Posted on 02/28/2017 6:45:17 AM PST by RoosterRedux
Paradox: How does a supposedly bad man appoint good people eager to advance a conservative agenda that supposedly more moral Republicans failed to realize?
We variously read that Trump should be impeached, removed, neutralized — or worse. But until he is, are his appointments, executive orders, and impending legislative agenda equally abhorrent?
General acclamation followed the Trump appointments of retired Generals H. R. McMaster as national-security adviser, James Mattis as defense secretary, and John Kelly to head Homeland Security. The brief celebration of Trump’s selections was almost as loud as the otherwise daily denunciations of Trump himself. Trump’s equally inspired decisions, such as the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and Jeff Sessions as attorney general, presented the same ironies.
Most of these and other fine appointments came amid a near historic pushback against Trump, mostly over what he has said rather than what he’s done. But again, do the appointments create a dilemma for his existential critics who have gone beyond the traditional media audit of a public official and instead descended into calls for his removal — or worse? Indeed, removal chic is now widespread, as even conservatives ponder impeachment, invoking the 25th Amendment for mental unfitness, while the more radical (here and abroad and both Right and Left) either abstractly or concretely ponder a coup or some other road to his demise.
How do his opponents square such excellent appointments with Trump himself? Even bad people can occasionally do good?
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Ping
Trumps opponents (including those here during the primaries) promote an extreme liberal social agenda with their actions while promoting a conservative agenda with their words.
There will be no change from them.
George Will, Bill Kristol and the National Review, would rather have McCain or Romney being nice and polite, even if they are completely ineffective in pushing a conservative agenda, then Trump's rough rhetoric combined with being able to push a conservative agenda. Its amazing how they all focus on Trump's "gaffes" rather than what is actually happening. Or they project what Trump will or won't do in the future rather than looking at what he actually is doing. Its no wonder the "conservative" blogs and press are so ineffective and useless.
A man who is mentally unsound cannot build a billion dollar business empire.
We only need to keep in mind that people had no problem with Trump whatsoever when he was only a businessman. All of the vile vitriol and hate directed his way appeared only after he threw his hat in the ring.
One reason I supported him from the beginning is that his very public life would shield him somewhat from the lies and slander that are always thrown at Republicans. I am correct, it does shield him. What I did not anticipate is that the left liars and slanderers would ramp up the vicious hatemongering in proportion to that shielding.
Regardless, the left still has nothing concrete against him. They can have their protest tantrums, they can screech about racism/sexism/homophobism/whateverism all they want, but they still have nothing tangible. They are like cornered animals in their desperation.
Yes, despite their howling, in the end Mr. Trump turned out to be far cleaner a guy than anybody would have guessed.
VDH is squirming like a nerve gassed python trying to get off the hook the NR editors put in him and other previously good people with their ridiculous anti-Trump magazine cover.
VDH WAS ANTI Trump...wasn’t he?
The media approach is unsustainable.
President Trump is picking good people, focusing on good solutions to important problems, he is personally scandal free and he quickly gets rid of people who may not measure up to his standards. He is extremely competent and presidential.
And the media says: Trump is Hitler! Trump is Hitler! Trump is Hitler!
Not sustainable.
Well, it’s a good explanation of how he still feels the cognitive dissonance, but seeing is believing and he is liking what he sees. Very smart man. Welcome back to him, if this is the case.
Can't be done, losing, quagmire, disaster , demoralization, quagmire , disaster, quagmire, losing - Taiban and Al Qaeda defeated and America won.
Same thing with Trump. It's just the media trying oppose while the serious guys just get the job done
Get used to sound wall of opposition because we will be hearing it for the next 4 years at least
Absolutely. One of the over educated fools who contributed to that infamous NR issue.
The anti-Trump crowd is having a very long temper tantrum.
Here is the info on your question about VDH having been a Never-Trumper because he has a column that appears in NR.
No, he was not a Never Trumper, in fact he has been critical of that stance referring to them as “Never Trumpers.”
