Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What If Trump Turns Out to Be a Great President?
Frankly, I had assumed the outcome would be otherwise. I don’t think my reaction to the 2016 election result was atypical among conservatives. I was delighted to dodge the bullet to the heart of the nation’s well-being that was Hillary Clinton. But I assumed Donald Trump would have no coherent agenda other than to try not to be Obama or Hillary and that he would likely step aside in 2020 after an ineffectual if not entertaining four years. Trump did not appear to have much of a policy compass or vision.
It never occurred to me that Trump could be highly successful or even a great president. His demeanor suggested that greatness was not to be his destiny. He often seems to share the same tendencies toward venality and petty vengefulness that characterized the Johnson and Nixon presidencies but with far less skill (and regard) for inside-baseball politics than those two. I assumed the bureaucracy would eventually tie Trump down as they always do with outsiders and perceived enemies and that they would stalemate any serious attempt at policy change.
Democrats and GOP NeverTrumpers convinced themselves the results would be dire. After the election, they issued a collective bipartisan heavy sigh and struck a noble pose waiting for the imminent invitation to deliver their I-told-you-so’s. Trumpian failure would inevitably unfold in an Aristotelian character-based tragedy in stark contrast to their own prescience and virtue which would leave them in a place of honor and adulation, gazing with mock sadness at the ashes of Trump’s presidency.
How many times have the anti-Trump faithful worked up the mock sorrow, the heavy sighs, and deep breaths getting ready for I-told-you-so’s, only to be disappointed? Mueller fizzled badly. The disastrous trade war with China morphed into an economy-boosting deal. The soaring humanitarian crisis at the border has faded as did the war with Iran. And the impeachment is a travesty. The prayed-for divine comeuppance just never arrives. Is there such a thing as Schadenfreudenus Interruptus?
It appears that without a very efficient use of expert opinion or intellectual depth, Donald Trump has repeatedly moved to sound and effective decisions on what seems like gut instinct. Can greatness emerge from that? Napoleon once said if he could choose, he would pick generals who were lucky over those who were known to be smart and competent. Did America do something like that in 2016?
Virtually every expectation (certainly mine) about the consequences of electing President Trump was wrong. The economy is spectacular. Most of the dictatorships to which Barack Obama bowed and scraped are now teetering on collapse and/or internal rebellion. The border crisis is abating to a degree no one thought possible. Only entrenched Democratic machines prevent even greater economic and social benefits for our most disadvantaged citizens from accruing faster. We have achieved energy independence. Elsewhere, Brexit and the Merkel idiocy of open borders have ended the myth of a bureaucratically managed nirvana delivered by elites.
Looking forward, what would a world be like in which the stranglehold of incompetent self-serving elites, dictators, and Marxist dinosaurs is broken everywhere and innovation, growth, and trade accelerate to bring about as yet unimagined material well-being around the globe?
Obviously, there is much unknown about the events leading up to the election and what will transpire over the following four years, but the prospect of a truly great presidency is now a distinct possibility. What then for Never-Trumpism?
The weird thing about Never-Trumpism is that it is not merely a position about candidate preference but became a kind of identity with a vested interest in Trumpian failure. For many, the reflexive condemnation of Donald Trump was not a policy difference but something personal, a way of asserting one’s own aesthetic and moral superiority to Donald Trump (or some caricature of him). Americans have always developed and expressed strong aversions to candidates and incumbents but with the understanding that voting is often a choice of the lesser of two bad policy choices. But to declare that one would vote for a candidate antithetical to all of one’s values just because his/her opponent is Donald Trump is unusual and kinda weird.
Twenty years from now, if Trump is remembered for ushering in a new economic golden age, the rollback of wars, the fall of oppressive regimes and substantive government reform, will elderly NeverTrumpers still be saying, “Yes but those tweets ..and he was so rude …and what he said about…” to their incredulous but wealthy grandchildren?
Published in General
I believe the Bush’s made their money before they held office, and didn’t get much richer while in office. They were interested in the power and maybe not just for the pleasure of having it.
