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‘Everything Trump Touches Dies’
ETTD. You’ve seen it here and undoubtedly encountered it elsewhere. Everything Trump Touches Dies.
The great thing about slogans is that they’re catchy, memorable, and spare you the heavy lifting of actually thinking critically about things. “Bush Lied, People Died” is a classic. “No Blood for Oil” is another, as are “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” Repeat them often enough and the ideas for which they’re lazy shorthand seem self-evidently true, and such simplicity is comforting in a disturbingly complicated and nuanced world.
“Everything Trump Touches Dies” obviously isn’t intended to be taken literally. There’s a darkly humorous idea out there that this might have been literally true of one of the candidates in 2016, but it wasn’t Trump. No, what it is intended to suggest is that everything Trump involves himself with becomes tainted, corrupted, diminished, broken — fails, in some way.
Trump has touched a lot of things (ahem), most of which don’t interest me much. He’s a serial entrepreneur, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he might not have been a particularly honest one. Risk-takers often have a string of failures behind them; self-promoting risk-takers who talk fast and paint rosy pictures often lose other people’s money.
Since becoming president, however, Trump has had what I think is a very positive influence on several things. He’s curbed regulations, removed us from silly climate pacts, improved relations with our closest allies, effectively responded to (rather than appeased) our adversaries, drawn attention to the looming challenge of China, strengthened our military, reduced our taxes, improved border security, made strides toward removing corruption from our federal law enforcement agencies, transformed the judiciary in a pro-Constitutional way, exposed the press as the biased and petty institution it appears to be, ended preposterous gender-identity diktats, and encouraged a pro-business climate in America with, I think, impressive results.
So, whatever Trump has figuratively-speaking killed, a lot of things I care about aren’t among them. Quite the contrary, he seems to be contributing to a lot of healing and renewal in places where I think we needed it.
Spouting this particular slogan strikes me as about as vacuous as all the other stupid and dishonest activist ditties. Anyone who thinks Trump is either an unalloyed success or an unalloyed failure is, I think, expressing a silly and indefensible view. We can debate whether the preponderance of Trump’s activities in any particular domain has led to positive or negative consequences. I think, when the domain is his role as President of the United States, we have more positive than negative. There are probably other domains in which I wouldn’t make that case, but his role as President is really the only one that I consider critical in my evaluation of the man and in deciding to vote for him (again) in 2020.
Published in Politics
Some teachers led their classes in cheers when Reagan was shot.
See, this is where you just say, “ok, take your time then, but we’re not mailing out any checks until you deliver.”
“I wish someone would kill him but you won’t hear it from me.”
It should have been obvious that they already have. But it’s not.
The goal posts as to what jumping the shark actually is keep moving.
I don’t remember this darkly humorous idea. Who are we talking about?
How to make friends and influence people. Call them pitiful losers when they disagree with you. That will cause them to realize the errors of their ways.
I strongly doubt that many teachers led their classes in cheering. Would students cheer? Yes.
I can report that at Scottsdale Hopi Elementary School, many students in the Cafeteria cheered on November 22, 1963 when the principal announced on the PA system JFK had been shot. I was in the lunchroom that day. I was in 6th grade. Our Art Teacher stood up and rightfully castigated us, and we were shamed into silence.
In November 1960 in 3rd grade we chanted “Nixon, Nixon, He’s our man. Kennedy, Kennedy in the trash can.” Catchy huh?
I for one, don’t hope that anyone kills Trump or any American President. Not Obama. Not Clinton. Not Carter. And it was appalling when some called for the assassination of W.
Maybe, but the people you side with dream of that stuff.
I think there are actually a fair number of pretty nutty people on the left who would celebrate the death of the current President. I think there’s a much smaller number on the right who would have applauded Obama’s demise.
I don’t know that it’s a majority of either group. I hope and suspect not.
But Gary has no guilt by association, any more than I’m associated with the occasional alt-right nut job who supports Trump.