At the time of the NR edition with its stupid cover he wrote this on Oct 18 three weeks before the election.
http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/the-case-for-trump/#more-9522
In sum, it is far more difficult in 2017 to enact conservative change than it was 40 years ago — not necessarily because the message is less popular, but because government is far more deeply embedded in our lives, the Left is far more sophisticated in its political efforts to advance a message that otherwise has no real record of providing prosperity and security, and the Right had avoided the bare-knuckles brawling of the Left and instead grown accustomed to losing in a dignified fashion.To the losers of globalization, the half-employed, and the hopelessly deplorable and irredeemable, lectures from the Republican establishment about reductions in capital-gain taxes, more free-trade agreements, and de facto amnesties, were never going to win the Electoral College the way that Trump did when he used the plural personal pronoun (“We love our miners, farmers, vets”) and promised to jawbone industries to help rust-belt workers.
The final irony? The supposedly narcissistic and self-absorbed Trump ran a campaign that addressed in undeniably sincere fashion the dilemmas of a lost hinterland. And he did so after supposedly more moral Republicans had all but written off the rubes as either politically irrelevant or beyond the hope of salvation in a globalized world. How a brutal Manhattan developer, who thrived on self-centered controversy and even scandal, proved singularly empathetic to millions of the forgotten is apparently still not fully understood.
Bookmark
But having retained some shreds of intellectual honesty he is trying to find some justification for continuing it and coming up empty.
It was easy to say that Trump was lying in his campaign promises but now that he is carrying through that is no longer solid ground.
VDH was not an early Trump supporter. In the NR he wrote critically of the Never Trump position in his column dated October 18th.
I post a link to it in my post #15 above.
His column ends with a clinical destruction of the Never Trump position:
QUOTE:
All the Republican primary candidates, in fear of a third-party Trump bid, swore an oath to support the nominee. When Jeb Bush or Carly Fiorina, even if for understandable reasons, broke that promise, they reinforced the unspoken admission that the Republican field — despite impressive résumés — operated on politics-as-usual principles. Trump won not only fair and square but also with a larger aggregate vote than any prior Republican nominee. Moreover, the Trump constituencies for the most part loyally voted in 2008 and 2012 for Republican moderates who they presciently feared were malleable on many conservative issues and who they rightly guessed would probably lose.
Trumpism was no fluke. During the primaries, a solid conservative governor, Scott Walker, at times seemed a deer in the headlights on illegal immigration. A charismatic Marco Rubio fell into robotic recitations of boilerplate. A decent Jeb Bush’s characterization of illegal immigration as “an act of love” was no gaffe but seemed a window into his own privilege. Multi-talented Ted Cruz convinced few that he was the elder Cato. Rand Paul reminded us why we would not vote for Ron Paul. Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry demonstrated how successful governors might not inspire the country. Chris Christie played the bully boy one too many times. The inspired outsiders, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, never quite got beyond being inspired outsiders. Campaigning is like war: It often involves a tragic correction to early mistaken appraisals of relative strength and weakness formed in calmer times. Casualties pile up to prove what should have been known but went unrecognized before blows fell: in this case, that in his energetic harnessing of popular anger, Trump, my own least favorite in the field, was the more effective candidate in gauging the mood of the times.
These are all valid rejoinders to those who say that recalcitrant conservatives, independents, and women should not hold their nose and vote for Trump. But they are not the chief considerations in his favor.
Something has gone terribly wrong with the Republican party, and it has nothing to do with the flaws of Donald Trump. Something like his tone and message would have to be invented if he did not exist. None of the other 16 primary candidates — the great majority of whom had far greater political expertise, more even temperaments, and more knowledge of issues than did Trump — shared Trump’s sense of outrage — or his ability to convey it — over what was wrong: The lives and concerns of the Republican establishment in the media and government no longer resembled those of half their supporters.
The Beltway establishment grew more concerned about their sinecures in government and the media than about showing urgency in stopping Obamaism. When the Voz de Aztlan and the Wall Street Journal often share the same position on illegal immigration, or when Republicans of the Gang of Eight are as likely as their left-wing associates to disparage those who want federal immigration law enforced, the proverbial conservative masses feel they have lost their representation. How, under a supposedly obstructive, conservative-controlled House and Senate, did we reach $20 trillion in debt, institutionalize sanctuary cities, and put ourselves on track to a Navy of World War I size? Compared with all that, “making Mexico pay” for the wall does not seem all that radical. Under a Trump presidency the owner of Univision would not be stealthily writing, as he did to Team Clinton, to press harder for open borders — and thus the continuance of a permanent and profitable viewership of non-English speakers. Trump’s outrageousness was not really new; it was more a 360-degree mirror of an already outrageous politics as usual.
