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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
Amend the 22nd to exclude Trump!
The reflexively anti-Trump folk would say his judicial nominations would have happened under any GOP POTUS; ditto tax cuts. The GOP would not have suffered a diminution of its reputation under a temperate fellow such as Rubio or Jeb, who would not alienate suburban women. True. But this posits a world in which Rubio or Jeb would not be held up by the media as enablers or exemplars of Everything Bad if it was convenient to do so. I wish I could visit the alternative dimension where Rubio is president, just to see why he is Hiterally Litler in that time continuum.
Would they have fought for Brett Kavanaugh though? That was a big deal.
@jamesliekhus Okay, let’s just exclude Rubio for now and once again pretend they could have won, because the idea that Jeb would not have been an absolute disaster is preposterous.
It’s an alternative dimension I simply can’t fathom without a healthy dose of DMT with Terrance Mc Kenna himself resurrected and a bevy of machine elves playfully giving me the ‘finger’, and even then…
The fact that these political morons are positing such fantasies is reason enough to purge them from amateur political punditry altogether, no matter what their conservative bona fides.
Jeb and Marco would have folded like a cheap card-table, on everything important and postured their way through the Presidency while giving away the store. We Trumpers are, and have been, way past worrying what the media says or does. But not the Nevers. They still have this dysfunctional animal imprinting, believing the media to be the mommy ( and daddy) who’s love they’re eternally seeking, always disappointed.
The fact that Trump actually could not fill high government posts without hiring Bushies, shows the pathetic claims that Jeb was “ his own man” and “ happened to have the same name” to be preposterous.
This Republican Party would have been ridiculed for a century for having three consecutive Presidents from the same immediate family. It also would have made the USA look like the phony, crony, undemocratic deep-state country it may well be.
And do they not think, with either of these men in charge, that we wouldn’t be in some new war or significant engagement right now?
Maybe they would have lowered taxes, but on whom? I’m for lowering taxes on everybody, but no way either of those two would have targeted the working class as Trump did.
As to judges, in our alternate dimension where these staid Presidential posers would have made the media focus on their policies instead of their wrestlemania antics, the battlefield would have been on their turf, and they would have set their sights on every judge in the most despicable manner, as we have seen them capable of doing, and I guarantee you lil’Marco and Jeb! would have caved.
There is an interesting column with a pretty good message.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/what_do_democrats_fear_in_donald_trump_greatness.html
Not one Nobel laureate imagined this American renaissance of GDP and stock market surge, record-low unemployment, wage growth, and low inflation in one bubbling cauldron. It took a change agent. Not one foreign policy mandarin suggested unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of the American oil man in order to destroy our enemies’ power over us permanently. It took a change agent. Not one State Department official questioned why the United States was still subsidizing Europe’s generous socialist welfare system seventy years after WWII. It took a change agent. Nobody wondered why we were enriching China at our own expense and preparing for a world where a communist dictator would lead. It took Donald Trump.
Worth reading. I’m not prepared to go as far as this column does but it could be true. Sometimes the best reason why your opinion is correct is the intensity with which others are trying to prove you wrong.
Oh, not just him. It’s their way of asserting moral superiority over anyone who voted for or continues to support him. It’s not him they hate. It’s us.
“What If Trump Turns Out to Be a Great President?”
Too late. Already happened.
Awesome Post.
Afternoon Old Bathos,
I would suggest that in the area of foreign policy, Trump has provided evidence of greatness. Here is Pompeo at Hoover:
https://www.hoover.org/news/secretary-state-pompeo-addresses-stanford-universitys-hoover-institution-following-strike-irans
This is a super 15 minute presentation followed by 15 minutes of Q and A, Condi Rice was on stage with Pompeo during Q and A. To paraphrase, Pompeo said that one of the first things to do in the Trump foreign policy was to re-establish deterrence. To do this we had to build up our armed forces and to not only show the capacity to impose costs but have the willingness to impose these costs. Pompeo notes that we have diplomatically isolated Iran, we have put great economic pressure on Iran, cutting off 80% of their oil revenues, and with the killing of Soleimani, we have provided another example of our willingness to use military force to impose costs on bad actors. We started arming Ukraine and having naval exercises in the South China Sea. Recall that during a visit to Mar a Lago, Trump during dinner told Xi Jinping that he had just fired missile into Syria. Pompeo also spoke specifically about supporting the protesters in Hong Kong.