When the more intelligent NeverTrump folks use the term, they are talking about more than individual policies, they are talking about the promise that the Republican Party had for this country before he hijacked it. I freely admit sometimes I have TDS – the fellow affects me the way Peter Sellers affected Herbert Lom in The Pink Panther movies. To think of him sitting in the office of Washington, Lincoln and Reagan makes me feel the way some folks feel about Colin Kaepernick dishonoring the flag at football games. When he took over the party we had the most commanding political position since 1929, and were poised for future growth if we had nominated a real Republican candidate. Since then we have lost how many statehouses and legislative seats? We lost the House of Representatives, and replaced public servants like Will Hurd with public clowns like Matt Gaetz. If the Dems do not dropkick their nomination process we will lose the WH and possibly the Senate. Trump has treated our party like his daddy’s fortune, and we will be paying for his “contributions” for decades to come.
Good comment, and I share some of your concerns. On the other hand, our party had experienced extraordinary success during the Obama years, and I would expect some regression toward the mean. We really don’t know how much Trump will influence the party nationwide. We can’t simply use midterm results, because they’re notoriously unfavorable for the party in power.
There’s also a possibility that we are in new territory for other reasons. The left is overtly left as we have not seen since the 1920s. Our educational institutions are deeply corrupt. After eight years of Obama, Trump is to some degree a response to an alarming progressive momentum in American culture. If that’s true, then, as challenging as the man is, he might actually be better suited to confront this than more normal Republican leaders would have been.
We are in a place where I’m not confident about making predictions — not that I ever am. And so I’m going to go with the first-order approach: vote for the most conservative electable candidate. That will without question be Trump, and by a vast margin.
With that in mind, I have little interest in running the man down leading up to the next election. On the contrary, I’m going to try to defend his best features and accomplishments.
I was in Washington DC in 1980 at roughly the time of the failed hostage rescue mission, though I’m not sure now if it was before or after. It was my first time in the city, so when I had a few free evening hours this country boy figured out how to use the metro system to get to the National Mall. Inside the Lincoln memorial I read Lincoln’s 2nd inaugural addresses, and got all teary thinking of the contrast with the fumble-tongued oaf who was then sitting in the White House. But I’ve gotten used to fumble-tongued oafs since then. There have been some who were worse than Carter. I quit listening to presidential speeches early in the Reagan administration, and it helps me keep my equanimity.
I fully associate myself with PB. As for Henry, I will willingly grant you that Trump has handled Iran just about pitch perfect in the last two weeks, frankly to my astonishment. Good for him! And good for our country and party.
Like high unemployment rates.
And the occasional terrorist.
I keep hearing about this hijacking of the GOP that Trump has done but do not understand what it means.
Well, see, until Trump The republicans had been doing a bang-up job of controlling spending and the debt.
And the galvanizing issue of the previous 8 years, repeal of the ACA (AKA ObamaCare)? That was torpedoed by the well known Trumpist ally…. (checks notes) John McCain. (Checks notes again). Wait, that can’t be right…
My preference would be for Soleimani to die in a car crash…Oh, wait!
Why do I have the feeling you wrote this entire post so you could use this sentence. And by the way, the title expression isn’t a slogan so much as merely the title of a book written by a deranged Never Trumper. But hey, if you repeat it often enough maybe you can make it into one. I say we ignore it until it dies a natural death, and I say give a moratorium to that Obama Favorite Word: “nuanced.”
You caught me. ;)
And I kind of agree with you about “nuanced.” It was a good word before Obama et al got a hold of it and made it a universal excuse for noncommitment. I appreciate Trump’s apparent lack of it.
I have to ask @henryracette, how many deep breaths did you take before writing that response?
Perhaps we will have some sort of a “Thermidorian Reaction” and our American “Jacobins” will be relegated to their proper place (any convenient dumpster would be fine in my opinion). However, given the popularity of our “Madame Defarge” (Ocasio-Cortez) and “Robespierre” (Bernie Sanders) and all the “mini-Jacobins” in the Mass Media and Universities, I think we still have a ways to go.