One does not need lectures about conservatism from Edmund Burke when, at the neighborhood school, English becomes a second language, or when one is rammed by a hit-and-run driver illegally in the United States who flees the scene of the accident. Do our elites ever enter their offices to find their opinion-journalism jobs outsourced at half the cost to writers in India? Are congressional staffers told to move to Alabama, where it is cheaper to telecommunicate their business? Trump’s outrageousness was not really new; it was more a 360-degree mirror of an already outrageous politics as usual.
John Boehner and Mitch McConnell did make a good case that they had stopped some of the Obama agenda and could not have halted more, given that Republicans did not have the White House and Obama often exceeded his constitutional mandates. But they hardly provided emotional energy and vehement opposition — the thumos that galvanizes others to do things deemed improbable. Tea-party rallying cries to stop Obamacare, to stop piling up trillions in new debt, to stop slashing the military, and to stop disparaging working-class Americans mostly in favor of preferred racial, class, or gender groups were not inspired by the Republican elite. The WikiLeaks peek into the Clinton-Obama media Borg reveals an insidious corruption in which it is hard to distinguish between campaign officials, network-journalist grandees, and top-level bureaucrats. Colin Powell’s pathetic hacked e-mails might suggest that such insidiousness is not just confined to liberals and progressives.
“Creative destruction” and “job mobility” are favorite — and often correct — nostrums for the unfortunate downsides of otherwise wealth-creating, unfettered trade. The more foreign products undercut our own, in theory, the more we are forced to tone up, put the right workers into the right places for the right reasons, and become ever more productive and competitive.
The problem, however, is that a displaced real person, unemployed and living with his 80-year-old grandmother in a financially underwater and unsellable home, cannot easily move to the North Dakota fracking fields, any more than the destruction of an 80-acre small-farming operation owing to foreign agricultural subsidies is in any way “creative.” What we needed from our conservative elites and moderates was not necessarily less free-market economics, but fair in addition to free trade — and at least some compassion and sensitivity in recognizing that their bromides usually applied to others rather than to themselves and the political class of both parties.
When Trump shoots off his blunderbuss, is it always proof of laziness and ignorance, or is it sometimes generally aimed in the right direction to prompt anxiety and eventual necessary reconsideration? Questioning NATO’s pro forma way of doing business led to furor, but also to renewed promises from NATO allies to fight terror, pony up defense funds, and coordinate more effectively. Deploring unfair trade deals suddenly made Hillary Clinton renounce her prior zealous support of the “gold standard” Trans-Pacific Partnership deal.
Wondering whether some of our Asian allies might someday build nuclear weapons galvanized Japan and South Korea to step up and warn North Korea against further aggressive acts, in a new fashion. In Europe, Trump is said to be unpredictable and volatile. But since when are predictability and serenity always advantages in global poker? More Donald Trump Trumpism Is Failing the Romney Test Why the Presidential Race Will Stay Competitive Was Trump’s Tax Loss Trump’s Tax Loss?
A President Trump might shake up U.S. foreign policy in controversial and not always polite ways. In far calmer fashion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton already has revolutionized America’s role overseas — from the Iraq pullout to the foundations of the Iran deal to lead-from-behind Libyan bombing to tiptoeing around “violent extremism” and “workplace violence” to empowering Chinese expansionism to increasing distance from allies and proximity to enemies. Obama reminded us that approval from abroad is usually synonymous with thanks for weakening America and making us more like them than them us. Should we be more terrified that the socialist and largely pacifist European Union is afraid of Trump, or that it welcomes even more of Barack Obama’s type of leadership? Is not the present course of projecting weakness while insulting Vladimir Putin — the Russian reset of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — the inverse of speaking softly while carrying a big stick?
The ancient idea of tragic irony can sometimes be described as an outcome unfortunately contrary to what should have been expected. Many of us did not vote in the primaries for Trump, because we did not believe that he was sufficiently conservative or, given his polarizing demeanor, that he could win the presidency even if he were.
The irony is now upon us that Trump may have been the most conservative Republican candidate who still could beat Hillary Clinton — and that if he were to win, he might usher in the most conservative Congress, presidency, and Supreme Court in nearly a century.
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