The Trump foreign policy is one that is aimed at mutual respect, we will not be taken advantage of, and we will impose costs on your attempts to continue to take advantage of us, those costs could be tariffs, could be military, could be sanctions, could be a public rebuke. Compared to the foreign policies since Reagan, the Trump foreign policy looks excellent. It has high goals, we want Iran, China, North Korea to act like normal countries, but this policy is not one that will lead us to be the world’s policeman. So when Merkel asked, she did, us “what are you going to do about Ukraine”, we reply to her “what she is going to do about her neighbor Ukraine”.
Petty, spiteful, sphinctered caudal orifices. My memory tells me that Trump said to them, more-or-less, you screwed it up and I’ll fix it. Drain The Swamp. Of course they opposed him. If he is successful through reversing their long-standing policies and implementing his own, he will have proved that they were the problem. Something his supporters suspected all along.
Can Trump establish a lasting coalition? American populism won’t die and it will remain an important force in the American conversation and in American politics. Trump has channeled that populism towards almost entirely good ends (I’m still sketchy about his trade deals). I think Trump could be great if he establishes a legacy of channeling that fierce populist nationalism into classically liberal patriotism.
But what will happen to the broad American right after Trump goes away in 2024? The populist hatred for the establishment will not go away. Can it make peace with those who weren’t Trumpy?
This is an excellent question. I guess the old saying (was it Herodotus*?) that “if you strike a king you must kill him” will apply. If he doesn’t root out the Bush machine then we will have but a temporary reprieve. That was Reagan’s biggest fault.
* edit: Surprisingly, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don’t think any of the others except for maybe Cruz would have stood up to the pounding from the MSM, literati, Hollywood, etc etc.
They would have folded like cheap furniture.
It’s not difficult to figure that maybe they really never wanted those conservative things to begin with. They might have only claimed to support them when it was clear that they wouldn’t happen, under Obama etc.
I agree. The “establishment” Bush machine was happy controlling the Republican Party, whether they had the White House or Congress or not. Having a majority in the House or Senate, or someone in the White House was like the weather to them. Sometimes they have it, sometimes they don’t. The key is that they had a very nice spoils system that guaranteed them wealth and power no matter who held the reins of government.
For example, the corrupt John McCain didn’t give a rat’s behind about Americans suffering from Obamacare. He just wanted to protect his status, and in that particular vote he just wanted display his own power for his own ego’s sake. He was a corrupt, petty, small-minded little jerk, overtly more concerned with his and the party’s status than with the freedoms of his constituents. And yet people still think well of him. The Bushes were never petty and vindictive, at least, but they remain steadfastly committed to protecting the status quo, with them in control of the party, whether it’s in power or not.
A Pox on them all.
Routinely of my social media feed someone will post something to the effect of wanting politicians to put America first and stop being beholden to parties or political ideologies.
Trump is that guy.
I shared all of Old Bathos’s 2016 concerns, but I feel like I hit the lottery.
I don’t think so. The next President after Trump will be Republican, but he’ll be a one-termer unless he gets (warning: triggering word ahead) “Trumpy.”
Me too.
I am not yet tired of all the winning
There will be a certain divide going into 2024, win or lose in 2020, about how ‘Trumpy” the next nominee should be.
Trump spent the better part of four decades becoming the Donald Trump people were familiar enough with to elect president in 2016 — someone coming on the scene over the next four years and deciding to be Trump’s Mini-Me might win over the voters who simply want the angriest guy or gal in the bar to represent them. But those were the types who in general went for Ron Paul in 2008-12, and he stayed as just a niche candidate because he didn’t have the high-profile public image Trump did.
At the same time, voters are going to want a candidate who fights back, and especially if Trump wins this fall, since the Dems and their media supporters are going to go apoplectic about whoever the Republicans look like they might nominate in ’24. Someone running as the kinder, gentler ‘Not Trump’ four years from now who thinks he or she still isn’t going to get treated even worse than Mitt Romney was in 2012 probably isn’t smart enough to be allowed to cross the street by themselves, let alone run for president. So to win, and then to govern effective, the next candidate is going to need to have a little of Trump’s combativeness in them, but at the same time is going to have to show they’re their own person, or they’re going to come off as insincere and/or will make too many false steps they then can’t get out of.
Concur, which likely means no one from the 2016 cohort. Dan Crenshaw, maybe. Nikki Haley did a great job pushing back against the blue beret brigade at the UN. I think this bench is probably deeper than we think.