Can we have Crenshaw or a Nikki Haley or someone who constantly fights back but in a more polite way? I’m thinking of a Reagan with a twitter account. Reagan made fun of the media constantly and was great at using the bully pulpit to talk directly to the American people but he was still a Midwestern gentleman. Crenshaw did a great job of making fun of Saturday night live in a way that was strong and masculine but not Trumpy.
Dave Rubin (who is very unlike Trump in his politeness) in his most pro-Trumpy moments would say that we needed Donald Trump in order to get out of this quagmire of political correctness and identity politics. Can we have a the next guy or gal in 2024 be somebody fights but is more polite about it?
The society has not been going in that direction. Kanye will be running and challenging other candidates to rap battles.
There was nowhere that I said they used the government for graft. I didn’t say it. I didn’t imply it. I said they like the power and the control. That’s an entirely different thing. The Bushes have this sentiment of noblesse oblige that is both very insulting and annoying and also at the same time entirely inappropriate for Americans. Most of the Never Trumpers seem to agree with this sentiment. The Bushes would have been Tories during the War of Independence.
Too bad there was never a debate between Don Rickles and Sam Kinson as a blueprint for the 2024 candidates to use.
I think the Bushes may well have ignored the profiteering of subordinates. Not the same as the Clintons but some people got pretty rich under the Bushes. I do have some concerns about Nikki Haley. I assume we will learn more.
That I would have paid to see.
I share your concern that the Bushes might be far too interested in power for power’s sake. But I do think that a fair minded person could reasonable infer that you were accusing the Bush family of graft when you said,
I also share concerns that they overlooked corruption with their underlings. But I remember the Republican Congress during the GWB administration and I feel it unfair to blame a President (entirely) for the Congress’s failures. Even the Republican party during Lincoln was filled with Tammany Hull Hucksters.
If Kanye doesn’t use curse words because of his Christianity I’d consider that a cultural win.
[As an aside. I must say this conversation alone has been worth the monthly price of Ricochet.]
I see your point. But I don’t think the Bushes were corrupt. I think that power and control naturally brings wealth, and that becoming or maintaining wealth while in power shows competence, not graft. That is, if a person has that much power and can’t find a way to legally make money, then he’s a fool.
My problem with the Bushes is that they are socialists or at least have no principles that uphold individual freedoms. Recall that the GHW Bush quit the NRA, not because they are the corrupt quislings that they are for gun rights, but because he thought they went too far in protecting gun rights. He also took the unprecedented step of regulating cable television. The only reason the government has a patina of legitimacy to regulate broadcast television is because the radio waves cross state borders. Cable broadcasts do not (necessarily) cross state borders, and thus the feds had no business controlling it at all. But Bush thought it was a grand idea. There are few socialist programs the Bushes don’t support.
No. Not while he advocates expanding H1B and other “temporary” visa programs. He should be working to shrink these, not help them grow.
What’s your beef with legal immigrants?
It’s safe to say Trump is the best President of the 21st Century, but that isn’t setting the bar very high.
The H1B program is routinely abused by companies to fill jobs with lower paid “temporary” workers instead of American workers. Here’s one such example. I personally know several HR directors in firms who say this is still the case.
Crenshaw wants to expand this program.
As long as they aren’t criminals and aren’t getting free stuff, I’m all in favor of it. I want the ones who earn their own living to come here. More the merrier. It’s the criminals and the jobless ones we don’t want.
Lower the safety net from where it was raised to during the Obama era, when the Clinton-era welfare reforms were rolled back, and you likely wouldn’t need as many visas. I think I’ve told this story before, but our local hospital a decade ago had to go out and get J1 visas to fill nursing positions, because even in the middle of the recession, they couldn’t get enough nurses to move down from high unemployment areas in the Midwest and elsewhere to the Texas oil patch.
They would rather take their change with an improving future economy than have to uproot and relocate 1,500 miles, and the benefits available in 2009 were high enough to give them that option. If the hospital wanted nurses, they had to look overseas (and even with the current low unemployment numbers, there’s still only about 62-63 percent of working age Americans who are employed, which is not much different from the Obama era. That’s one of the reasons why there’s a labor shortage, because even with increase in available jobs, some people have opted not to come back into the workforce).
