Donald Trump Is The Next Barack Obama

The Federalist ^ | February 29, 2016 | Angerlo Codevilla

[Kaslin]

The difference between Donald Trump and Barack Obama amounts only to whatever difference may exist between each emperor’s set of cronies.

The Obama years have brought America to the brink of transformation from constitutional republic into an empire ruled by secret deals promulgated by edicts. Civics classes used to teach: “Congress makes the laws, the president carries them out, judges decide controversies, and we citizens may be penalized only by a jury of our peers.”

Nobody believes that anymore, because no part of it has been true for a long time. Barack Obama stopped pretending that it is. During the twentieth century’s second half, both parties and all branches of government made a mockery of the Constitution of 1789. Today’s effective constitution is: “The president can do whatever he wants so long as one-third of the Senate will sustain his vetoes and prevent his conviction upon impeachment.”

Obama has been our first emperor. A Donald Trump presidency, far from reversing the ruling class’s unaccountable hold over American life, would seal it. Because Trump would act as our second emperor, he would render well-nigh impossible our return to republicanism.

Donald Trump Is Everything that Has Ruined Us

Today, nearly all the rules under which we live are made, executed, and adjudicated by agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and countless boards and commissions. Congress no longer passes real laws. Instead, it passes broad grants of authority, the substance of the president’s bureaucracy decides in cooperation with interest groups.

Trump’s career and fortune have been as beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others.

Nancy Pelosi’s remark that we would know Obamacare’s contents only after it passed was true, and applicable to nearly all modern legislation. The courts allow this, pretending that bureaucrats sitting with their chosen friends merely fill in details. Some details! Americans have learned that, as they say in DC, if you are not sitting at one of these tables of power, “you’re on the menu.”

Trump’s claim to be an enemy of rule-by-inside-deal is counterintuitive. His career and fortune have been as participant and beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others. Crony capitalism is the air he breathes, the only sea in which he swims, his second nature. His recipe for “fixing” America, he tells us, is to appoint “the best people”—he names some of his fellow crony capitalists—to exercise even more unaccountable power and to do so with “unbelievable speed.” He assures us that, this time, it will be to “make America great again.” Peanuts’ Lucy might reply: “This time, for sure!”

Deal-Making Expands Government

In recent years, Obama and the Democratic Party (with the Republican leadership’s constant collusion) have prevented Congress from voting to appropriate funds for individual programs and agencies. They have lumped all government functions into “continuing resolutions” or “omnibus bills.” This has moved the government’s decision-making into back rooms, shielding elected officials from popular scrutiny, relieving them of the responsibility for supporting or opposing what the government does. This has enabled Obama to make whatever deals have pleased him and his Republican cronies.

This has moved the government’s decision-making into back rooms, relieving elected officials of responsibility.

Trump touts his own capacity to make good deals. But good for whom? And who is to say what is good? Who or what causes would benefit from continuing government by secret deals? Who or what would lose? Trump’s stated objective is to wield whatever power might be necessary to accomplish whatever objectives upon which he—in consultation with whomever—might choose from time to time. But the difference between Trump and Obama amounts only to whatever difference may exist between each emperor’s set of cronies.

By contrast, the U.S. Constitution of 1789, as explained by James Madison, envisages a continuous mutual effort at persuasion among the American people’s many parts, to “refine and enlarge the public views” and to result in ”decisions based on the “cool and deliberate sense of the community.” For two centuries, the government’s main decisions have happened through open congressional proceedings and recorded votes. That’s the republic we used to have.

Rule By Will, Not Law

Like Obama, Trump is not about persuading anybody. Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them. Throughout history, this style of politics has been the indispensable ingredient for wrecking republics, the “final cause” that transforms free citizens into the subjects of emperors.

Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them.

This style of politics has grown, along with a ruling class that rejects the notion that no person may rule another without that person’s consent. As I have shown at length elsewhere, America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.

This class’s fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate. The ruling class insists on driving down the throats of its opponents the agendas of each its constituencies and on injuring persons who stand in the way. This has spawned a Newtonian reaction, a hunger, among what may be called the “country class” for returning the favor with interest.

The Cycle of Revenge Rarely Slows

Ordinary Americans have endured being insulted by the ruling class’s favorite epitaphs—racist, sexist, etc., and, above all, stupid; they have had careers and reputations compromised by speaking the wrong word in front of the wrong person; endured dictates from the highest courts in the land that no means yes (King), that public means private (Kelo), that everyone is entitled to make up one’s meaning of life (Casey), but that whoever thinks marriage is exclusively between men and women is a bigot (Obergefell).

Trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is well-nigh beyond human capacity.

No wonder, then, that millions of Americans lose respect for a ruling class that disrespects them, that they identify with whomever promises some kind of turnabout against that class, and that they care less and less for the integrity of institutions that fail to protect them.

Trump’s voters expect precisely such turnabout. Within good measure, not only would this right any number of wrongs and restore some balance in our public life, it is also indispensable for impressing upon the ruling class and its constituents that they too have a stake in observing the limits and niceties that are explicit and implicit in our Constitution.