Anyone who supports the President, even slightly, will be considered persona non grata by the Nevers on the right. Just ask them. Our own most notorious Never has written off candidates for merely appear on the same stage as President Trump.
2024 is going to be fascinating and horrible at the same time.
That’s going to be more of a problem for the #NeverTrumpers. If you’re going to write out even people like Haley and Crenshaw, you’re going to be left with … who? Mitt v3.0 or Jeff Flake? Will the Bulwark field it’s own 2024 candidate?
That’s why if many of the #NeverTrump crowd were as smart as they think they are, they’d already be game-planning 2024, to figure out which candidate(s) can win over the bulk of the Trump supporters while at the same time be acceptable to them — or maybe they already know that for 2024, any candidate they overtly support might be given the Kiss of Death via those efforts (to me, Haley’s facing the possibility of being negatively pinched from both ends, as the #NeverTrump hardcores write her out for not turning on her former boss now that she’s no longer U.N. ambassador, while the hardest of the hardcore Trump backers are either mistrusting of her over the Conservative flag kerfuffle from six years ago and/or are irked that she’s not 100 percent in lockstep with Trump due to things like her tweet after Trump’s tweet last year mocking Elijah Cummings after his Baltimore house was robbed…)
Not as long as he keeps pushing for expanded H1B and other “temporary” visa programs.
I don’t see that he will ever be a great President, regardless of the economy. He’s blotted his copybook by his temperament and self-dealing (note: I’m sure that history will sand off the edges, but that will take 100 years or more), so at best he can be a good President. Personally, I’d just call him an OK one, but by the other Presidents of my lifetime, warts and all, he’s still on the low-side of OK.
It’s hard to be Eisenhower or Coolidge. Let alone Washington or Lincoln. After all, once the slaves have been freed and the Nazi and Soviets vanquished, the low-hanging fruit is gone. “Free the Trans” doesn’t have the same historical resonance.
?
That reminds me of people saying that Clinton resented that he never had a crisis to deal with because it denied him the opportunity to prove his greatness.
Great or not, Trump has the chance to be one of the most consequential presidents in living memory.
You totally misunderstand that this is precisely what makes him so good.
Evening Kenton,
Great may be a term which limits our understanding of Trump. If we measure Trump by the change in policy and political understanding that Trump has caused, then Trump has been the biggest disrupter in my life. Trump has been the source of the most change since the end of the Cold War. His foreign policy presents a new approach to enemies, economic rivals, and allies. It is different than Bush and Obama, and the foreign policy establishment which supported both Bush and Obama, Trump’s policy is tenacious about reciprocity and respect which will be enforced by diplomacy, economic muscle, and an indifference to proportionate military response. You can see this with Iran, China, and Germany. America first tells the gulf states that we will no longer be their army, and tells Germany that your freeloading will not be accepted, and to China, that we know that tariffs will hurt you and expose your weakness more than it will hurt us, and we will stick with tariffs as long as it takes even if we suffer pain.
Domestically, conservatism has been represented by leaders who have more in common with the Harvard faculty than anyone in flyover country. These leaders have been worse than passive about illegal immigration which may benefit their donors, and maybe weaken labor unions but at the cost of our own society in many profound ways. Our past “conservative leaders have been indifferent to China’s theft and currency manipulation and China’s threat to our institutions. They have not cared as we have driven down male job participation and community destruction, since did not hurt them or their kids. Our “conservative leaders” have written off blue color workers as forever lost to Dems. They had also written off blacks and had been cowed over immigration in their approach to Hispanics. Trump has changed all that and has exposed the deep corruption of the admin state and the extent to which the Democrat party has ejected any principles they once had. Trump maybe a symptom of the populist anger and resentment toward the elites, but more than anyone I can imagine he has been the exact instrument of change that these times have needed. Some may not think that is great in the sense that in retrospect we think Reagan was great, but I think Trump is great.
Jim, my eyes nearly moistened to read this. Thank you for expressing this so clearly.
There has been zero indication that any of the Bush’s were using the government for graft. I dislike political dynasties and I wish the Bushes successful lives as productive citizen. Of course there are multitudinous congress critters of both parties who suck the life from productive people in order to enrich themselves but the Bushes never played that game.
Accusing them of graft is like accusing Mr. Trump of anti-gay or anti-jewish bigotry. Flaws abound in Trump and the Bushes (as they do in all of us) but it is unfair and irrational to make up flaws for which there is zero evidence of and strong evidence against.