is too ‘hinged’

Until Saturday evening, members of the media and Democrats (and some establishment Republican elites) held up President Donald Trump as the living embodiment of a person who has become unhinged. That was before an obscure, marginally talented and vile so-called comedian named Michelle Wolf was invited by the White House Correspondents Association to spew one-liners during its annual gala. Wolf took “unhinged” to new extremes, and, in doing so, exposed how unhinged, dare we say deranged, our left wing mainstream media remains since the unthinkable happened last November 2016. Wolf exposed them because she had them laughing uproariously at her mean spirited monologue.

Trump arguably is more unfiltered or uncensored (by Washington standards) than unhinged, but he continues to irritate even some members of the media who retain a few threads of credibility. Columnist Peggy Noonan, to name one. In her weekly Wall Street Journal column April 27, Noonan railed against Trump’s “latest unhingement” during last week’s call-in to the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” morning show. She took issue with Trump ranting about James Comey, the FBI, the vicious take down of his nominee to head the Veterans’ Administration, the “crazy Stormy Daniels deal”, and fake news.

Presidents traditionally have not spouted off. Everything was scripted and focus group tested before it was uttered. But consider the contrast between a wide ranging Trump rant, such as the one Noonan scolded about, and a well-crafted Barack Obama, fully hinged speech.

Trump: James Comey is “liar and a leaker”. Unhinged again. And true by all accounts.

Obama: “If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan. If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor.” Not unhinged. Completely untrue.

There are numerous additional examples. The point is that when Trump goes off script he nearly always does so to further expose hypocrisy, media deceit and corrupt Washington insiders. And now there is new polling strongly suggesting that tightly hinged Republican lawmakers will be the reason Democrats could win back Congressional seats in the 2018 mid-terms. Writing for Townhall.com, Timothy Daughtry reports:

“A new poll of 1,000 likely voters by McLaughlin and Associates … (indicates) that the ‘Blue Wave’ so hoped for by the liberal media is not at all inevitable and that there is still a possible path to Republican victory in November. (The bad news in the polling results is) Republican voters are wanting results, and many in the GOP base see Republican leadership as supporting the swamp they were sent to Washington to drain.

There are but a few nuggets of encouraging data in the McLaughlin poll for DC Republicans, one being that “the generic ballot for Congress in the November election is essentially tied at 44% for Democrats and 43% for Republicans.”

Other poll results:

  • Among Democrats, 65% trust their party to do what it says it will do. By contrast, only 15% of Republicans trust their own party to carry out its promises, and that dismal percentage drops to 9% among the conservative base.
  • Overall, 46% of voters polled say the Republican leadership is “supporting the swamp that President Trump promised to drain.”
  • Trump’s job approval rating of 45% (in this poll) is higher than the job approval of the GOP Congress. Overall, 84% of Republicans and 73% of conservatives approve of Trump’s performance.

Different polls reveal different trends. The McLaughlin poll “dispels the … narrative that President Trump is a drain on the ticket.” But another poll released April 30, by Reuters/Ipsos, finds that a generally negative view of Trump among millennials does not predispose them to lean heavily in favor of Democrat lawmakers.

“The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters ages 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years, to 46 percent overall. And they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.”

The report did not find a surge of millennials who’ve shifted to “overt support of Republicans (at 28% it’s about the same as a similar poll two years ago). Yet, heading into the 2018 mid-terms, these millennials also say “they were undecided, would support a third-party candidate or not vote at all.”

Polls ebb and flow, but almost all point to hapless Washington lawmakers in both parties who fail again and again to get out of their own ways, and thereby continue to sacrifice trust and voter approval. Meanwhile, Trump soldiers on despite the black cloud of the Mueller investigation and daily media attempts to diminish his administration.

But nothing can diminish the successful nomination of Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch, the defanging of the Obamacare mandate, restored relations with Israel, historic tax cuts and reforms that are changing American citizen’s lives and lifting their optimism, the hope of fairer trade with China, and, suddenly, the prospect of a denuked North Korea and a unified Korean Peninsula.

That strikes many as more unparalleled than unhinged.

 

 

Tariffs 101

By Harold Mendelson

It seems a lot of so called knowledgeable people are upset with President Donald Trump’s imported steel and aluminum tariffs. The general viewpoint is the tariffs will start a trade war and the U.S. economy will collapse.

Is it true the tariffs will destroy our economy? Well it is true that businesses generally hate tariffs, because they drive up the cost of imported materials used to make their products. If that is so, why would President Trump want to upset the economy?

If you look at the tariffs he has imposed, you will see there’s is a vagueness to his tariffs. Mexico and Canada are exempt for the time being. Why? President Trump wants to renegotiate NAFTA. NAFTA was the brainchild of then-President Clinton. It was designed to build up free trade between the U.S. and its North American neighbors. In the past 20 years, what has it accomplished? It certainly expanded trade between the nations of North America. It also allowed American companies to move manufacturing jobs off shore, where lower labor costs reduced manufacturing costs and raised net profits. The areas around Detroit and the rest of the rust belt states were turned into ghost towns. Auto plants and steel mills shut down. Supporting industries such as logistic companies shut down as well. You can’t make steel with the coke made from coal. NAFTA was a treaty that was much more beneficial to countries outside the U.S. So what can be done to fix the the disadvantages of NAFTA so the American economy isn’t hurt by the treaty? One way is to renegotiate NAFTA. Up to this point Mexico and Canada have been slow to agree to reopen the talks. After all, both nations realize any changes made to NAFTA will hurt their their economies. So President Trump is using the tariff as a bargaining chip. The same holds true for the rest of our international trading partners, including China. Most of the treaties the U.S. has entered into since NAFTA have put the U.S. at a disadvantage. President Trump has said these treaties were bad for the U.S. and pledges to renegotiate those treaties.

As for China, it has done it’s best to promote its economy at the expense of other nations’ economies. It manipulated its currency; it has been dumping steel and aluminum on the world markets for years. Ratan Tata, an Indian billionaire who made his money in the steel and aluminum industries as well as the auto industry, a number years ago reopened steel plants in the UK. Late last year he announced he was shutting down his UK operations because of the artificially low prices of steel exported from China. President Trump instituted these tariffs to equalize the prices of steel and aluminum coming from China and others nations that have been dumping their exports on the world market. He has publicly announced the tariffs will be ended when these imbalances are eliminated, and when product dumping ends and NAFTA is renegotiated.

Why impose tariffs and risk upsetting the world recovery? Because it puts the U.S. in a position of strength and influence. At long last.