I almost never ask this question on Ricochet, but your response forces me to: did you read the linked article? Because if you did I don’t think you’d have made such a dismissive comment. You’d have read about companies replacing their American workers with lower-cost H1B workers and, to add insult to injury, forcing the Americans to retrain their replacements if they wanted to receive severance. You’d have read how the H1B system, which was put in place to allow companies to hire foreign workers with certain skills the companies couldn’t find in the American workforce, has been undermined and is harming American workers. You’d have read about how firms like Tata and Infosys contracted to replace Southern California Edison IT workers, who on average made $110K, with foreign H1B contractors making an average of $71K.
The H1B system is broken. Crenshaw doesn’t want to fix it so American workers aren’t harmed. He wants to further expand it.
Opposing this doesn’t make one “anti-immigrant.”
Not a rumor; I saw it happen to a friend first-hand.
I don’t care it people come here for less money. The economic force will not be stopped, it is irresistible. Either we pay our workers less or companies will continue to ship manufacturing overseas. But in truth, it’s usually the taxes, not the wages that cause that.
It’s not manufacturing.
Software, database administration, software testing and integration are even easier to ship overseas than manufacturing. One doesn’t need a sophisticated infrastructure for that, just smart, hardworking people. I saw a lot of folks from India who were getting advanced degrees at local universities in the late 1990s. They planned to go back and take their knowledge with them. Most were going to work in software even though their main field was mechanical engineering. They had learned software doing simulation-based design.
So, either we bring them here and they pay our taxes and contribute to our economy or we pay them over there and we lose all that and the ability to do things on our own.
Our country is founded in freedom. We should welcome all here who are willing and able to earn their own way. It is only because we have become a socialist country that gives us any reason to complain about good people coming here.
I wasn’t complaining in this case; I was making an observation about how the system worked at that time.
There are some legitimate complaints, but they also are from that time period and revolve around the y2K issues and how management dealt with them.
EDIT:
I actually had some sympathy for those in the position to hire people. In 1995, I was one of those “over-age, over-paid, and over-specialized engineers”. If I had been over-weight, I’d have fit the entire stereotype. Someone or something must have been looking out for me because an opportunity came out of the blue. I wasn’t the ideal candidate and was told so, but I had the necessary accesses and polygraph records to prove it. I took the job and for about six months my life consisted of working my a$$ off for 7 ½ hours and letting management look the other way while I brushed up on both the technologies and the specific domain. After the workday was done, it was work out, shower, eat, and more studying. Repeat the studying in the weekends. It paid off big league (as The Orange One might say). I got promotions and raises and my own portfolio. When word got back to my former co-workers, a couple called to say they were available. They wanted to get out of the rut, but knew nothing about the domain or the new technologies, and wanted to know what my training budget was. Yes; they wanted me to pay them to take classes. Over-age, over-paid, over-specialized, AND over-weight. I offered them the same deal I had been given and they refused. I explained that I could hire younger workers at half the pay who already knew the technologies, and would pick up the domain quickly, so it was take it or leave it. They all left it. I never met people with such a sense of entitlement until I worked with a few millennials. BTW, it was a research project; we needed people with the ability to add to the body of knowledge, not twits to train.
I think it’s great we have a president who doesn’t believe in a foreign policy of “if we’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to us.” Or that countries who use us for their defense, exploiting our people and resources, are “friends.”
That may seem like a low threshold for greatness, but Trump didn’t set the bar there. He just leaped over the mewling and feckless policies of all previous administrations within my lifetime (some props to Reagan).
If true, I especially like the story that, when the generals went to mansplain our foreign engagements to Trump and told him “we weren’t told to win in Afghanistan,” he blew his top! “I want to win!” should be translated into Latin for his presidential motto.
Excellent, but points deducted for using the word “mansplain.” :)
“Generalsplain?” Or “jackasssplain?” “We weren’t told to win” would seem a firing offense for generals.
Too many H1B visa holders who are indentured servants. American citizens are being laid off and replaced by these people. Legal immigrants who want citizenship are fine.
The H1B visa holders are getting American jobs in supposed high tech fields and being paid Indian wages.
And?
The version of this 100 years later?