But not only do opposing sets of wrongs not make anything right. As I have argued (Sophocles did it a lot better), trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is well-nigh beyond human capacity.

Neither Obama nor Trump seem to know or care that cycles of reciprocal resentment, of insults and injuries paid back with ever more interest and ever less concern for consequences, are the natural fuel of revolutions—easy to start and soon impossible to stop. America’s founders, steeped in history as few of our contemporaries are, were acutely aware of how easily factional enmities deliver free peoples into the hands of emperors. America is already advanced in this vicious cycle. The only possible chance of returning it to republicanism lies in not taking the next turn, and in not following one imperial ruler with another.

[DoughtyOne]

Agreed. I think it was later revealed to be Angelo.

[Kaslin]

Thanks, but I doubt that they get it.

[Lurkinanloomin]

In my view there’s a much better chance than with any of the guys who until recently were only talking about how to accomodate the illegal aliens.

[ETL]

Donald Trump has been a success in the private sector. Obama is a failure. Simple difference, but quite significant.

Obama has been more successful than Trump can dream of ever being, given that his stated goal was to "fundamentally transform", ie, destroy, the country as we know and love it. He certainly has not "failed" in that regard. Rubio was correct in that New Hampshire debate a few weeks ago when fat boy Christie and that phony Trump jumped all over him for saying Obama knew exactly what he was doing.

______________________

Re: Eighth Republican debate, New Hampshire 2016

From the transcript...

RUBIO: And let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. Barack Obama is undertaking a systematic effort to change this country, to make America more like the rest of the world.

That's why he passed Obamacare and the stimulus and Dodd-Frank and the deal with Iran. It is a systematic effort to change America.

-snip-

CHRISTIE: We've heard it said on the stage that President Obama knows exactly what he's doing.

-snip-

RUBIO: Here's the bottom line. This notion that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he's doing.

CHRISTIE: There it is. There it is. The memorized 25-second speech. There it is, everybody.

RUBIO: Well, that's the __ , that's the reason why this campaign is so important. Because I think this notion - I think this is an important point. We have to understand what we're going through here. We are not facing a president that doesn't know what he's doing. He knows what he is doing. That's why he's done the things he's done.

That's why we have a president that passed Obamacare and the stimulus. All this damage that he's done to America is deliberate. This is a president that's trying to redefine this country. That's why this election is truly a referendum on our identity as a nation, as a people. Our future is at stake.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-eighth-republican-debate-new-hampshire-2016/
____________________________________

_____________________________________________

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
We are the change that we seek"-- BARACK OBAMA
_____________________________________________

"Barack Obama told supporters that
'change has come to America' as he
claimed victory in a historic presidential election."

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/election.president/index.html

[okie01]

You honestly should not get away posting this vitriol here.

Spoken like a true Trumpnik.

This article is ridiculous beyond all belief.

True though it might be.

[Hoodat]

Other than them both being liberals, textbook narcissists, and pathological liars, you would be correct.

[CodeToad]

Total crap.

[okie01]

The Donald will not just have a pen and a phone, he will also have Congress.

He doesn't need Congress.

Not anymore...

[Kaslin]

If you are so certain that Trump will be the next president, than you don’t need to bother to even vote in November.

[Kaslin]

Thanks to you, that arrogant pos occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was reelected in 2012 because #1 you was to lazy to vote in the Tennessee primary and than in the general election you wrote in some third party candidate who had no chance whatsoever to get elected.

[Las Vegas Ron]

That has been debunked. Didn’t happen.

Doesn't matter, when you're losing this badly you resort to anything and everything....including lying.

[Slambat]

“The difference between Donald Trump and Barack Obama amounts only to whatever difference may exist between each emperor’s set of cronies.”

Now that’s desperate.

[Citizen Zed]

[chulaivn66]

Angelo Codevilla’s remarks could very well have been recitation from Frederic Bastiat’s The Law. Every point he made in describing what we are faced with can be found in that work. The truth of the matter is far too many cannot see the forest for the trees so-to-speak and allow loyalty to a candidate to cloud their thinking. I add only that Bastiat indicated revolution was the eventual end result of our inattention.

[mak5]

Arrogant, egotistical, megalomaniacs? Yep, both are the same.

Trump will not build a wall, deport criminals, lower taxes, and while he may abolish Obamacare, has no plan to replace it, though what he has said he likes is even worse.

[fieldmarshaldj]

BTW, I’d love to repudiate my votes for Dubya, who turned my neighborhood in Nashville... on his watch... into a slum for illegals.

I take it you’ll be voting for Hillary in November.

[Kaslin]

Only in your dreams. I have never voted for a rat and never will

[fieldmarshaldj]

Oh, and I voted for Virgil Goode by shading in the ballot. I didn’t have to write in his name. He was on the ballot.

You voted for the Socialist Ringer, Willard.

BTW, if your idol Dubya had enforced the f***ing law on immigration, built the damn wall and stopped spending money like a drunken RINO loser, Zero would never have been elected in the first place.

But, hey, don’t let the facts get in the way of your delusional rantings.

[fieldmarshaldj]

You voted for Willard. You voted for the RAT.

[libbylu]

It is true, long known fact. Trump won’t be quite as far to the left though.