I probably have more sympathy with so-called never-Trumpers than most Trump supporters do — and almost certainly than most Trump supporters who go around, as I do, wearing a Trump2020 hat. I shared Petty’s hope in the “promise the Republican Party had” prior to his nomination, and I was afraid that he would be the death of that hope. I was as voluble in my opposition to him during the primaries as I am in support of him now.
I have little faith in our ability to predict the future, and even less in our ability to predict alternative futures — that is, to guess what might have happened had this or that counterfactual come to pass. I don’t know how a Cruz (my first choice) or a Rubio (my second) would have fared against a rabid media, what compromises he would have made, what scandals — real and manufactured — might have plagued him.
Would he have deregulated so aggressively? Would he have appointed the caliber of justices we’re getting? Would he have instilled the confidence the business community seems to feel right now? I don’t know. He might have cut spending, or might have tried and been shot down by a fearful Congress and left lame and ineffectual.
The point is, I don’t know. What I do know is that I generally like the job Trump is doing. What I don’t know is how the GOP will look post-Trump. Trump is sufficiently exceptional, in both good and bad ways, that one can imagine him being a moment that passes. Ronald Reagan was such a moment: no Republican who followed him had his resolve or charisma or ideological coherence. It would have been great if he had shaped the party more in his image, but I don’t know that truly exceptional men can do that. There’s a lot of inertia in a party composed of tens of millions of individuals.
(In a similar vein, I’m hoping that the Democratic Party can survive the exceptionally awful people who are driving it right now, the hard-left radicals who seem to be forcing Pelosi’s hand and making her do stupid things.)
So I’ll take another four years of what seems to be working, and hope that we carry the best of the Trump years forward — the blunt criticism of the press, the indifference to the screeching from the hard left, the willingness to overturn such stupidity as gender-identity guidelines and radical environmental pacts and suicidal quasi-treaties with terrorist nations. And I won’t pretend that we know what would have happened had some other Republican won the nomination, nor what will happen in 2025 when Trump steps down following his second term (he says, hopefully).
You know that GIF of Orson Welles rising to his feet and applauding enthusiastically?
consider that to have been inserted here.
I agree with you in the 90th percentile of whole-heartedly, but would note that many of the things Trump has done; embassy moving, NORK-treading, general-whacking, have been greeted with so much hysteria* that I suspect they are exceptional and revolutionary. There is also the twitter commentary which, objectionable as it often is, manages to bypass the long reigning news gatekeepers.
For good and ill, Trump is a oner.
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*Admittedly, we have a lot of professional hysterics.
If Trump gets to serve out his entire 8 years, I believe he will be as impactful as Reagan. He certainly will have had a greater impact on the courts. He already has had a major impact on the attitude towards China from both Democrats and Republicans, not to mention Independents. Most regular folks believed China was killing our jobs and manufacturing capabilities, but the big shot politicians of both parties, as well as the Republican Chamber of Commerce, were more than willing to sell those folks out so that the elites and bankers could make more billions. There was nothing we could do, we were told. Guess what, there was something we could do, and Trump is doing it. Even after he is gone, our attitudes are forever changed. People now realize that China is our number one threat. Trump also has had the guts to call our immigration mess out for the disaster that it is. Allowing a rampage at our borders has never been a popular policy amongst the average folks, but none of our politicians would do anything to stop it. Perhaps Trump will be able to leave a lasting impact in that area as well.
Well, for the time being anyway, I’ll have to grudgingly give you this one.
I remember hearing at the time that teachers were doing that, but haven’t been able to verify it on the Internet.
That reminds me. I recently read a story about the 1960 campaign. The Kennedy campaign wanted to win a straw poll in the elementary schools, so they planted a story that Nixon wanted to require school on Saturdays. The tactic apparently worked and Kennedy won the straw polls.
That story gave me a laugh because it triggered an old memory.
I was zero years old during that campaign, but eight years later Nixon was running against Humphrey, I was in the third grade and I heard the same rumor. It was still going around. Don’t remember whether I believed it or not.
Please touch the Mullahs . . .
Just a guess, but I think it might mean that the GOP under Trump will no longer be Democrat-Lite.